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I love Santa Cruz. My favorite place. If any affordable housing ever opens up there, i'I'll move there in a heartbeat. I prefer the energy of university towns. I've never been lucky enough to live in SC, but my daughter did for years, and I would visit her. It's also been my favorite place to go visit since I was a kid.
I live next to SCU now, and lived in Davis, as well. Love university towns. That's why I'd choose SC over other areas around it. BTW, the parking in Capitola is horrendous, at least anywhere near the beach. My daughter looked to rent there, and you're lucky to find a parking spot on the street anywhere in the vicinity of your house - if you don't have an on-property parking spot.
She also lived in Soquel and that was nice, too. Basically a suburb of SC. But I prefer the energy of SC proper. Love to people watch and shop and go to the beach.
I like Scott's Valley, Aptos, Capitola and Soquel better than SC. I commute there about once a week for work (sales calls) and generally enjoy my stay there.
I agree. SC, while I enjoyed living there, was sort of a magnet for transients and a few real creeps. The standing joke was Capitola cops dumped their dregs on SC city parks. Downtown was so bad they had to enact a law against aggressive panhandlers. Aptos is my favorite. Scotts Valley is great if you are more conservative leaning but want quick access to SC beaches. Capitol is similar to Newport Beach in Nor Cal. I remember when I moved back to So Cal and someone asked me where I lived they said, oh nice place too bad it attracts freaks that's why we moved to Monterrey LOL. I was offended then but they were mostly right.
Santa Cruz has had a fairly high crime rate for some time--however as is often the case with crime stats you have to look at it in context. It's a medium sized town, not a city, so it's easy for per capita stats to be higher. As well, there is a lot of unincorporated areas around Santa Cruz like Live Oak or Soquel or Pleasure Point or Pasatiempo that have much lower crime rates and function as part of the greater Santa Cruz area but are just on the other side of the city limits. Living in these areas, you're basically living in Santa Cruz, just not officially.
The tourist trade drives up the crime rate as there's a lot of drunken incidents and bad behavior at times--and yes the transient population is responsible for a lot of the crime in Santa Cruz--many arrests are for theft or drug possession. But Santa Cruz is basically a big town but still pretty small--when I was a kid there were cops everywhere eager to arrest(or harrass) little troublemakers like us--and crimes get reported and followed up on unlike bigger cities. It's still news when someone gets murdered in Santa Cruz--if 5 people get murdered in a year, it's a big news story--and my mom starts getting scared and saying the town is going straight to hell--as she has for the last 30 years. Five people could get murdered in a week in larger more crime filled locations like Oakland or Stockton or Richmond and people wouldn't be all that surprised.
I still have family in Santa Cruz who have lived there for over 35 years now--and the worst they've ever been a victim of in terms of crime is theft. Car break-ins are the worst that's happened to my folks in that whole time--and you have to watch for burglaries or that sort of thing in some areas. It's a little different than affluent yuppie-villes up in the hills above Silicon Valley or Monterrey/Carmel--however someone coming from a bigger city or metro just needs to take the usual precautions for the most part. The people in Santa Cruz who've I've known who were victims of crime, were often people involved in shadier aspects of the town to begin with.
Location: Overlooking the vineyards, olive groves, cattle and horses in the hills of San Miguel CA
167 posts, read 336,071 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Deezus
Santa Cruz itself has a high crime rate, however it's not a particularly grimey or rundown town for the most part.
Did you read the article?
AT RISK: Santa Cruz crime among state's highest - Santa Cruz Sentinel
The Sentinel article somewhat unintentionally points out the absurdity of SC's 'crime reduction policies'... aging hippies who cannot or will not see the spray-paint on the wall, pun intended... it also cuts your argument for living in SC with or even without a family which includes small children to ribbons. If you haven’t, I suggest you do. The gentleman in that article who brought SC’s disturbing crime statistics to the SC government, Mr. Bovee, illustrates a darker by-product of the high SC crime rate- when people are less inclined to risk their car’s stereo, their bike, their physical safety they go out less. They spend less time out and about with their fellow SC residents. They withdraw into solo journeys around town during the day, leaving the nights for tourists, students, criminals and the homeless… fracturing the SC community even more over time. It’s amazing the view of the future SC can have if they look… downhill.
