Letter | Design Housing – not a divisive multi-use project

By Letters to the Editor | Santa Cruz Sentinel October 5, 2022 at 5:00 a.m.

If the mixed-use project on Lot 4 was about housing, that’s what its design would maximize. Instead, the complicated eight-story and 1.5-acre project runs sidewalk to sidewalk from Lincoln to Cathcart along Cedar Street, a mass of concrete and design tangents that include disparate elements.

A garage, when we’re overbuilt in parking garages? A library, when Measure S dedicated funds to renovate our library where it is now at Civic Center?

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— V.J. Girsh, Santa Cruz

Stephen Kessler | Location of the farmers and the antique vendors

By Stephen Kessler | Santa Cruz Sentinel October 8, 2022 at 7:00 a.m.

A downtown institution since 1993, the Antique Faire started out on Pacific Avenue and after a few months was moved by the Downtown Association to Lincoln Street; years later it was briefly transplanted to Cedar, where it withered for lack of foot traffic. It moved back to Lincoln in 2003 and has been thriving there ever since. “Moving us could kill the show,” organizer Bonnie Belcher told me. “We have to have visibility from the mall.” As the city is Belcher’s landlord, she has taken no public position on Measure O — the renovate-the-library, save-Lot-4-for-a-plaza, build-housing-elsewhere initiative — but she’s hoping to stay where she is.

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Stephen Kessler | Columnist

Stephen Kessler | ‘Affordable housing’ questions

By Stephen Kessler | Santa Cruz Sentinel September 24, 2022 at 5:00 a.m.

The first question that occurs to me is: If affordable housing is so urgently important as to have supplanted the original garage in project propaganda — the garage is still there but underneath the housing and is never mentioned even though it is still volumetrically the largest component — why was there no housing included in the original project? And if housing could be added so easily to the library-garage, why not just build it somewhere else, like Lot 7, where it wouldn’t be caught in such a fraught political controversy?

The answer is: branding. Knowing the garage-library was widely unpopular, the prevailing city powers (staff, council, the Democratic machine) added affordable housing so that anyone opposed to the Taj Garage could be branded as anti-affordable housing — which is as distasteful and disgraceful as being called antisemitic, LGBTQ+phobic, racist or misogynist in such a righteously progressive community as ours. So let’s be clear, based on the evidence (it was a cynical afterthought), that housing was added to the Lot 4 project mainly because nobody could object to anything that included it.

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Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.