Tuesday has come and gone but the results aren't in. There could be as many as 60,000-90,000 ballots left to process. What does that mean for local races?

Elections can be opaque and our intent with this voter guide is to hopefully cut through some of the fog and provide some rationale for how a socialist should approach the general election.

Unlike the California Association of Realtors and Santa Cruz Together, we don’t want Santa Cruz to be the second-most-expensive rental market in the country.

Santa Cruz city voters who care about fairness and equity should vote “No!” on Measure E.

Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, Santa Cruz County supervisor hopeful and current city council member, is smart, well spoken, and politically savvy—to a fault, given her record. With her expertise in political doublespeak and garnering campaign funding from real estate money, she has led the charge of the city’s anti-homeless crusade, expertly couching criminalizing and pro-policing policy in a veneer of compassionate language. For these reasons and more, including her Santa Cruz city council voting record, we are opposed to Kalantari-Johnson's candidacy for county supervisor.

As argued in Astra Taylor’s and Molly Crabapple's recent video, "Your Debt is Someone Else’s Asset," granting relief to the average U.S. citizen suffering debt burden is revealed as not only achievable, but the best path to economic stability, racial justice, and a fairer world for all.

La agricultura de California depende de los pesticidas químicos, muchos de los cuales afectan negativamente a los que tienen contacto con ellos. En el frente están los trabajadores agrícolas y sus familias, que viven y van a la escuela cerca. A estos trabajadores, que son en su inmensa mayoría inmigrantes y personas de color, se les niega el acceso a la información sobre cuándo y qué se está fumigando.

Revisiting the prescient sci-fi horror film Ex Machina offers important lessons about current political imperatives, calling on us both to critically recognize and resolutely refuse the false solutions and dystopian “future” on offer by our tech bro overlords.

In August, 2021 the median price for a single family home in Santa Cruz was $1.25 million, the average rent for a one bedroom apartment about $2500. The end of the eviction moratorium last September is estimated to put at least 5,000 residents at risk of eviction. Around 300 of our neighbors are living in their vehicles, and hundreds more are camped out in a flood zone by the San Lorenzo River, soon to be swept by the city with no sufficient alternative. It is in this context that Santa Cruz City Council Members Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, Sonja Brunner, and Renee Golder have decided to put their energy into creating an Oversized Vehicle Ordinance (OVO)—currently under consideration by the City Council—that will fine, ticket, and tow away the vehicles of people who cannot afford more conventional housing. But, as we show, and drawing on copious research, this is nothing less than a disastrous idea.

As one of the most expensive cities in the US in which to live, Santa Cruz suffers from a massive housing affordability crisis that prices out many of its residents. We can’t afford to leave homes sitting empty. As the wealthy maintain second homes that remain unoccupied for much of the year, the people who want to live and work in Santa Cruz—those who contribute most to the city’s diversity and its vibrant communities—cannot find affordable housing.

Vote No on the recall. We oppose this recall not because Gavin Newsom is the lesser of two evils, but because we recognize that a successful recall will be a material setback and will strengthen right-wing and far right-wing organizing in California.

The struggle against Line 3 invites us to imagine a different future where Indigenous people are not dominated and cast aside by a colonial system, but rather exercise self-determination; a future where struggles by the people win out against the forces of capital and the state. Will Parrish – a Santa Cruz resident, organizer, PhD student, and investigative journalist – reports from a Line 3 water protector camp in Minnesota, where he is engaged with the Indigenous-led struggle against the Canadian multinational Enbridge’s laying a new pipeline that would bring Canadian tar sands oil into the U.S., crossing Anishinaabe land and the Mississippi River headwaters.

California agriculture relies on chemical pesticides, many with known harmful effects on those who come in contact with them. On the front lines are the farmworkers and their families, who live and go to school nearby. Overwhelmingly immigrants and people of color, they are denied access to information about when and what is being sprayed.

If we are going to push Santa Cruz to build truly affordable housing, then we first need to understand what affordability is and what it is not.

The city of Santa Cruz acquired the Marsh in 1991 as a required mitigation for expanding the wastewater treatment plant at Neary Lagoon. However, rather than restoring the Marsh and building amenities for the public such as paths, interpretive panels, scenic overlooks, and benches, the Parks and Recreation Department’s management of the marsh has concentrated on wholesale vegetation removal and policing. This is consistent with the pattern noted by police abolitionists such as Ruth Wilson Gilmour, in which whiter, higher-income areas receive resources whereas lower-income, non-white neighborhoods are marked out for neglect or “organized abandonment”, coupled with higher rates of policing and incarceration.