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Turning Santa Cruz Into a Haven For Hackers, Makers & Startups
waderoush writes "While Santa Cruz, CA, may be most famous for its surfing, its boardwalk, and its lax marijuana laws, it was also the birthplace of big tech companies like Plantronics, Borland Software, SCO, Seagate Technologies, and Netflix. But that was all a long time ago. As entrepreneurs and city leaders in Santa Cruz work to revive the city's technology scene today, they're starting largely from scratch. In a three-part series this week, Xconomy looks at efforts in this sunny beachside town to build a thriving high-tech ecosystem with a unique identity, separate from that of nearby Silicon Valley. Part 1 surveys the products and industries that make up the Santa Cruz brand, from sports and recreation to organic food. Part 2 looks at the city's past technology successes and its crop of emerging startups, and efforts to build a strong local network of startup mentors, advisors, and investors. Part 3 details efforts to increase the local talent supply, in part by encouraging more students from UC Santa Cruz to live and work in the city after they graduate; it also looks at the city's campaign to reverse perceptions that it's an anti-business haven for beach bums and pot smokers."
Problem with SC is the exact thing that is happening in Austin:
1: Students move in and get residency rights.
2: Said students vote themselves lots of amenities (bike paths), and against anything that isn't "cool" (such as new police substations, water treatment plants, roads, etc.)
3: Said people graduate and move back home.
4: Taxes go up in the city, and the consequences of the decisions (higher crime) that these people make isn't felt by these transient voters, but by everyone else living in the area.
5: New students wonder where the cool hangouts went. Answer: They were taxed out of the city. Instead, the only places that can pay the large bills are places that cater only to the spray tan and duck lip crowd.
If you are a college student, SC is a great town. If you actually have to shoulder a tax burden for people who voted for things and are long gone, there are better places.
A lot of developers I know are pot smokers, so it's not that they're necessarily mutually exclusive.
This whole thing sounds like reading the local chamber of commerce brochure.
>> students from UC Santa Cruz to live and work in the city after they graduate
Look, I went to four different colleges between undergrad and grad school. Besides the degree, the whole point of college is to get out, see new things, and make your sophomoric mistakes (get it?) in some other town where no one will remember you ten years from now. Wherever you go to school...please, please don't just settle down there. You'll thank me later.
Santa Cruz is a nice place to spend a weekend but it's completely and utterly ISOLATED. It's a 45 minute drive from San Jose by way of the SR-17, which is a rally course set in a ravine. Every time I go through there, it's a stressful ride with a rock wall on one side, a concrete divider on the other and everyone wants to go 80 despite the 50mph limit. I'd probably enjoy the drive more if I had a Porsche or other low slung sports car, but not in my top heavy SUV careening through a narrow, curvy highway.
And that's the ONLY way to get there. There is no MassTransit Solution aside from possibly a bus.
Being that the tech community is about CONNECTIVITY, Santa Cruz has no place in that culture because it is physically so unconnected.
And don't lecture me about Skype and email etc -- we all know that's bullshit and for any real business to happen people will have to commute 45 minutes to an hour from SJ or 2 hours from SF to get there. And those without cars -- well, might as well leave the day before and get a hotel room because CalTrain + Bus will likely add up to 4 hours each way.
...isn't a lack of talent, or retaining students, or anything else related to business - it's crime. The once-quaint "beach bums" are actually violent street kids and mentally ill homeless people, and unless you're on campus and removed from the city itself, you can't help but to experience this everywhere you go.
I lived there for four years while at UC Santa Cruz, and while there was a street kid problem then (15 years ago), it's much worse now, crime rates are up, and I don't feel safe there at all, just walking down the street. I've lived in various low-income communities, and for the most part they're "just" poor - there's crime, of course, but you can walk down the street safely. Santa Cruz is absurdly rich for some people, destitute for others, and it attracts a homeless/street population that make it no longer worth visiting. It's sad but true.
" Plantronics, Borland Software, SCO, Seagate Technologies, and Netflix"
Of these - Borland & Seagate were both located in Scotts Valley NOT Santa Cruz (the city). Scotts Valley is in Santa Cruz County but those are two entirely different entities/locations. Looking at the Netflix website - their Corp HQ is now in Los Gatos on the right side of the Hwy 17 hump!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Great place to live if you like to surf. I have a surfer friend there. She lives three blocks from the beach. But it's not a high-tech place.
Highway 17, which connects San Jose to Santa Cruz, isn't a freeway. There are non-interchange intersections all along its length. This is because of opposition at the Santa Cruz end. Caltrans would like to make it a freeway, and put in a center barrier to reduce collisions. Even that was opposed. "The barrier makes residents and his business feel isolated", whined the owner of a motel. (Cars can no longer make left turns across traffic to get to his motel.)
According to the article, the biggest private employer in Santa Cruz is Plantronics, which makes headsets. 500 employees. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is an amusement park, has about 600, but it's seasonal. Santa Cruz is a seaside resort town. There's just not much industry there.
Then there's the mind-set, which is way too laid back to get much done. It's also very retro. There are towns near Santa Cruz which are still stuck in the hippie '60s, flower-print granny dresses and all.
The big industrial growth area near Silicon Valley is Fremont. It's hot and boring, but Tesla is there. So is Gillig, the bus maker. There's serious manufacturing in Fremont. There are jobs available now in Fremont for CNC machine operators, robot assemblers, automatic screw machine maintainers, master mechanics, and vacuum manufacturing technicians. Current Santa Cruz job openings: school crossing guard, dental receptionist, social worker, pool attendant, dog companion.
As a Santa Cruz resident I'm sick of people living outside SC making a big fuss about how marijuana is handled here.
We have incredible problems with drug related crime, for cocaine, meth, AND marijuana.
I loved living here before drugs ruined this place and turned it into a crime ridden shithole. It will always be my home, but the drug-slinging gang members AS WELL AS the pothead students with their never ending thirst for drugs ruined things.
So fuck the submitter for making a big deal about weed, because weed is what's killing my home.