Jan Chaffin June 11, 2018

Who Are These People?

I live on the West side of Santa Cruz. Some say ‘West side is the Best side’. In many ways, I agree. Despite the density of population and closeness of quarters, there has always been a core community here that would rally when bad things happened to one of our own; we were a neighborhood.

Of course, neighbors came and went over the months and years but I grew to know most of them and felt lucky to be surrounded by diverse, caring people who happened to also not leave a large footprint in our little urban world. We waved to each other in our yards and on our streets.

Some neighbors would only come on weekends and holidays; this was their second home at the beach. One family had several grown children and the husband held a high-level tech job in Silicon Valley. I watched their kids get married, their grand parents and pets pass away… They showered me with candy on every occasion and all they asked was for me to take out their garbage. I happily obliged since they were in many ways ideal neighbors and put up with my overwhelming myrtle bushes in their gutters. Their entire house had been rebuilt by a previous owner in violation of the tiny property’s set back rules. Regardless, my myrtles were out of control…

Other neighbors became good friends and I even adopted one neighbor’s cat when he started hanging out here instead of her house. She recently married and had a baby. The cat seemed to have issues with babies since this was the second time he jumped ship when one was born. She agreed he should live with me. I know she must be sad; I would be sad if he left me.

When a twenty-two year old who’d been drinking at the church rave(?!) totaled my parked car and almost hit the market owner, folks all came running and showed their support. A few of us even worked for the market owner’s wife when he suddenly died, leaving her to run a 90-hour a week business by herself. The neighborhood pitched in and donated to the family and they hosted a BBQ for us.

We have always, despite gangs, disreputable minister-landlords and destructive drunk drivers, banded together as a community.

It was the same where I came from. We were the first family on the block and I played in the woods until developers started building houses all around us. Houses were affordable and people often stayed for life. We became close to all of our neighbors; I remember the names and back-stories of every family on the street.

I’ve lived here since 1999. It is now 2018. A lot has changed. I’m not sure when I started noticing that the people who were staying a few days at the house next door didn’t look familiar at all. At first I thought it was just my neighbors being generous, loaning their second home to friends and family who wanted to hang out at the beach for a weekend.

The former cat owners would leave for days even weeks on end and a friend would show up to check on the house which would usually lie dormant. At some point, over the past four years, I noticed that folks would visit when they weren’t there.

First Uber came along. Then Lyft. And then came Air B‘n’B. Suddenly people’s real property could be leveraged for real cash. Suddenly people were trusting complete strangers within their most intimate confines, for a profit, for a deal, through a convenient, seemingly transparent middleman. The idea was that, like facebook, it’s Pavlovian policy would be regulated by social media. If you misbehave, you will be shunned. If you behave, you will be rewarded.

Last winter, three cars full of teenagers loudly converged and surrounded my house trying to find parking. They all pulled out backpacks and headed…. next door. I stood on my tiny front porch in dismay.

This spring, as I was quietly sitting on my front porch, I watched seven people and a bull dog emerge from next door and loudly assemble themselves in their matching monster trucks for a day at the beach. My cat recoiled in terror. I was beyond dismayed.

Sunday at 8:30am, I awoke to the loud squeals of a renta-family staying at the former cat-owner’s house.  Although she had told me months ago of their plans to selectively rent their house, some of their tenants were noisy large groups with lots of cars.

Several months ago, the church that has been at the center of the circle since it became a circle (was the reason it became a circle) was surreptitiously sold to a high-density housing developer. (Not saying the church-owner was an angel; he rented the church to the highest bidders, literally at the expense of the community’s safety and quality of life.)

I guess it’s a sure sign of becoming a living relic when you start railing against the inevitable tides of change. I understand I live in a town that is full of people who want to live here because it is very literally close to paradise. Property is gold. Roll tides roll. People are turning their homes into vacation rentals and gentrified flop houses just to pay the bills.

But at what cost? Where is the accountability? When did R-1 zoning change from single family residential to anyone who pays can stay for any length of time? Shouldn’t there be requirements for renters to stay minimum terms? Isn’t the house a hotel otherwise, subject to hospitality tax? Even so, in what way does that tax benefit the neighbors who just want their neighborhoods back? Should we retaliate with the same social media tactics that permit these practices by shaming or praising our renting neighbors on neighborhood forums? Where goes our peace of mind?

About a year ago, the neighbors next door stopped leaving sweets on my porch. Sometime after I realized they were (often carelessly) renting their house out, I stopped taking care of their garbage. Now we barely speak, much less exchange cards with holiday news… Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems a big part of paradise is how we share it.