[Dryerase] The Alarm--Transience in Santa Cruz

[Alarm!Wires]

This comprises the first two of a three-part series on "Transience in 
Santa Cruz".  It is obviously fairly specific to the area, but it 
touches on issues of importance everywhere:  entrenched bureacracies 
beholden economically and politically to a tax base which is itself 
dependent on a transient, insecure workforce.  It is particularly 
applicable to college towns and tourism hubs.  It is also some of our 
most biting journalism so far (if i do say so myself).

Transience in Santa Cruz
In this series, I address the role of transience in Santa Cruz—how it 
affects our community economically, politically and psychologically.  To 
accomplish this analysis, however, requires a redefinition of transience 
which includes more than the narrow colloquial version of “the 
transient” limited to homeless vagabonds.  Without this redefinition, it 
becomes far too easy to scapegoat the homeless for the problems stemming 
from a much broader and more systemic transience.
Part One:  The economy
By Fhar Miess
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
Transience, in a very literal sense, is a perennial phenomenon in Santa 
Cruz, and it is by no means a new one.  The Ohlone tribes, who were 
likely the first people to settle here, are said to have migrated 
between the mountains and the low wetlands seasonally, as the weather 
and availability of food changed.
As broad-leaved plantain (which some call “White Man’s Foot” because of 
the way it tended to spring up wherever settlers tread) began to 
populate the area, seasonal migrations took on a slightly different 
character, but they were still determined, to a large degree, by 
shifting weather and availability of natural resources.
As those resources—mostly forests—became denuded at the end of the 19th 
Century, tourism began replacing the resource-intensive manufacturing 
base that had come to define the Santa Cruz area.  It was still a very 
transient set of communities, but that transience was driven less and 
less by seasonal weather changes and more and more by market 
fluctuations.
It’s interesting to examine what we mean by “transient” in this 
historical context.  Most people in Santa Cruz, when asked to point out 
a transient, will look about for the nearest person they can identify as 
being homeless.  In a sense, they are right.  In one—somewhat 
superficial—respect, the homeless in Santa Cruz are transient much as 
the native Ohlone were:  their need for shelter and the shelter options 
they choose are largely determined by what the climate dictates.
This climate, however, is very different from the climate known to the 
Ohlone before missionaries and settlers arrived.  Contrary to the local 
natural climate, which was (and is) ideal for human habitation and 
cohabitation, our present climate is marked economically by inflated 
housing costs and deflated wages, with the availability of both being 
determined to a large extent by a much more significant transient 
population than the homeless:  namely, the student and tourist 
populations.
For those who are homeless, it is also a social climate marked by 
violence.  The Homeless 2000 Needs Assessment survey for Santa Cruz 
County, conducted by Applied Survey Research, indicated that seventy-six 
out of 811 people said they had been physically beaten, sixty-five said 
they had been robbed and thirteen had been sexually assaulted.  The 
Santa Cruz Police Department noted in a memo that homeless people are 
more likely to be victims of crime than the housed.
The survey also noted that more than three quarters of respondents had 
lived in Santa Cruz County for over five years.  Almost thirty percent 
grew up here.  Respondents’ biggest daily problem, after lack of work or 
income, was transportation, which indicates that their transience is 
more of an unpleasant necessity than a choice.
But this is only one sliver of the transience that characterizes our 
region.  According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 
agricultural sector accounted for some 12,940 documented workers in the 
county in the peak growing season of 2000, with only 4,469 employed that 
winter.  Many of those displaced are forced to relocate after the 
growing season.
UCSC students account for some 13,000 people during the school year, but 
only 2,900 during the summer vacation.
The tourism industry offsets this to an extent.  On its own, the Seaside 
Company and its concessionaires employ over 1,200 people to keep the 
Boardwalk running during the summer.  Many of these are travelers from 
outside the country, participating in Seaside Company’s “Work & Travel 
Program” which houses seasonal travelers and employees in La Bahia 
apartments, displacing the largely student population which resides 
there the rest of the year.  Students planning to stay in Santa Cruz 
over the summer must vacate to make room.
The UCSC community accounts for a large part of the transient nature of 
our community.  In early summer, while the departure of the students 
allows locals to breathe a sigh of relief for a week or so until the 
tourists show up in droves, it also strains the region economically.  
