The city of Santa Cruz has also decided to address the need for affordable housing. Galvanized by groups like Mercy Charities, the city has contributed to a number of affordable housing efforts, including El Centro, a downtown apartment house for the elderly. Two of the city's more prominent projects include the Neary Lagoon Cooperative, which was built in 1991 and supplies affordable housing to some 300 people, and Sycamore Street commons, a complex at Front Street and Pacific Avenue scheduled to open next February. But there is a problem with building affordable housing within the city limits, Mardi Wormhoudt says, which results from attitudes toward poor people. No one wants complexes like Neary Lagoon in their neighborhoods.
People are afraid of crime, squalor and the attendant depreciation of their real estate.
Wormhoudt finds this dirty little Santa Cruz secret appalling. Now with the attitudes toward affordable housing, it makes me think that to be poor is to be considered lazy or somehow irresponsible. That's what some housing experts say, anyway, including Legal Aid attorney Gary McNeil. It's a beautiful place to live, and it's close enough to a thriving economy. And I think we have an overcrowded housing market as it is.