“This is what the most notorious "bad" neighborhood (Beach Flats) in Santa Cruz looks like:”
So if it looks nice, it is nice? Looks can be deceiving… I pass through that area several times a week… as someone who grew up in some of the worst areas of NYC and New Haven, CT as well as all over SC, my perspective is obviously different than many about SC’s BAD neighborhoods…
“Downtown Santa Cruz has a problem with transients around it--who occasionally are responsible for various crimes, but this is what it looks like:”
See above and my former posts below:
Originally Posted by Charles R Higgins 
Of the three Santa Cruz is most expensive and not by a little bit... UCSC and the Scotts Valley businesses as well as Plantronics, etc. are possible sources of employment as is the killer Route 17 commute to San Jose, etc... not much in the way of real jobs south of SC until you hit the 5 Cities/SLO area anyway...
SC is also more dangerous because unlike Santa Rosa (have a few old SC friends who are by now longtime SR residents), the random nature of relatively uncontrolled violent and property crimes in almost all neighborhoods at all hours in SC makes it difficult to provide safety and consistency while out and about with the fam and also provide a safe and relaxing school experience for your child... Santa Rosa has crime, sure- but it's both perceived and handled differently. Crucial distinction as it applies to quality of living...
Traffic in SR is generally more predictable and not usually as bad as SC... better infrastructure to match big traffic volume equals faster commute, etc. times.
See my previous two posts for more on the bait-and-switch that is the young family experience in SC... IMHO the winner would be SLO unless a particular deal-breaking job is in the offing in SR... summers are *hot* in SR/Petaluma but there are several scenic and relatively quick routes to the ocean from either town... lived in Point Reyes Station and went into Petaluma/Cotati/Rohnert Park/Santa Rosa frequently for shopping, supplies, eating, etc..
While all three have trade-offs, if decent work's possible in the five Cities/SLO area for you that might be the ticket... if you feel particularly lucky and really, really want to come into contact with surly homeless folks, Trustafarians driving old Mercedes diesel wagons like NYC taxis, Steamer Lane surfers on their day jobs in Tundra pickups in homicidal moods because they're not in the water and wannabe boho white kids with the world's worst tattoos and Silicon Valley commuters in Beemers cutting through traffic like Mario Andretti up Route 17 into San Jose, one of the most dangerous roads in CA your way to a real estate Open House where you'll share a look with several score other SC Pilgrims at a $675K 2BR 1B in a noisy, cramped neighborhood with students, surfers and addicts in the homes nearby, try SC out... but you'll likely be moving down the coast like us eventually. I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating. Unfortunately, I'm not.
Hope the OP will keep us posted (again no pun intended)! '^)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charles R Higgins 
At 7:30 pm on a Monday night at a bus stop several miles from campus the UCSC student was shot in the back of the head by an assailant/robber with a rifle who had demanded money... miraculously the bullet didn't completely pierce her skull and she recovered. Never did catch the suspect, though...
Not too long before that a woman walking near downtown SC at 11:00 AM was knifed and killed by a criminal just down from SF apparently... they caught this one.
A martial-arts instructor was shot and killed outside an SC restaurant at his own birthday party one evening, rapes on the UCSC campus, a shootout with a double-cop-killer that lasted over 20 minutes near downtown have all combined, this year especially to provide an ongoing, ominous pattern of violent incidents, not just the petty property crimes for which SC has always been known... if you'd like, check my previous post for some other SC absurdities that are now depressingly familiar and common around here. The pretext SC loves to share with the world is that it's a safe, friendly, frisky little town full of weird lovable characters, surfers and students in one big square dance of happy Cali fun... the most dangerous thing a 'small town' can do is to promote an atmosphere of denial in the service of tourism. Look what it did for the fictional town of 'Amity' on Martha's Vineyard in 'Jaws', right? '^)
No one dislikes and regrets hating on SC more than me... I was born here in 1960 and have had some great, great times here. But Santa Cruz is not the place for fun, sun and kids to grow up in that it once was. If you're wealthy it's too crowded, dirty and small-time... if you're a criminal/gang member, a transient thief, a student, a tourist or a surfer who likes riding 3-foot swells on the most overrated break in North America, SC's still the place for you. Parent of a young child? I'd suggest looking elsewhere... unless you want to try and enjoy what's left of the fabled, world-famous 'Surf City' lifestyle with a little one to care for I recommend other places where safety isn't third. A small town with big-city problems is twice as dangerous especially for kids as a big city with big problems... because the focus of precious resources for law enforcement, urban planning and management, etc. are all in their infancy while the big-city problems like gangs, drugs, random street violence and rampant homelessness grow faster than anyone is willing to acknowledge let alone do anything about either in tactics or strategy... there is no workable 'plan' for SC's *present*, let alone future. And that fact has NOT been lost at all on predators, criminals, weirdos and scammers from all over the world let alone the state of California.