The housing market goes totally out of whack as students who live in 
town try to find subletters before they leave town for the summer, and 
students who live on campus or in seasonal housing such as La Bahia try 
to find off-campus housing, and often for longer than just a summer 
sublet will allow.  The job market goes through similar spasms.
Graduation marks another period of transience, where many will venture 
over the hill to find decent-paying jobs.  Many of these graduates will 
stay to live on this side of the hill.  When they do find high-paying 
jobs, particularly in high-tech fields, this exerts an enormous amount 
of pressure on housing costs and availability in Santa Cruz County, as 
well as other counties to the south and east.
This climate is what prompted the National Association of Homebuilders 
in January to label the Santa Cruz/Watsonville housing market the least 
affordable in the nation (we have since dropped back down to third 
place, after San Francisco and Salinas).
UCSC Chancellor MRC Greenwood’s overhaul of the institution to make it 
a “Gateway to Silicon Valley” can only exacerbate this situation.  It is 
evident, between increased funding priorities for applied sciences and 
engineering and the gutting of the Narrative Evaluation System (NES), 
that the UCSC administration is bent on turning the University into a 
well-oiled machine to churn out skilled workers and bases of knowledge 
for the Silicon Valley.
Manuel Schwab, who advocated the retention of NES during the 1999-2000 
school year, described the battle this way:  “One of the issues that 
gave the NES fight much broader significance beyond the desire for a 
certain intellectual atmosphere was that many of us realized that 
quantifiable evaluation was one way to facilitate the transition of 
students from the intellectual laboratory to the ‘real-world’ workforce.
“It was yet another method to make it difficult for us to think of 
ourselves outside of the career track,” he said.
Still, the University administration boasts of its contribution to the 
community through money students, faculty, staff and visitors to the 
campus spend in Santa Cruz County.  From July 1, 2000 to June 30, 2001 
it valued this contribution at $413.8 million.  While a portion of that 
money goes toward well-paid workers, particularly in the construction 
trades, members of the campus community spend nearly the majority of it 
to support low-wage positions in the retail sector.
Those same retail workers are the ones to serve travelers when the 
transient demographic of Santa Cruz changes from students to tourists.  
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics records from the year 2000, the 
retail sector is the second largest employer in Santa Cruz, after 
services, with the lowest average weekly wage of any sector at $374.  
The largest portion of employers in the retail sector is eating and 
drinking establishments, with an average wage of $232 per week (of 
course, these are statistics for documented labor)—hardly a living wage 
in Santa Cruz.  Even I make more than that (barely).
Merchants all over Santa Cruz County depend on revenues from tourism, 
but their particular brand of transience is even more insecure than that 
of the campus community.  If it’s a bad year, whether due to recession 
or fears of terrorism, merchants become neurotic at the prospect of lost 
revenues.  This neurosis surfaces in the form of proposals for draconian 
ordinances in shopping districts, where that other population of 
transients—the homeless—already complains of constant harassment by law 
enforcement.  Results from the Homeless Needs Assessment Survey of 2000 
indicate that over 15 percent of respondents listed “problems with 
police” among their most troublesome daily problems.
It seems ironic for merchants to blame problems caused by the 
capriciousness of Santa Cruz’s tourist transients on some of Santa 
Cruz’s most stable transients—the homeless.  It is particularly ironic 
when one considers that those same merchant’s wages and hiring policies 
(transient student and youth populations are favored over more stable 
residents who are less likely to accept such low wages) encourage—more 
than any other sector—the sort of economic climate that forces people 
out into the weather.
In Part Two of “Transience in Santa Cruz”, I will focus on the political 
apparatus that solidifies much of what happens on the economic level 
into policy and bureaucratic practice.
 
Transience in Santa Cruz
Last week, I examined the role of transience in the local economy of 
Santa Cruz.  In this installment of “Transience in Santa Cruz,” I’ll be 
drawing attention to the political apparatus that both encourages, and 
is determined by, that transience.  Readers may remember from the last 
installment that I conceive of transience not primarily as the homeless 
and the transient poor, but as tourists and students.
   Part 2—The Politics of Transience
By Fhar Miess
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
In the late 1920’s, as Ku Klux Klan chapters grew around Santa Cruz, 
Fred Swanton, Santa Cruz Mayor, industrialist and town booster, lead 
caravans promoting the area’s tourist attractions, most of which he had 
built himself (or, more accurately, paid others to build for him).
