Just off Highway 1, at the far end of River Street in the Harvey West neighborhood of Santa Cruz, a temporary micro-city is still humming along despite another deadline fast approaching for its residents. Behind a tall fence topped with barbed wire, tents housing some five dozen people are arranged in neat rows, personal touches like prayer flags and a water station thoughtfully arranged near the front entrance.

Outside the city-backed homeless encampment, temporary no parking signs posted when the camp first opened in February still list a June 30 expiration date. Now, with just over a week to go until the city’s next self-imposed deadline for an alternative shelter, GT has learned that the city is poised to again delay a decision on the camp amid ongoing resistance to proposed longer-term locations.

“It doesn’t look like we’ll be taking anything to City Council on the 14th,” city spokesperson Eileen Cross wrote in an email, referring to next week’s Santa Cruz City Council meeting. “No decision has been made on River Street.”

Cross adds that “the city and county are continuing to explore feasible options of locations to move the camp to,” though she did not specify individual sites or neighborhoods. Santa Cruz County Spokesperson Jason Hoppin, meanwhile, says the county is more focused on the potential for increased state funding and youth homelessness outreach.

“The River Street camp itself was always something the city did,” Hoppin says. “Their efforts to relocate people and find a new location for that—that’s going to be up to them.”

With the future of the River Street camp uncertain, some local homeless advocates are taking matters into their own hands, launching efforts to create more options for people to sleep safely in cars or store personal belongings. At the county level, nearly $2.5 million in federal funding has also flowed this summer into efforts to address homelessness among young adults and school-age children who lack stable housing.

In the process of identifying potential paths forward, Santa Cruz is grappling with an increasingly acute situation felt in cities throughout California and beyond.

“It’s a huge issue up and down the coast,” says Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, where policymakers in the state capital are also exploring city-sanctioned camps for some 600 people. “The West Coast, from San Diego to Seattle, all saw pretty significant increases in homelessness.”

PUBLIC LAND DILEMMAS

Perhaps the biggest question now is how far local governments in Santa Cruz and cities with similarly outsized homeless populations will go to use public land to alleviate homelessness while policymakers discuss longer-term fixes for affordable housing.

Four sites were previously proposed for an interim shelter facility to be open for 18-24 months until a new permanent shelter could be built, including a county facility on Emeline Avenue, the National Guard Armory near the DeLaveaga Golf Course, Pogonip Clubhouse off Golf Club Drive, and Dimeo Lane near the city landfill. Though homeless advocates and some residents have urged immediate action, many would-be neighbors have staunchly opposed the proposals, stalling a decision.

“It’s been an endless cycle,” says Brent Adams, who heads local nonprofit homeless services and advocacy group the Warming Center Program, alluding to evictions prior to the River Street camp in San Lorenzo Park and elsewhere. “We think there needs to be a more holistic and street-aware approach to shelter.”

While public agencies debate next steps, grassroots groups like Adams’ have started to offer up stop-gap measures—some with government support, some without.

The Association of Faith Communities, for instance, has appealed for public funds to expand its SafeSpaces program offering free parking spaces to the estimated 30 percent of homeless residents who sleep in their cars each night, one third of whom live in their cars with a child. The Warming Center Program, which operates with no public funding on a $65,000-a-year budget, has offered its namesake winter shelter since 2014 and in June began a free service that allows homeless residents to store their belongings while not in use.

Last Thursday evening, Adams and the Warming Center’s one paid employee stood outside a white passenger shuttle bus parked at a running city meter in the lot behind the downtown Wheel Works. A slow trickle of men and women walked up to the bus, gave their names and waited for the gray plastic bins with their belongings — bedding, clothes, shoes — to be retrieved for the night.

One man with a bald head and bright blue eyes, Larry, said he lived at a home in the Santa Cruz Mountains for 40 years and used to commute to Silicon Valley for work as an engineer. Finding a new job after a layoff proved impossible at an older age, he said, which led to spending the last few weeks sleeping in a quiet spot with good light, on the street near downtown.

Still, Larry, who declined to give his last name, said he was hopeful he’d find a new place in the mountains in a few more weeks. He described himself as “independent,” but also said living on the street was for him something like an out-of-body experience you might read about in a book. He even sympathized with neighbors in houses and apartments who remain divided over what to do next.

