By Ross Eric Gibson
Since the late 19th century, Santa Cruz and Santa Clara were described in superlatives for natural beauty and agricultural prestige. Yet for a time after World War II, both counties made efforts to become a Los Angeles car culture of freeways, heavy industry and suburban sprawl. Santa Clara “succeeded,” but Santa Cruzans formed groups to Fight the Blight.
In 1950, the San Jose City Council announced it intended to become the “Los Angeles of the North.” Land speculators swarmed Santa Clara County, buying up cheap farmland to be revalued as urban subdivisions. Longtime farmers, trying to keep their prestige as the nation’s quality fruit capital, gained protections through a 1954 Santa Clara County zoning amendment for agriculture-only districts.
Outraged, the San Jose City Council annexed property, county roads, and school districts into the city by any means possible. In the spring of 1955, the farmers got the state legislature to pass an act preventing annexation of farmland nor adjoining county roads without the property owner’s consent. This would have worked, but San Jose took advantage of the 90 days before the act became law to expand its borders to 200 miles enclosing less than 20 square miles. The frenzy of acquisitions frightened communities neighboring San Jose, who, for the sake of “home-rule,” incorporated into seven new cities.
Heavy industry moved in with legions of workers, overtaxing the aquifers and causing a water crisis. By the late 1950s, fly-by-night developers maximized profits by building inferior ticky-tacky tract homes, which fell apart so quickly, they became instant slums. While the FHA (Federal Housing Administration) was intended to aid homeowners, it was shady developers who sought their low-interest insured mortgages to build hundreds of homes for a no-risk profit. And lax Veterans Administration oversight permitted development on known floodplains, building homes the U.S. government would have to repurchase after inevitable flooding, then repair for resale.
Santa Cruz flood
Santa Cruz County was drawn into San Jose’s over-development psychosis following the Christmas Flood of 1955. While the flood was statewide, it flooded downtown Santa Cruz, Ocean Street, Soquel, Capitola, and Watsonville. The designated “Flood Recovery” redevelopment continued for more than 30 years, brought to an end only by the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, which prompted the next 30-years of redevelopment to be called “Earthquake Recovery.”
Following the 1955 flood, shady San Jose developers made forays into Santa Cruz County, buying up large Victorians, tearing them down, and squeezing as many cheap tract homes onto the site as possible. This caused a backlash against the loss of a neighborhood’s character-defining landmarks. A riverside neighborhood was cleared away, and county offices moved there from the beloved Romanesque Court House on Cooper Street to the hated County Government Center, a New Brutalism-style monstrosity resembling a penitentiary, and built as a nuclear fallout shelter.
But City Planners seemed oblivious to the outrage, wanting developers to carry out a similar modernization of Santa Cruz. It was proposed to abandon the county’s lead industries of tourism and agriculture (calling tourism shabby), both seen as stumbling blocks to development on parklands, wilderness and farms. Santa Cruz would become “the City of Industry” or “the Detroit of the West” (depending on the sales pitch), through a proposed 11-mile corridor of factories along the rail shipping line between Santa Cruz and Davenport, surrounded by a sprawling suburbia of tract homes. A proposed City/County zoning ordinance to prevent residential encroachment on potential industrial sites failed to pass.
Annexation
Santa Cruz planned to annex Scotts Valley, Live Oak and Wilder Ranch for high-density urban development, ban agriculture and ranching within the city limits, dump passenger rail for a network of four-lane freeways along West Cliff Drive, over Neary Lagoon and Beach Hill to Ocean Street, along the edge of the University, through Pogonip, and DeLaveaga Park. Downtown Santa Cruz would be demolished for highrise office buildings, apartment towers, massive parking lots and chain stores, with West Cliff and Beach Hill envisioned as a Miami Beach row of skyscrapers, gas stations, and fast food joints, while the new UC Santa Cruz campus was planned as a towering Manhattan in the Redwoods.