In 1933, during the last year of Swanton’s five-year mayoral term, he 
transferred title on a few acres of public land at the current location 
of the Boardwalk parking lot and some of its rides from the City to the 
Santa Cruz Seaside Company.  The Seaside Company has owned and operated 
the Boardwalk since Swanton himself bankrupted the operation in 1915.
Santa Cruz politics has changed a lot since then.  Certainly, one would 
hope that a KKK rally would not last long here these days.
But, in other ways, the old guard is still very much in power.  
According to maps from the 1850s, the land that Swanton sold to the 
Seaside Company was below the “mean high tide” level, in what are 
called “tidelands”, properties owned by the State of California and held 
in trust by the City of Santa Cruz.  According to the State 
Constitution, those tidelands should never have been transferred to any 
private party.
In 1998, activists challenged the City Council to file suit against the 
Seaside Company to reclaim the land and restore the tidelands to natural 
habitat for Coho and Steelhead.  The San Lorenzo Estuary, which was 
largely filled in after the construction of the river levee, is deemed 
essential for the ability of the fish to survive upon entering the briny 
waters of the Monterey Bay.  Apparently, the State Lands Commission 
found the evidence compelling enough to offer to back up the City if it 
were to take the case to court.
The City Council ceded eighty percent of the land to the Seaside Company 
in October of 1998 rather than suing for the entire property.  But a few 
months later, a new council—populated by councilmembers such as 
Kristopher Krohn and Ed Porter who had been elected partly on their 
pledge to advocate for the return of the land to the City—reversed the 
decision.  Unfortunately, according to Beach Flats resident Phil Baer, 
the weight of the tourism industry giant leaned hard upon the 
professional city staff (City Manager Richard Wilson and City Attorney 
John Barisone) who advise the council.  The city staff in turn leaned on 
the City Council.  “My observation is that the City Council rarely, if 
ever, does anything other than what the staff suggests and advises that 
they do,” he says.
Metro Santa Cruz reported on July 4, 2001 that the council held private 
negotiations that summer with the Seaside Company.  Despite vigilant 
protests from activists and claims of violations of the Brown Act, which 
mandates open access to public meetings, the council eventually dropped 
the case.
Tourist transience is big money in Santa Cruz.  Former Santa Cruz Mayor 
Mike Rotkin estimates that between one-third and two-thirds of Santa 
Cruz tax revenues come from the tourism industry.  The City Admission 
Tax, which comes primarily from the tourism industry and the Boardwalk 
in particular, accounts for about $1.5 million of city tax revenues 
annually.  The City also levies a Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) on hotel 
patrons, which accounts for over $3 million annually, and sales taxes 
from money spent by tourists amount to millions more.  When it comes to 
local politics, that big money talks, and—as the tidelands case 
illustrates—often behind closed doors.  Baer notes that the Seaside 
Company exerts “this quiet, behind-the-scenes pressure that you can 
never seem to trace exactly, but things always seem to go their way.”
The City spends big money to keep tourism in Santa Cruz as well.  
Upwards of $400,000 per year is allocated from the City’s General Fund 
to support the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CVB) which promotes 
tourism in Santa Cruz.  The primary benefactor of this subsidized 
advertising is the Seaside Company with its various tourist attractions.
But city subsidies for the tourism industry are not always so direct.  
The City also contributes significant funds for public works (which go 
toward cleaning up sidewalks and beaches, etc.) and police protection.  
“A lot of our police efforts are directed towards tourism,” says 
Rotkin.  “When you put police officers on Pacific Avenue or in the beach 
area, that’s pretty much tourist-related.”
Several people I spoke with would like to see some hard numbers 
detailing the amount of money that tourism actually brings to the Santa 
Cruz community as well as the social, environmental and economic costs 
of accommodating tourists.  Those numbers are hard to come by.  In the 
course of conducting interviews for this series, I have found 
politicians and bureaucrats alike reluctant to offer solid figures on 
either the costs or the benefits.  I was lucky to get approximations.
Fred Geiger, an activist who follows the Seaside Company and the local 
tourism industry, had a few things to say about it.  “I don’t think the 
business community wants to have that kind of information out there 
because people might decide that it’s simply not worth it,” he says.  
“Many other towns have condemned these types of operations [like the 
Boardwalk]—Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Venice, Long Beach—because they 
bring blight to the community.”
