At first, Jamie Kahn tried ignoring the repeated knocks on her front door. It was September 2015, and the 52-year-old Santa Cruz woman had recently faced an unexpected 40% rent increase that she could not afford.
After missing a rent payment, her new landlords in the northern California beach city quickly moved to evict the single mother and her two children. Kahn thought that if she refused to open the door and accept a summons, she could bide some time to fight the increase from $1,400 to $2,000 a month. She was wrong.
Court records show that a process server repeatedly showed up, and the Kahns ultimately had no choice but to vacate their home of six years. Her 22-year-old daughter subsequently moved into a small back porch room in a neighboring city. Her 19-year-old son crashed on couches. Kahn, meanwhile, moved into her black 1995 Camry station wagon – where she has been sleeping ever since, often stationed in Walmart parking lots.
“California is a monster. If you don’t keep up, you end up on the streets, and nobody cares,” said Kahn, a college graduate who previously worked two jobs in Santa Cruz. “This is a public health issue. It’s a catastrophe.”
While housing shortages and homeless epidemics have afflicted communities up and down the west coast, a major crisis has emerged in Santa Cruz, the liberal seaside city 80 miles south of San Francisco, known internationally for its surfing and laid-back boardwalk attractions.
With a swelling presence of Airbnb short-term rentals and university students, Santa Cruz has increasingly become unaffordable and inhospitable to many longtime low-income workers and middle-class families, and experts say the tech boom and housing crunch in nearby Silicon Valley is exacerbating the displacement.
For newly evicted families such as the Kahns, there’s often nowhere to turn except the streets.
‘Least affordable’ housing in the US
Santa Cruz, which was originally controlled by Mexico, was incorporated as a California town in 1866. The city is constrained by mountains and the ocean but has steadily grown since the gold rush, attracting agriculture and commercial fishing along with a vibrant resort community and tourism industry.
Housing development has not kept pace with the growth of the population, which is now 62,000 in the city and 270,000 total in Santa Cruz County. The county has added roughly one housing unit for every 10 new residents in recent years, according to county housing manager Julie Conway.
At the same time, the top five occupations in the area are low-wage jobs in retail, food service and cleaning, paying between $9.06 and $11.30 an hour, according to 2015 research. As a result, 63% of renters live in unaffordable housing, meaning their rent is more than 30% of their income.
By some measures, Santa Cruz is considered the “least affordable” small metro area in the US. Santa Cruz – which is about 58% white and 33% Latino – also recently counted nearly 2,000 homeless people, which translates to one of the highest concentrations in the country, according to the federal government.
“Such a broad spectrum of the community is being priced out,” said Sibley Verbeck Simon, president of New Way Homes, an affordable housing not-for-profit group in Santa Cruz. He said roughly 70% of the homeless were previously housed in the area, meaning the housing crunch is displacing many locals.
The lack of housing has also led to severe overcrowding, said Steve McKay, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who has studied regional poverty and recently found that the median hourly wage for low-income workers is $10.
“No one can live on $10 an hour,” he said.
Santa Cruz also lacks rent control laws to preserve affordable housing rates, which means the increasingly intense competition for a limited supply of units has enabled landlords to dramatically jack up rates.
McKay said it’s not uncommon to see two renters pay $1,000 each to share a single bedroom. He said he recently learned of a landlord who put up dividers in a four-bedroom house, illegally converting it to an eight-room property and charging $8,000 a month.
In another case, four senior citizens were sharing one studio apartment.
“People are living in all kinds of alternative housing – converted garages, cars, chicken coops, you name it,” said Gretchen Regenhardt, regional director of California Rural Legal Assistance, which aids low-income renters.
Most of the time when desperate tenants show up at the doors of Regenhardt’s office there’s little she can do. So many evictions and rent hikes are legal, she said, which means her organization can’t assist 90% of the people who seek their help.
‘We didn’t know where to go’
On a recent summer afternoon in downtown Santa Cruz, a mile away from the city’s main beach and waterfront amusement park, homeless residents filed into the public library, carrying piles of personal documents and half-completed housing applications.
John Dietz, a housing specialist with the 180/2020 program, which aims to eliminate chronic homelessness by 2020, sat with clients at a small roundtable, prepping them for high-stakes meetings with prospective landlords.
“It’s gonna be a tough interview,” he told William Henry Brown Jr, a 65-year-old man who lost his Santa Cruz home last year when an owner redeveloped his building.
“I’m very patient,” said Brown, who has been sleeping on the living room floor in his father-in-law’s unit. “But I won’t give up.”
Dietz and Brown discussed how he would explain to a potential landlord why he doesn’t have credit.
Dietz and his colleagues have developed relationships with specific landlords to try to encourage them to accept homeless tenants who have vouchers for housing – but can’t find anyone to take them.
“The hardest part is knowing that there is available housing, but not being accepted,” said Joshua Waltrip, 27.
“When we go to interviews, I get so nervous,” said Rita Chavez, Waltrip’s mother.
Statistics suggest her fears are merited. A recent 88-unit affordable rental project, for example, received 1,371 applications, according to Conway.
Chavez noted that she has seen the dynamics of Santa Cruz change over the years. “It used to be a lot of local people. There used to be more hippies.”
Some worry the expanding presence of short-term rentals is worsening the housing emergency in Santa Cruz county, which is home to Airbnb’s “most popular” rental. Even a local councilman was reprimanded for illegally renting out a secondary residence to make extra cash.
In addition to tourists and an increasing number of UC Santa Cruz students straining the already tight housing market, the relocation of wealthy Silicon Valley tech workers to Santa Cruz has also accelerated anxieties and fears of rising income inequality and a changing population.
Earlier this month, Kate Downing, a planning commissioner in Palo Alto – a city by the headquarters of Apple, Google and Facebook – penned a viral resignation letter outlining why she, a lawyer, and her husband, a software engineer, could no longer afford Silicon Valley.
The lack of housing in the region has made it impossible for the couple to comfortably raise a family and stay in Palo Alto, she said. Instead, Downing wrote, the couple has decided to migrate south and settle in Santa Cruz.
‘Because of Silicon Valley’
Commuting from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley across the windy, two-lane Highway 17 can be a nightmare during rush hour, but more tech workers may make the move as housing prices continue to climb.
“Unless you work over the hill at Google or Apple and are making a ton of money, you’re basically not going to be able to afford anything here,” said Dale Davis, 65, who was recently priced out of Santa Cruz with her husband. “This is because of Silicon Valley.”
“Santa Cruz is feeling that pressure,” added Downing, who argued in her letter that Palo Alto has fundamentally failed to fix its housing crisis by blocking new developments. “Santa Cruz is at least trying.”
Government officials and housing advocates say they are focused on increasing the pace of development and reforming local laws so that developers are incentivized to construct denser projects.
Simon, the nonprofit director, argued that if the area had 2,500 new units, median rent would drop 20% across the board. “We could absolutely significantly alter the dynamics by building supply.”
The county, however, has a target of producing roughly 1,400 new housing units by 2023, and some worry it’s not enough.
Conway, the county housing official, noted that the crisis has been building for decades and won’t be quickly solved. “We’re losing our middle class, and we’re losing our young families … Does that mean the fundamental character of our community is changing? Of course.”
For Kahn, who is still living out of her car and relocating to New Mexico this month, it seems clear Santa Cruz won’t ever be an option for her again.
She said she feels grateful that she and her children have found ways to get by. “Many people aren’t so lucky … In Santa Cruz, people end up on the streets for the rest of their lives.”