“They’re in a tough spot,” he said. “It’s a lot of people.”

THE MAKING OF A STALEMATE

The official numbers, tallied one day every other year by a team of volunteer surveyors, say that Santa Cruz was home to 2,249 homeless individuals last year—up from 1,964 people in 2015, but well below the 3,536 people counted by the point-in-time survey in 2013. About 68 percent of people surveyed last year lived in the county prior to becoming homeless, and 38 percent of people had been homeless for 11 months or less.

Still, advocates and public officials alike question whether statistics capture the full range of people living in various stages of homelessness. Gray areas like constant couchsurfing, long stays in motels or families living doubled or tripled up are often overlooked, along with people who may try to avoid being counted or stay in more isolated outdoor areas.

“I think we forget all the different faces of homelessness,” says Santa Cruz Vice Mayor Martine Watkins, who also works as a community organizer for the Santa Cruz County Office of Education. “We have a lot of kids who are homeless in our county.”

About 17 percent of those tallied in the 2017 homeless count were children under the age of 18. During the 2016-2017 school year, the county reported 3,263 homeless school-age students, mostly living in overcrowded homes or apartments shared with other families.

Starting this school year, Santa Cruz County Schools and Pajaro Valley Schools will each receive $175,000 annually for the next three years to serve homeless students. As part of more than $2 million in federal funding for youth homelessness announced by the county this summer, schools will also benefit from $100,000 annually to be spent on a new Youth Homeless Response Team to bring children who may be on the street or in shelters back into the school system.

Though homelessness can result from a range of circumstances—job loss, medical conditions, substance abuse, evictions—the reckoning about the future of the issue comes at a time of increasing anxiety about widening economic disparities in the county. A disconnect between high costs of living and scarce high-wage work in Santa Cruz has earned the city several dubious distinctions in recent years.

One 2015 UCSC report named the city the “least affordable small metro area in the entire country.” Just two weeks ago, the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California reported that Santa Cruz County is the second-poorest county in California—Los Angeles County topped the list—with nearly 24 percent of area residents falling below a localized poverty rate of $33,953 for a family of four.

“Housing costs are really the single-largest component of what’s driving at least the California poverty measure,” says Tess Thorman, co-author of the PPIC study. “Any changes in that statewide will really have an impact on poverty.”

Though Santa Cruz built more housing than required by state regulators from 2007-2014 for residents earning $41,700 a year or more, the city did not report building any of the minimum 75 units ordered for residents earning less money. The city’s latest state-mandated housing assessment from 2015 attributes the gap to the recession-era dissolution of statewide redevelopment agencies, which previously provided permanent funding for affordable housing.

As residents with and without housing await word on what might come next, Hoppin says an estimated $8-10 million from the state that could be made available on an emergency basis by the end of this year could be a game changer. Still, even good news comes with caveats.

“That funding is one-time, and it has to be spent in a relatively short amount of time,” Hoppin says. “We have a lot of work ahead of us to figure out how we’re going to spend it.”

Andy Hartman, of the local electrical workers’ union, has noticed a strange irony when it comes to building affordable housing.

Oftentimes, the men and women laboring to bring a project to life make too little at the construction sites to afford to live in one of the finished units, explains Hartman, the business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 234.

That’s why he’s excited about a new $140 million bond measure headed to the November ballot to fund affordable housing, as it would require that workers be paid a living wage—which, for electricians, would be $46 an hour—instead of hourly wages that he says can run as low as $15.

“We want to see workers out there on projects,” he says. “We want to ideally have more local people going to work on the projects.”

It isn’t just the unions who are throwing their weight behind the measure, which would need a two-thirds voter majority to pass on the Nov. 6 ballot.

By last month, the coalition working on the November measure had grown to more than 70 people, including members of local city governments, affordable housing developers, the Community Action Board, Visit Santa Cruz County, Barrios Unidos, the Santa Cruz Farm Bureau, and Santa Cruz for Bernie, to name a few. On Tuesday, Aug. 7, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to place the measure on the upcoming ballot.

During a public comment period that lasted more than an hour, Cathy Sarto, of Peace United Church of Christ, spoke on behalf of COPA, a coalition of more than 29 institutions, like schools and churches. Her voice trembling, she spoke about her five children—one of whom works for Hospice of Santa Cruz County, and another in mental health.