We'd love to continue enjoying Big Basin State Park, Henry Cowell Redwoods, all the beaches, the downtown, Aptos, Capitola, the mountain towns, restaurants and bookstores... but the whole town is a 'food desert', with little cuisine that cannot be eaten by a skinny student with a hangover and a Mastercard... the downtown is a maze of sticky body fluids, needles, surly homeless vagrants, overpriced tourist/student swag and spaced-out white locals with bad tattoos, low-paying service jobs and no disposable income. If we're going to put up with big-city problems, we'd live in San Jose, SF, the East Bay or LA and have those cities' scale, diversity and depth as productive and enjoyable counterbalances... but we came back to the SC area with a young child for another type of experience, NOT the big-city (my wife and I spent many years in NYC) one... now we have to navigate, plan and behave as if SC IS a dangerous and expensive place, because it's become a traffic-clogged, scummy mid-sized CA coastal town with wishful thinking as its foolproof plan to solve all its problems going forward. SC has never been Mayberry, and we expected to be dealing with doses of all these issues as we would with almost any 50k+ population CA city... but the schizophrenic nature of SC now has worn us down... just when we begin to relax like we want to, some jarring reminder that we can't live like that around here shuffles around the corner and tries to defecate on our car in the driveway (true story). What good are 'city reflexes' when you are trying to relax with your young family in a town that won't let you put your 'city-guard' down at least a little? Hence our decision to move to the more low-key environs of the Five Cities/SLO area. We always lock our doors and stay alert everywhere but at least we won't have to wonder every morning when we wake up what fresh new piece of hell is going to jump off that day. At least in the city we'd be able to fall back on what great resources we know are there for the taking, day or night, rain or shine. Living in SC in a nice West Side neighborhood a half-mile from the beach and trying our best to enjoy all the local resources and activities isn't sufficient comfort to make up for dealing with all the SC bull every day.
I guess that's what happens when a town gets smug & complacent and then decides to go without 'adult supervision' for too long. More's the pity. Our small family is gone from here to the Five Cities/SLO area as soon as possible and we'll miss our little rituals... but we won't miss the lie that SC tries portray itself as to the world and tries to pawn off on its residents- young, old, rich, poor, educated, homeless, gang-affiliated, artists, surfers, fun-hogs or parents of children of all ages... 'we're a small town with small, simple problems! Ignore what you see, hear and read have fun!... we are Surf City and we are immune to reality!' Um, no. WanderingSunDevil, try SC at your own risk... but remember, its problems are larger than they appear in the mirror. 
See my posts from a related thread above… the average SC dweller’s 18:1 exposure to crime is precisely why SC’s MORE dangerous than most of Oakland, etc… it LOOKS just fine comparatively...Using Google Street View to show the reality of SC’s sketchy, cheesy downtown area is woefully inadequate… if someone theoretically mounted a set of webcams to see how things really go downtown every day and night, it would give the lie to Street View’s Google cam car.
“Santa Cruz has had a fairly high crime rate for some time--however as is often the case with crime stats you have to look at it in context. It's a medium sized town, not a city, so it's easy for per capita stats to be higher. As well, there is a lot of unincorporated areas around Santa Cruz like Live Oak or Soquel or Pleasure Point or Pasatiempo that have much lower crime rates and function as part of the greater Santa Cruz area but are just on the other side of the city limits. Living in these areas, you're basically living in Santa Cruz, just not officially. “
Can't have it both ways- either quote the stats and stick with them in both SC and Oakland, et al contexts or use
“The tourist trade drives up the crime rate as there's a lot of drunken incidents and bad behavior at times--and yes the transient population is responsible for a lot of the crime in Santa Cruz--many arrests are for theft or drug possession. But Santa Cruz is basically a big town but still pretty small--when I was a kid there were cops everywhere eager to arrest(or harrass) little troublemakers like us--and crimes get reported and followed up on unlike bigger cities. It's still news when someone gets murdered in Santa Cruz--if 5 people get murdered in a year, it's a big news story--and my mom starts getting scared and saying the town is going straight to hell--as she has for the last 30 years. Five people could get murdered in a week in larger more crime filled locations like Oakland or Stockton or Richmond and people wouldn't be all that surprised."
“I still have family in Santa Cruz who have lived there for over 35 years now--and the worst they've ever been a victim of in terms of crime is theft. Car break-ins are the worst that's happened to my folks in that whole time--and you have to watch for burglaries or that sort of thing in some areas. It's a little different than affluent yuppie-villes up in the hills above Silicon Valley or Monterey/Carmel--however someone coming from a bigger city or metro just needs to take the usual precautions for the most part. The people in Santa Cruz who've I've known who were victims of crime, were often people involved in shadier aspects of the town to begin with.
