THE FOLLOWING FLYER WAS DISTRIBUTED AT CITY COUNCIL THURSDAY AFTERNOON.



Support Real Rent Control Not Sell-Out Leases at Clear View Court !

Last September Santa Cruz City Council betrayed the seniors at De Anza Mobile Home Park. Council, under the guidance of City Attorney John Barisone and CityManager Dick Wilson, simply dropped their “irrevocable� commitment to rent control “in perpetuity�. The Council passed its shabby sell-out after months of shadowy negotiations with the predatory MHC corporation to avoid further lawsuit involvement.

De Anza residents and the broader community responded bravely with 8500 signatures to put the matter to a public vote. The De Anza Board of Directors let itself be intimidated and in turn intimidated its residents into accepting this destruction of affordable housing, betrayal of seniors, and harbinger of further betrayals.

Clear View Court was next. They bought some time with threats of a lawsuit and negotiations with the City Council frontmen for Barisone and Wilson. The political cost of
Council’s turning out poor Hispanic women and children out on the street in a second surrender
of affordable housing to predatory speculators was a little too much for Council to swallow
several months ago.

Now they’re back with more “emergency legislation� that guts rent control and offers instead a lease that destroys the equity in people’s homes. In addition tenants face the prospect of the Council’s authorizing expanded hotel development across the street from Clear View into which its dumping tens of millions of dollars of public money. A four-story parking garage, after all, is more profitable than low-income struggling residents of a trailer park, right?

Council is consciously ignoring real alternatives: Capitola has rent-control for its many trailer parks. Why isn’t City Council simply rewriting the shoddy ordinance that Kennedy and Barisone cooked up in the 90’s? Why not do it right this time? It can be done. It may need to be defended in court. That was the promise made to Clear View tenants a decade ago. All the tenants can be included this time--including those that former owner Al Vierra misled, or that the City charged with overseeing the arrangement, did not assist.

No doubt, we’ll hear more about the budget crisis, about threats of closing Louden Nelson Center--even as Council throws its money at developers. And the Kennedy-Rotkin Council, with its developer majority intact, will no doubt take its own way.

But the Community has a real choice here--whether to support the last rent-controlled
mobile home park in Santa Cruz, or let it be sacrificed to the Barisone-Wilson financial agenda.

It takes thousands of registered City votes to turn back another bad decision by this City Council. But De Anza tenants did it last fall. And with the community’s help, Clear View residents can do it again.

If we do not stand together when the poorest are threatened, they will slice us off one by one.


Tune in Sunday morning 9:30 AM to 1 PM for more discussion of this issue on
Bathrobespierre’s Broadsides on Free Radio Santa Cruz at 96.3 FM, 101.1 FM, and www.freakradio.org.

Email City Council at: citycouncil (at) ci.santa-cruz.ca.us