Of particular concern to activists is the sort of vehicle-intensive 
“day-tripper” tourism attracted to the Boardwalk which contributes 
little to the local community except reduced air quality, increased 
noise and traffic, and drunken rowdiness.  Folks like Baer and Geiger 
claim that much of this day-tripper tourism precludes lower-impact, 
“conceivably beneficial” tourism, not to mention the health and sanity 
of locals.
Student transience
There is, however, a dearth of political will to move away from tourism 
as a local tax base.  “I don’t think anybody is thinking that there’s 
some other industry that’s going to replace tourism in Santa Cruz,” says 
Rotkin.  But he does note the way in which Santa Cruz’s economic and 
political establishment of the 1950’s dealt with the lack of any 
off-season industry by pushing for the location of a UC in town.
In some ways, though, they ended up shooting themselves in the foot.  “I 
don’t think they understood the political impact of bringing a major 
university here,” says Rotkin.  After all, the voting age was still 21, 
and students were not allowed to vote outside of their home districts 
for some time.  Vietnam-era state and federal legislative changes 
reversed those conditions.  This, in combination with the student body 
that was attracted to one of the most radical experiments in higher 
education at the time, led to a strong progressive shift which gave the 
town the nickname “The People’s Republic of Santa Cruz”.
Santa Cruz still carries that reputation across the country—undeservedly 
so, according to many.  Contrary to the high ideals which originally put 
people like John Laird, Mike Rotkin, Ed Porter and others into local 
government, Baer now describes the City Council as a “dynasty”.  “The 
local politics are so entrenched that you’re basically choosing between 
incumbents and former council members, selecting from this handful of 
people who can get elected any time they want and just sort of pass it 
back and forth between each other because we have some regulation on the 
books that no council member can sit on the council for more than eight 
years,” he says.  “They then have to take a two-year break, and then 
they can go for another eight years, on and on until they’re senile and 
attending council meetings from the retirement home.”
To a large degree, this state of affairs can be attributed to the 
transience of the political powerhouse that is the student body.  
Eight-year term limits do little good in a population with at best a 
four-year attention span.  “As much as I like the students and the 
university and higher education,” says Baer, “in general, I don’t think 
of the average UCSC student as being particularly cognizant of what’s 
going on in city politics or what the impacts are of the votes that they 
somewhat casually cast.
“I think they get played by the people who are influential up there [on 
campus], notably Mike Rotkin,” he says.  “Their vote is being used by 
people to do some things I’m not sure students would really want done if 
they understood how it was really playing out.”
What Baer is referring to is the myriad controversies that Rotkin, who 
teaches a class on Marxism at UCSC, has gotten himself embroiled 
within.  Rotkin, along with councilmembers Scott Kennedy, Cynthia 
Mathews and Mike Hernandez consistently found himself in hot water with 
local activists over issues such as the Beach Area and South of Laurel 
Plan, which included converting La Bahia apartments into a convention 
center, an expansion of the Boardwalk and the razing of affordable 
housing in the Beach Flats, among other things.  The plan was meant to 
“revitalize” (many would say “gentrify”) the area and bolster tourism.
The Rotkin-Kennedy-Mathews-Hernandez council majority also came under 
fire for supporting the Gateway Plaza and Costco developments.  Rotkin, 
who is running for a fifth term in November, cites this as an attempt to 
take advantage of a potential non-tourist tax base and stem the flow of 
capital out of the community into big-box havens such as Fremont and 
Sand City.  Community activists countered that these developments would 
only support low-wage jobs and the profits of huge corporate chains.
Those other transients
When asked what the city had done to mitigate the tourism industry’s 
tendencies to draw down wages in the area with the proliferation of 
low-skill, poorly-paid jobs, Rotkin responded, “It’s led to people 
thinking that we need to help try and support organizing so that people 
in those industries can organize and provide an economic defense for 
themselves.”  As evidence, he cited a case in 1981 in which, as Mayor, 
he supported a strike at a local hotel.  He was hard-pressed to cite 
more recent examples, but noted that the City requires that contractors 
pay prevailing wages in the building of city developments and that, had 
the La Bahia Conference Center idea gone through, the City would have 
required the employer to pay prevailing wages.
The City’s recent passage of the Living Wage Ordinance, which requires 
the city and its contractors to pay their employees an annually-indexed 
“living wage”, indicates that—at least ideally—the City Council is in 
support of decent wages and workers’ rights to organize on the job.  