The longtime problem of all but open-market Westcliff drug dealing and drug use is routinely ignored by police... to quote one perplexed resident in a recent Town Council meeting: "everyone knows from all the needles discarded everywhere how many addicts are in town... so why are none of the people selling dope to all these guys in jail yet?" The Grant Park area is not what I'm talking about... nor Beach Flats etc... no place in and around SC is immune to random theft and violence... I grew up in a town that had similar violent crime and theft rates- New Haven, CT in the 1970s. What a bucket of blood that town was back then, still is for the most part... and SC's crime and drug rates are HIGHER now than New Haven's were back THEN. Family town, SC? Not really. Not for a long time.
Many 30-something men and women who were born here in SC who've inherited their family homes all over SC and the general area are working two jobs just to pay the TAXES on their family properties, homes that decades ago came out of mortgage payments... the scores of SC slumlord speculators who rent to 6-8 students to a single house using the students' parents credit ratings and money who jack up the rentals around SC so people making 60-70k a year are hard-pressed to rent in a safe SC area, which are getting kinda random nowadays... not to mention jamming the streets with 4-8 cars per home parked on the street where there are VERY few speed limit signs and ’Slow- Children’ signs BTW.
There's a joke amongst longtime SC locals that '... if your bike is stolen, don't worry- you'll see a troll riding it past you soon enough', last week I stopped by Redwood Pizza in Felton owned by my friend Evan... while I was waiting , a young lady in her 20s remarked that on her FIRST DAY in SC, re: Live Oak, one of the areas in greater SC to which you refer as 'lower in crime' saw a kid beaten to death in front of her... murders, assaults and property crimes like theft, vandalism are FREQUENTLY go unreported because of the high intimidation factor that uses SC’s ‘small-town’ population habits and rituals against itself by the many low-lifes and sketchy characters inhabiting almost very neighborhood in the SC area. Just ONE consequence of this ongoing situation are high auto and home insurance rates in the SC area.
The SC chapter of the Hells Angels (yes, along with Monterey and San Jose) have a saying they frequently emblazon on their helmets and motorcycles: ‘Don’t let your tongue get your teeth knocked out.”... it's a prevalent attitude/practice amongst more then the local MC gangs... the local ‘enforcer’ surf thugs who ‘protect’ Steamer Lane from ‘outsiders’, aka anyone not born here on a locally made surfboard to a SC surf family… the SC Assistant Police Chief, whom I pitched Police/Surfrider Foundation promotion I ran into one morning while getting a cup of coffee, told me to go ahead with it… my idea was to photograph a Patrolman standing before his SC Police cruiser with his surfboard strapped across the roof’s light bar, with the slogan: ’To Protect and Surf’ (credit to the Surfrider Foundation for that slogan BTW). I find myself with mixed feelings about submitting my work to the SCPD precisely because of the problems in SC… I’ll probably go ahead, and donate both my fee and any proceeds from the promotional campaign to the families of the two slain SC patrolman and patrolwoman murdered by that crazy person six months ago which resulted in a 20+ minute running gun battle in Soquel (another ‘lower crime’ area, eh?) during which the perpetrator was killed.
“The 'shadier aspects of the town are predictably coming for easier pickings than fellow thieves, gang members and assorted criminals... reminiscing about 'your' SC does the OP no favors... one can only hope he and his family aren't among SC crime victims whose only mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Dismissing the memories of all those crime victims of just this year puts your your erroneous reasoning’of ‘The people in Santa Cruz who've I've known who were victims of crime, were often people involved in shadier aspects of the town to begin with.' in a rather smug, cynical light. The usual SC local response.
A perfect example of the insular, cliquish ‘too-cool’ quality of far too many SC locals is the way the MAJORITY of dog-owning SC locals ignore the leash law and ignore the ‘clean up after your pooch’ ordinance make walking our LEASHED dog in most SC parks and trails almost impossible without running into problems with ‘aggro’ unleashed dogs starting up with our VERY well-socialized dog. We drive up to Bonny Doon, up in the hills 12 miles fro our front door to take long trail walks up there with the dog sometimes- it’s that bad. Politely asking a ‘free-range’ dog owning local to pop a leash on their dog on shared trails in SC usually results in a surly, profanity-laced response.
To the OP- good luck with your move- pay less in rent and have WAY more safety renting below Aptos, near Freedom for example… you won’t regret it. ‘^)
Last edited by threepounduniverse; 09-20-2013 at 01:11 PM..