“These are Santa Cruz’s own kids, kids who did everything we asked of them,” she said.
“We asked them to get an education and contribute and give back to society. Our congregations are losing members and clergy. Our schools can’t recruit teachers. Our health institutions can’t recruit doctors and nurses.”

The rent for a two-bedroom Santa Cruz apartment is about $3,200, according to data from both Zillow and Rent Jungle, which is more than half the median household income.

Casey Beyer, the executive director of the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce, has been working on the measure and building a coalition for more than a year, since former Mayor Don Lane and former state Assemblymember Fred Keeley asked if he would pitch in to help strategize. Beyer says that when the chamber polls its members on top priorities, three things rise to the top of the list—housing, transportation and retention or recruitment of employees, in that order. When Beyer asks business owners about their recruiting problems, he says they tell him, “Well, if we can recruit someone here, we often lose that potential candidate because the cost of housing is too high.”

The challenge, he says, applies to both the public and private sectors.

Some progressives were understandably less than thrilled at the bond’s dollar amount, given that it would provide $110 million less than the $250 million measure Lane and Keeley had initially pitched. Keeley says the trick was finding that sweet spot between how much voters’ checkbooks will support and how much money was required to provide the needed impact. The last time that the Affordable Housing Santa Cruz County (AHSCC) coalition met, members in attendance voted unanimously to support the measure. They also voted unanimously to go “all in” on the campaign, meaning that even if someone is running a different campaign, the affordable housing bond should be their second-biggest priority.

“We gotta be number two, not number three or four,” Keeley explains.

In the measure, 75 percent of the funds are slated for affordable housing construction, and 15 percent would go to fund the brick-and-mortar construction costs for new homeless facilities that could be spent anywhere in the county. The final 10 percent would go to assistance for home ownership, like loans to first-time homebuyers.

Beyer says that in order to build units that are truly affordable, the community will need funding, and if Santa Cruz wants to compete for state grants, the county needs local sources like a ballot measure.

The measure’s money is split between the county’s five local governments, with a breakdown that the city managers and the county administrative officer agreed upon.

Recent polling paid for by AHSCC reveals some encouraging tidbits about likely voters’ compassionate interest on these issues—but also cause for concern. Only 60 percent of voters support the measure at first, with 3 percent more leaning in that direction. After hearing more information, that number jumps to 64 percent, with 2 percent more leaning toward supporting it, bringing the total number to 66 percent, still technically under the needed two-thirds threshold.

The measure includes language, recently mandated by state law, about the cost of the bond measure to property owners on their property tax bill. It would cost $16.77 per $100,000 of the officially assessed value of the property.

The pollsters told Keeley support could be 5 to 12 percent higher were it not for that language. Coalition members know they could wait two years and put the measure on the ballot in 2020, when they can count on higher turnout from a presidential election. But if a recession begins between now and then, Keeley isn’t sure that the climate would be any more favorable. He notes that coalition members have plenty of campaign experience, and that housing will drive voters to the polls in November, as there will be two statewide housing measures and two local ones.

With a short runway ahead, Beyer says campaigners need to craft a cohesive message and stay on the same page. “Now’s the time to play ball. We have 100 days to pull it across the finish line,” says Beyer, a onetime chief of staff to former Congressmember Tom Campbell.

In the AHSCC poll, county voters’ top three priorities were affordable housing, homelessness and mental health services. Those needs came in ahead of education, transportation, the environment and public safety. Eighty-four percent of likely voters agreed that local governments should do more do address the homeless problem in Santa Cruz County, with 60 percent strongly agreeing. Those numbers are up from polling in 2017. Not only that, but the numbers of those who were unsure, who somewhat disagreed and who totally disagreed went down.

The polling indicates that people are less concerned about being able to find a place to live for themselves than they are about other people. That indicates encouraging findings on what Keeley calls “the compassion meter.”

“The compassion meter in our community isn’t inexhaustible, but this isn’t so much about them,” he says. “It’s about what kind of community do we want to live in?”

Keeley stresses the campaign is in the business of securing money for affordable housing, not making housing policy decisions that local governments will figure out in the future.

“We’re not in the business of saying where it should go, should it be single-family or multi-family? Should we do four stories on Water Street? We’re staying in our lane,” Keeley says, “and our lane is forming capital, providing funding and community funding to make these pencil out.”

