Columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote recently on the failure of West Coast cities. It wasn’t a forecast; more a post mortem. If you’re reading this now and you’re not nodding your head in affirmation then, like me, you’re probably older and you own your home. Which is to say we’re more the cause than the effect of that failure. I’m not trying to provoke shame or remorse. No matter how left-leaning, libertarian or communitarian, free-thinking, anarchic or counter-cultural we choose to see or project ourselves, all homeowners are walking the same well-trod road. And if we see our homes — whether built with sweat equity or refinanced to the hilt – as bastions of financial security, then we’re standing firmly on the problem and not the solution side of the current failure of West Coast cities.

Simply put, if you’ve owned a house for any length of time, you’re rich and privileged in a way that others cannot begin to grasp. I rented in Santa Cruz for 17 years before building my home 30 years ago, and I was shocked then by the advantages ownership had suddenly afforded me. But that’s nothing compared to the current gulf between real estate haves and have nots.

Frantz Fanon wrote, when I was still in elementary school, “If you’re white, you’re rich. If you’re rich, you’re white.” In Santa Cruz today, to own property is to be white in a world fast-approaching economic apartheid, where the divides of race and orientation and even morality are but straw dogs and smokescreens, distractions from the real question of who owns what.

Kristof thinks East Coast cities are in much better shape than ours – lower crime, far less homelessness and income disparity — and he has a theory as to why. We here don’t have two active political parties negotiating balanced and pragmatic solutions to actual problems. We have the luxury of erring on the side of optics. But I grew up in New England, and have my own take on why we’ve failed, and why we refuse to admit that failure. It’s in the very title of a book I wrote once but never tried to publish. “Divisible Cities. Acting Local in a Transient World.”

There was a period once in Santa Cruz politics when anyone who stood to speak at a public hearing felt obliged to declare how long they’d resided here. I heard 50 years, five years; I even heard someone claim five months of residency as their bona fides for speaking out. In my hometown of Providence, anything less than five generations was considered fresh off the boat; people patiently waited their turn to speak. From that perspective, Santa Cruz looked and felt to me like a colonial settlement, a plantation built not on resource extraction like the days of ’49, but from the outside in, on the importation/exploitation of high tech and highly educated workers. People came here to be exploited. And what they got in return was real estate.

So our failure, our West Coast curse, grew from the self-conscious hubris of we newcomers who hid our ignorance of the time and rhythm of this specific place behind mountains of free-floating idealism meant only to camouflage our privileged self-interest. Just tune in to the Clock Tower controversy, the pitting of those needing a place to live in Santa Cruz against those who’ve got theirs and can’t bear to look upon anything new or different.

The sooner we aging newcomers cop to our failures, the sooner we can stop trying to control what we’ve already messed up. We can begin by drawing a reasonable line in the sand, an East/West average. If you own your house but haven’t lived here for three generations, admit you’re a fortunate newcomer and abstain from the debate. If change makes you uncomfortable, try keeping it to yourself. Traffic, aesthetics and massing aren’t going to kill you. Besides, it’s really not your business anymore. The next generation will live with and in the next Santa Cruz. Let’s hope they’re smarter than us. They’ll have to be.

Mark Primack is an architect and former City Councilmember. His manuscript, Divisible Cities, can be read at https://www.academia.edu/16811303/Divisible_Cities_Acting_Local_in_a_Transient_World.