Although I do believe homicide rates are the same or higher in those other towns.
A little, but Santa Cruz is ranked 9th statewide for violent crime, and 1st statewide for property crime.
It also spills over - my parents, my wife's parents, their neighbors, other family members - no violent crimes yet, but they've all been stolen from within the last few years... and most of them are in mid county.
Dismissing the memories of all those crime victims of just this year puts your your erroneous reasoning’of ‘The people in Santa Cruz who've I've known who were victims of crime, were often people involved in shadier aspects of the town to begin with.' in a rather smug, cynical light. The usual SC local response.
A perfect example of the insular, cliquish ‘too-cool’ quality of far too many SC locals is the way the MAJORITY of dog-owning SC locals ignore the leash law and ignore the ‘clean up after your pooch’ ordinance make walking our LEASHED dog in most SC parks and trails almost impossible without running into problems with ‘aggro’ unleashed dogs starting up with our VERY well-socialized dog. We drive up to Bonny Doon, up in the hills 12 miles fro our front door to take long trail walks up there with the dog sometimes- it’s that bad. Politely asking a ‘free-range’ dog owning local to pop a leash on their dog on shared trails in SC usually results in a surly, profanity-laced response.
First off, please figure out who you're quoting or writing yourself when you do long winded posts. I can't tell if you grew up in Santa Cruz in the 60s or if you're from New Haven, Connecticut or if you wrote both of those. Quotes, they're easy to use.
So sorry for sharing my personal experience with the place. At the same time there's no need for you to start trying to getting hysterical regarding personal attacks against me or accusing me of "Dismissing the memories of all those crime victims of just this year".
Quote:
while I was waiting , a young lady in her 20s remarked that on her FIRST DAY in SC, re: Live Oak, one of the areas in greater SC to which you refer as 'lower in crime' saw a kid beaten to death in front of her... murders, assaults and property crimes like theft, vandalism are FREQUENTLY go unreported because of the high intimidation factor that uses SC’s ‘small-town’ population habits and rituals against itself by the many low-lifes and sketchy characters inhabiting almost very neighborhood in the SC area
So the lady who witnessed the murder in Live Oak did not report it? You're making the claim that "murders" go unreported in Santa Cruz. That's a serious claim you should do something about. Never heard from anyone it was that bad...
You notice I never said Santa Cruz was ever some crime-free paradise, and nor would I recommend most people ever living there. It's very overpriced and I left years ago because it felt small and boring to me and I hated the insular nature of the people I grew up with who never left that town or the many preachy and angry transplants who moved to the place. It's always had a sketchier side since the 70s before I was born. I just stated that in general my family and friends who still lives there (and have lived there for over 35 years) have never been the victim of anything more than minor theft--and in general looks can be surprising because the areas that are worst in Santa Cruz aren't often that far from better neighborhoods. People who think it's as bad as Oakland are free to move to Oakland and compare the two--and while it really depends what neighborhood of Oakland you're living in--my brother lived on the edge of Rockridge and it was nice but burglaries or theft were basically a bi-weekly occurrence for his roommates. None the less I know people who live in Oakland and Santa Cruz and they share the occasional crime story, but they aren't living in fear for their lives nor are they in danger on a weekly basis...
So don't think you know a damn thing about how I feel about the place or call me the usual Santa Cruz local since I don't even live in the town anymore nor would I ever move back to that area. People expect Santa Cruz to be Los Gatos or Palo Alto with a beach and they're somehow surprised by the transients and local dirtbags that have been part of downtown and lower Ocean and Beach Flats and the Westside for years. It's actually way more gentrified and smug these days than when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, but it's always going to have this sketchier element, just as much as you gentrify San Francisco or Berkeley it's always going to be there(unless people really start cracking down on the network of the transient population that rolls in from somewhere else and remove the political power of UCSC students). If it's truly gotten more violent in the last year and not just hype(as I've heard it's gotten more violent every year since I was born)--then just politely say that to make your case.
In short thank you for reminding me why I'm glad that I don't live there... Why don't you just sell your house(the market is hot right now) and move somewhere else better if Santa Cruz is such hell on Earth?
two slain SC patrolman and patrolwoman murdered by that crazy person six months ago which resulted in a 20+ minute running gun battle in Soquel (another ‘lower crime’ area, eh?) during which the perpetrator was killed.
That was a terrible tragedy that had national coverage. It didn't take place in Soquel however. It took place just off Branciforte Ave. a block away from where one of my best friend's family lived. I'd think you would know that considering you're such a crime expert on Santa Cruz.
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