While this may tend to exert an upward pressure on regional wages, it 
will likely be limited to workers specifically identified in the 
ordinance.  There are some notable exceptions, such as the Santa Cruz 
Community Credit Union, which this spring voted to tie their lowest 
wages to the city’s annually-indexed “living wage”.  Unfortunately, 
those workers in the largely tourism-driven retail sector are least 
likely to share in the ancillary benefits.
When it comes to material, systemic support for decent wages and working 
conditions, the City’s record is not so impressive.  Continuing 
no-strings subsidies for the exploitive tourism industry are a notable 
example.  “Police protection”, which, according to Rotkin, comprises a 
large portion of public subsidies for tourism, is particularly 
problematic.  When asked who it was that was being policed in this case, 
Rotkin answered “everyone.”  However, the casual observer will note 
that, at least when it comes to Pacific Avenue, the scruffier transients 
are targeted overwhelmingly over the more well-to-do tourist transients 
who visit the area.  Again, hard numbers are hard to come by on this 
issue, as law enforcement officials are reluctant to keep records to 
track it.
Even stricter downtown ordinances and more rigorous enforcement of 
existing downtown and anti-homeless ordinances can only compound this 
problem.  As tempers flared around the time of the police-instigated 
riots of 1994, members of the Santa Cruz General Membership Branch of 
the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or “Wobblies”) put it 
succinctly:  “All low-paid waged laborers…are essentially being warned 
by anti-homeless legislation to ‘play it safe’ on the job so as not to 
end up on the street.
“The effort to stigmatize and outright vilify an economic circumstance 
that all waged workers must constantly struggle to avoid is a very 
useful strategy for keeping labor in line. In Santa Cruz, a worker’s 
existence is primarily defined by the constant struggle to maintain 
legal housing where over half of one’s monthly wages may go towards 
rent. The criminalization of the condition of being unable to pay rent 
functions as a very real demand that workers remain ever-grateful for 
current employment, regardless of conditions or pay.
“By securing access to a subdued and fearful service-industry workforce, 
supporters of anti-homeless legislation (almost entirely bosses) seek to 
simultaneously sweep the streets of the homeless while assuring that 
there will always be a willing employee to hold the broom.”
Where to now?
This piece began in 1920’s Santa Cruz, when the Wobblies were as active 
here as they were in 1994, then struggling against the timber barons in 
the Santa Cruz Mountains.  Tom Scribner, whose bronze statue perches on 
the Pacific Avenue sidewalk facing the St. George Hotel and whose 
portrait graces the wall of the Poet & Patriot, was a Wobbly during 
those times.  He devoted most of his life to organizing with the 
unemployed and downtrodden against the financial system that kept them 
down.  He was later known for his skill in playing the musical saw, 
which he often did in public spaces.  If only our eclectic street 
musicians were treated with such respect nowadays.
Still, it is positive that we have a statue of an old-time radical and 
no such visible monument to the racial and class bigotry which ran 
rampant in the ‘20s in Santa Cruz (at least until Louis Rittenhouse 
erects—as Bruce Bratton claims he plans to—a commemorative plaque to his 
grandfather, a major proponent of the “Keep California White” 
movement).  But, we cannot rely on a transient and unrooted student 
radicalism to maintain the pseudo-progressive majority in Santa Cruz.
For one thing, the political power of the student body is likely to 
become increasingly fragmented as a new student demographic is brought 
to UCSC by bolstered Economics and Engineering departments and a waning 
commitment among faculty to non-traditional education.  For another, it 
is clear that the student body has enormous political power, but that 
political power will be easily mobilized, as it always has been, to 
serve the interests of the political elite who have in turn enslaved 
themselves to the economic interests of the tourism industry.
The solution does not lie in City Government.  As Phil Baer notes about 
his experience in City Council meetings, “It just seems like a 
predetermined process.  You go there, you say your spiel, but you get 
the sense the decision has already been made.”  How we vote matters far 
less than how we relate to our bosses, our landlords or those who would 
presume to police us.  It also matters far less than how we all relate 
to each other—the community ties and the alternative institutions we 
build together.
My next installment of “Transience in Santa Cruz” will focus on how 
transience affects these interpersonal relationships.  It will not 
appear in the next issue, but rather in the following one, to give all 
of you time to relate your stories and register your opinions on this 
topic.  Please send us your thoughts to our P.O. Box or e-mail me at 
fhar at the-alarm.com.

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