As a techie, Santa Cruz renter and UCSC parent, I sympathize with the author
But living here and going to school here are choices, UC Davis, Merced & Berkeley exist
I’m sure someone can complain that I outbid them to rent a house
But driving up from Berkeley, seeing the housing issue, the homeless problem, and then saying “this sucks, but make room for me” strikes me as naive
Step 1: Move somewhere affordable.
Step 2: Spend years building an awesome community because you personally endeavor to make it what you want.
Step 3: Profit.
Notice this is the same process for a fixer upper house. It's just a buying into a fixer upper community. Labor intensive. Higher variability in the outcome but notice much more upside than flipping houses.
Why should the growth stop? People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities. I see no reason why NIMBYs should be allowed to artificially decide that newcomers are not allowed. Growth will simply continue as long as people keep moving in.
Yes, they demonstrate a desire to move into these cities in their current non-hypergrowth form
Then you follow up and make that desire a reality by putting a down payment on a property
Talk is cheap
Besides, why should existing homeowners get a monopoly on deciding what kind of city Santa Cruz should be? If there is a desire for dense housing, then dense housing will get filled. If you're right that people moving to these cities want suburbia then one would expect new multi-story apartments to go empty. But that's clearly not what happens.
>As a ... parent
Why did you contribute to the growth?