Update: A previous version of this story misspelled Cathy Sarto’s last name and misstated Tom Campbell’s former title, as well as the findings of a previous housing poll.

The national numbers are already jarring. Just over 15 percent of Santa Cruz County residents live under the federal poverty line of about $24,300 per year for a family of four.

Add in local housing costs and the value of safety-net services like food and rent assistance, though, and that number jumps — to the second-highest poverty rate in the state behind Los Angeles County, according to a report recently released by the Public Policy Institute of California.

When factoring in costs of living and the local availability of social services, more like 23.8 percent of residents fall below what researchers call a more realistic poverty line for Santa Cruz County of $33,953 for a family of four.

Here’s a snapshot of the statewide findings from the nonpartisan think tank, which looked at the most recently-available data from 2014-2016:

To understand the gap between the official poverty rate and the on-the-ground financial realities in Santa Cruz County, we talked with study co-author Tess Thorman. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s a stereotype that inland California is the poorer part of the state and the coast is more affluent. What does this report say about the reality?

TESS THORMAN: The official poverty measure has always shown poverty in the Central Valley. The California poverty measure additionally shows that there is poverty in what we’ve considered to be wealthier regions along the coast.

By including the full range of resources that families are using to meet their needs — but also variation in cost of living — you can see that families in higher-cost places may be earning enough to not be in federal poverty, but still be struggling to afford living in places where it’s expensive.

What issues should people who are concerned about high poverty numbers be watching moving forward?

I mean, housing costs are really the single-largest component of what’s driving at least the California poverty measure. I think that any changes in that statewide will really have an impact on poverty. Most housing policy is really happening at the local level. It’s not something that the state has really taken on.

With regard to the safety net, there’s been conversations about adding work requirements to SNAP, which is the federal program behind CalFresh. That will have a big impact, given that CalFresh is a major program that alleviates poverty in California. That’s a place to watch what’s happening in the Farm Bill.

One thing that was surprising is that nearby places known for being even more expensive, like Santa Clara and San Francisco, ranked below Santa Cruz for poverty. Is it clear why that is?

That’s a good question. It’s hard to tell specifically, but it’s likely to do with the average amount of resources that people do have.

In Santa Cruz, for example, many people who are earning above the federal poverty level but are still struggling to make ends meet are not eligible for a lot of safety-net programs. Those programs don’t have the chance to assist, and it may also be that people in the Bay Area have slightly higher incomes.

When Juanita Sorrentino hung up the phone with her eldest granddaughter, she never imagined that the quick, casual goodbye would be her last. Isabelle Gonzalez, a 16-year-old San Jose High School student, told her grandma she’d hang out with friends for a few hours, but would come home in time to rest up for her cheerleading rally the next morning.

Around 1:30 a.m. on March 16, Gonzalez sat in the back seat of a Honda Accord. The car’s driver, 22-year-old Brandon Gomez Hunsperger, barrelled down Casselino Drive at freeway speed before losing control of the car, striking a small tree and careening over a nearby hill. Paramedics pronounced her and Hunsperger dead on the scene. Her best friend and another man in the car survived with treatable injuries.

Though the crash remains under investigation, the coroner’s toxicology report showed that he had 11 nanograms of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, in his system. Had Hunsperger been driving in Colorado, that would have put him over twice the legal limit for that particular cannabinoid, perhaps the drug’s most common and also most psychoactive ingredient. What should not be overlooked is that lab results also showed that Hunsperger died with more than twice the legal limit for alcohol in his bloodstream as well.

When pot became fully legal for recreational use in California at the beginning of the year, law firms and law enforcement stepped up warnings about stoned driving. Signs like “Drive High, Get a DUI” along freeways warned about the consequences of getting busted behind the wheel while under the influence. But unlike Colorado, California does not yet have a definite maximum THC level, so policing marijuana-induced driving under the influence (DUI) charges has proved challenging.

“It is the officer’s interpretation of the situation based on their training to determine whether a person is too intoxicated to drive,” says Santa Cruz County California Highway Patrol (CHP) spokesperson Trista Drake. “Hopefully, we will have something like Colorado. We have been slow to catch up so far.”

Officer training, Drake says, includes programs on both enforcement of impaired driving and recognizing various substances, each of which includes identifying if someone is high. And the state legislature will soon fund a UC San Diego study to look at the effects of cannabis on driving.