From a post-World War II perspective, this was seen as highly practical, and part of a national trend for Urban Renewal gutting cities, targeting ethnic neighborhoods for “slum clearance,” with suburban sprawl, freeway development, and polluting industries seen as a badge of progress. Development pressures were such that farmers couldn’t afford to keep farmland priced as urban subdivisions, nor rural property owners keep trees on their property taxed as unharvested lumber (rather than shade, ecology or wilderness).
Rebellion
In 1963, neighbors rose up to stop proposed freeways cutting through neighborhoods, and the planned leveling of the town’s architectural heritage. Many businessmen agreed, especially as a tourist town, that turning Santa Cruz into Detroit would be bad for the economy. The businessmen formed SCOPE (the Santa Cruz Organization for Progress & Euthenics). “Euthenics” means well-being from a better environment. Their stated goal was to: “Retain and Enhance the human values, the natural beauty, the clean air, the fine old trees, the historical values and areas and architecture, the open spaces, the public safety, the absence of traffic noise, the rural atmosphere, and the Distinct Individuality, character, and charm of this community of Santa Cruz County.”
They proposed guidelines for landscaped freeways that blended into the scenery, and avoided being routed through the urban core. Demolition for town freeways stopped, and thanks to Chuck and Esther Abbott, SCOPE helped guide the transformation of Pacific Avenue into the 1968 “Pacific Garden Mall” as a designated National Historic District.
Meanwhile, a backlash to Santa Cruz annexation plans came as Live Oak complained it would lose its world famous floral and mushroom industries. Live Oak residents feared the County would dump its unwanted housing projects on its farmland, even as 41st Avenue’s Brown’s Bulb Ranch and Veterle Brothers Begonia farm were annexed into the new city of Capitola (born in 1949). Scotts Valley’s Skypark Airport was owned by the City of Santa Cruz, but Scotts Valley resisted Santa Cruz annexation efforts by voting to incorporate as a city. The claim was that Scotts Valley could keep its rural charm and its airport if residents voted for cityhood in 1964. But election results were challenged in the belief the cityhood campaign was actually funded by development interests. Scotts Valley incorporated in 1966 and closed its airport, which cityhood was supposed to protect.
The proposed 1969 Wilder Ranch development was called “a bedroom community for San Jose,” with 10,000 homes expected to double the population of Santa Cruz, and turn Mission Street into commuter gridlock. Santa Cruz bridled at bearing the brunt of city services for commuters, while their employers’ business taxes were left over-the-hill. The same year, Palo Alto assumed losing its foothills to housing was inevitable, and commissioned a plan to create the most beneficial and environmentally-sensitive development. They were shocked at the findings: “… if the cost of schools, roads, police and fire facilities … and other municipal items were added (up) … the total investment would so far exceed any tax revenues the area could produce, that buying the land (for open-space) would be cheaper. Thus, the most economical environmental design would be no design.” (California Tomorrow, p.257-58). The proposed Wilder Development brought community opposition over these same issues and conclusions, and in 1974, the property was saved as State Park open-space.
Hoping to alleviate Santa Cruz County housing needs, Watsonville built affordable housing for agricultural workers. Yet some feared it ended up as commuter housing. Over the years, periodic plans were proposed for massive industrial development on Coyote Valley farmland in the south Silicon Valley. When San Benito, Monterey, and Santa Cruz Counties complained these plans produced a massive housing deficit that would send an invasion of commuters to these counties, the San Jose City Council said it was not their concern, and other counties would have to fend for themselves. That was a turning point for many.
Today’s affordable housing crisis is nationwide, and places that overbuilt (like Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco), have been no more successful making home prices affordable than those that haven’t. In this turbulent history, Santa Cruz has retained its quality of life, agricultural open-space, wilderness areas, and tourism charm, all of which contribute to the high demand for housing here. How to gain the one without losing the other is the balancing act we face.
Ross Eric Gibson is a former history columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and Santa Cruz Sentinel.
