SANTA CRUZ COUNTY >> The county’s nearly status-quo 2024 homeless population count, gathered during an annual single-day roundup held each January, conceals more complicated currents beneath the surface.

The city of Santa Cruz, the county seat that provides numerous social services and hosts the Main Jail, has long been a concentration point for those in need, according to similar censuses over the years. This year, however, Santa Cruz continued trending downward for a second year with its homeless population, opening up space for the city of Watsonville to surge to the forefront.

Watsonville’s estimated homeless population this year exploded by 60% — an all-time high of 673 individuals counted in one of the point-in-time censuses. Hints of the uptick were first heralded a year earlier, when the city saw a 15% increase. After the 2024 count, there were 1,850 homeless individuals countywide, a nearly 3% single-year increase. The next homeless count will be conducted Jan. 30.

In response to the city’s dramatic homeless spike, Watsonville elected officials set in motion plans to pen its first Homelessness Action Plan, and began holding public workshops on the issues for the Watsonville City Council earlier this year. To bolster the effort and gain community buy-in, the city formed the Task Force on Homelessness and recently closed a public application process for members to be sorted into working groups focused on topics of housing, prevention, policy, enforcement and resources. Also already in motion — and under public appeal — is a Monterey County-led partnership with Santa Cruz County and Watsonville to build Recurso de Fuerza, a 34-unit micro-home navigation center village funded by a state grant for the parking lot of the Westview Presbyterian Church in Watsonville.

During a November City Council meeting, police Chief Jorge Zamora said when dealing with a social issue with such widespread impacts as homelessness, “everybody kind of owns a bit of the problem.”

Further north, Santa Cruz’s homeless population count decreased by nearly 36% in 2024, ratcheting down from 1,028 people counted last year to 659 this year. Showing a parallel improvement, the estimated number of people who died on the streets of Santa Cruz County in the past year dropped nearly 40%, slipping from an all-time high of 121 deaths to 74 this year, according to tabulations from the county’s Homeless Persons’ Health Project.

This year, the city of Santa Cruz, in addition to continuing to secure local and state funding to maintain several city homeless shelter and parking operations, passed a somewhat symbolic ordinance barring employees of outside jurisdictions from “dumping” their homeless citizens in the city without some pre-organized agreement.

Serving as a backdrop for Santa Cruz County’s teeter-tottering homeless counts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June in the case of the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. The ruling stated that municipal outdoor sleeping bans do not violate the Eighth Amendment, meaning that moving someone sleeping on public streets and sidewalks with no alternative shelter options is not considered cruel and unusual punishment. The decision overturned a lower 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, Martin v. City of Boise, that had held since 2018 that rousting sleeping individuals from public places with no alternative sleeping sites was unconstitutional. Local authorities said the ruling would not change how they conducted their homelessness-related efforts.