[radicaldreamer]

There’s a ton of land that can be developed around Santa Cruz, it just can’t be developed due to public policy and local opposition.

Huge empty tracts all over and especially around Ben Lomond etc.

The flip side of all this is that a lot of long term residents love that their 100-200k houses are now worth a million+ with their property taxes capped at essentially nothing. They don’t want to give that up to allow their nieces and nephews to afford to grow their families in Santa Cruz.

[JumpCrisscross]

> There’s a ton of land that can be developed around Santa Cruz, it just can’t be developed due to public policy and local opposition

This is how we get urban sprawl and habitat destruction.

[bcrosby95]

Yes, up is better than out. I'm happy the Santa Cruz planning commission has sanely decided to start by building downtown up.

[epistasis]

There's tons of land inside of Santa Cruz that should be developed first. Keep the green belt and let people experience nature. Let all the people living in the hills and causing lots of environmental destruction through roads and other impacts stop making those impacts by giving them the equivalent rent inside the city.

In short, lots of houses would be great. (I'm a Santa Cruz resident, for the record)

[mwattsun]

You forgot to mention that UCSC sits on a huge tract of land that they refuse to build student housing on for reasons I can't fathom.

[epistasis]

NIMBYs in the city sue the university to stop all housing, infrastructure, or other things that may allow for more students or reduce their problems.

Fortunately there have been modifications to CEQA last year to prevent these abuses of the law that result in worse environmental outcomes (students driving long distances rather than living on campus)

[dekhn]

The original plan was to build out UCSC a lot more. I think the regents lost their motivation after building colleges 9 and 10 and also I think if they built more student housing, they'd have to build more parking lots (so many students have cars) and the traffic in the city would increase tremendously.

[JumpCrisscross]

> if they built more student housing, they'd have to build more parking lots

There is another solution to this!

[dekhn]

If you think you can solve CA's addiction to cars, I'm all ears.

[JumpCrisscross]

> think you can solve CA's addiction to cars

No need. We're solving a narrow problem: students' need to park on campus. Out-of-town commuter and part-time students will need a car. But everyone else is solvable.

[fragmede]

Specifically, Merrill and Oakes college have that parking lot, and there's a parking structure by the Earth/sciences building, and another one up above college 11, and several more. Once you get on campus though, there's a reasonably good shuttle to take you around campus, so you just need to park somewhere on campus and then give yourself enough time to take the shuttle to your destination. If you're living on campus, you only need to get off campus to go to the local downtown bar scene, or for other extracurriculars, but there's a bus that takes you downtown so as a student you can get away with not having a car.

[dekhn]

that's not how car problems are solved in California.