One of the problems with using THC to draw a hard line, however, is that cannabis affects different users differently. Medical cannabis patients, for example, may have a tolerance that is far beyond that of recreational users—and not be impaired regardless of how much THC is built up in their bloodstream, where it can remain for weeks after use.

Issues of drug use and driving have come up in Santa Cruz recently, as well. On the Westside, 24-year-old Kelsey Knoll was recently charged with murder after barreling her SUV into 23-year-old McKenzie Gilbert. Knoll’s toxicology reports have yet to come back, but she’s faced felony drug charges in the past, including for methamphetamine and heroin.

In general, Sorrentino says she’s concerned that, absent a standard for intoxication, the legal penalties for driving while stoned will fail to reflect the seriousness of the crime. “We want justice served,” Sorrentino says. “We want justice for Isabelle.”

Because it’s still early in weed’s post-prohibition era, regional law enforcement officials have been unable to confirm to what extent such fears are warranted. CHP’s San Jose branch has been tracking the number of marijuana-related DUIs, but the office has yet to draw any conclusions about whether stoned driving has gone up there.

While DUI related arrests in Santa Cruz County are on the rise, compared to last year (with a total of 615 for the first six months), Drake says incidents of cannabis-specific DUIs in Santa Cruz County haven’t increased.

Local cannabis attorney Ben Rice isn’t surprised by that fact, adding that cannabis-specific DUIs are “pretty darn rare” in his experience. “Cannabis is so different from alcohol. Users are more relaxed, and they mostly become more careful, and it makes them slow down, not speed up,” Rice says.

Rice adds that although CHP officers will arrest someone they believe is under the influence of cannabis, there’s often little the district attorney can do to prosecute such cases, since studies have yet to conclusively prove how to measure impairment.

Although federal research has shown that while smoking before driving does elevate the risk of crashing, it’s less impairing than alcohol. Anyone using both substances at the same time, though, can end up far more impaired than someone using either drug on its own.

While the American Journal of Public Health published a study last summer reporting that the states of Colorado and Washington saw no increase in fatal crashes after legalization, a separate study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that collisions went up 3 percent. The Washington Post called it “plausible that legalization could lead to a slight increase in minor accidents that don’t prove fatal.”

According to a Denver Post analysis last year, however, data from Colorado showed an increase in fatalities where the driver tested positive for recent cannabis use, with the rate more than doubling annually between 2013 and 2016.

In San Jose, the crash that killed Gonzalez wasn’t Hunsperger’s first drug offense. Court records show he had both drug- and driving-related infractions to his name. In April 2016, police pulled him over for participating in a speed contest. An officer found cocaine, pot and drug paraphernalia in his car. A judge gave him two years’ probation and suspended his license for one year—but he violated the terms of his sentence by getting behind the wheel again in 2017.

Hunsperger also entered a deferred entry judgement, a program for drug offenders that offers counseling or substance-use education in exchange for the chance to expunge their record. Gonzalez’s loved ones say the system that tried to save Hunsperger failed their family.

“She was underage, she was a little girl,” her aunt, Vivian Chavez, says. “That guy had no business drinking.”

There are other incidents that have indicated the trickiness of prosecuting drug-related DUIs in the year 2018.

On May 15, Fremont police arrested 21-year-old Dang Nguyen Hai Tran for allegedly causing a a five-car pile-up that killed three people. Police suspected Tran was under the influence of marijuana during the wreck, but released him from jail three days later without charges. “The justice system is that easy to let these guys go,” Sorrentino laments.

But others say that after decades of heavy-handed enforcement that disproportionately impacted people of color and fueled the crisis of mass incarceration, the powers that be have been trying to strike the right balance. Chris Johnson, a program manager for the pedestrian safety advocacy group Walk San Jose, says he isn’t entirely convinced that more severe punishment is the best way to prevent drug-related DUIs. Instead, he calls for expanding public transportation options.

“You make the choice to get behind the wheel of a car,” he says. “Yes, there should be very serious consequences for that, but I’m skeptical of the harshness of that sentence as a deterrent. It’s not premeditated.”

Update 8/3/18, 9:05 a.m.: A previous version of this story misstated attorney Ben Rice’s views on cannabis testing.