On my twentieth birthday, I arrived in Jerusalem to begin a six-week independent study. It was my first trip out of the country, and I was excited to be flying solo.

I did come with some baggage, a cousin’s wedding to attend and a promise to chaperone her brother. He was a few months younger than me and prone to trouble. Babysitting him was part of the deal that paid for my ticket.

Done with high school, working at a gas station, martial arts, Marlboros, living at home — you get the picture. He wanted to see the Old City, so I took him. We’d been warned to be cautious but I’d already spent time there and wasn’t worried.

As the winter sun faded, we were approached by some guy wanting to sell us hashish; a common occurrence, a set-up to sidestep. I knew that much at least, and brushed past him, only to discover a few seconds later that my cousin had stopped to chat. He hadn’t warned me that he was there on a mission to impress his friends by bringing home a finger or two of hash. My cousin lived to impress his friends. I couldn’t dissuade him, but it was growing dark and I couldn’t leave him there alone either. So we both got to spend 48 hours in jail before his mother — a hardnose at the best of times — showed up.

My cousin’s macho demeanor fled the scene when he and I were arrested, and it was left to me to keep us both safe until, finally, a guard announced I had a visitor and, no, she didn’t want to see her son. As I was escorted from the cell, my cousin let me know what was most desperately on his mind. “Tell my mom she should still let me buy a motorcycle!” he hollered at my receding footsteps. That’s when I understood that I should have left him with Joe the Russian on the Via Dolorosa to fend for himself.

Our country is flirting with death now. Perhaps it’s premature to say that; let’s just call it chaos. Here in Santa Cruz there are people on our streets who are sleeping on our streets, and they are our people, whether we choose to admit it or not. Their numbers will only increase. Yet we remain focused on that motorcycle, that indulgence and privilege of insisting that we can make Santa Cruz quaint again. I don’t exempt myself from the general delusion. Like many of you, I’ve still got mine. But our inability to distinguish right from privilege is coming back to bite us now. Again, there is nothing quaint about the disparities within our community — housed and unhoused, young and old, currently stable and deeply precarious. We’ve never been quaint, but we have been far more just, certainly more tolerant and definitely more generous than we are today.

The biggest threat to the stability of our community is not simply a shortage of housing, but the dearth of new models of housing that can support not a squandered, consumptive past but a sustaining future. Not more geriatric suburban sprawl, gizmo-ed and gated exclusivity or the vulnerability and inaccessibility of fire-prone forest commutes, but compact, cosmopolitan, walkable, democratic communities. This may be our best and final moment to measure our resources, acknowledge our failures and examine and reform our expectations.

I don’t think my cousin ever wanted to change, to move past his self-absorbed, adolescent desperation for heroics and validation. And we in Santa Cruz could go on arguing about who profits or loses from housing today, who is deserving and who should be shunned and, most importantly, who actually pays for it. But tomorrow is already vastly different than yesterday, and so is Santa Cruz. When I see buildings sprouting up downtown, I know they’re not being built for me. I’m not the future. We’ve had an extended adolescence here, with more than our share of cliques and classes. We’re about to grow up whether we want to or not.

Mark Primack would like to hear from you at mark@markprimack.com. His manuscript, Divisible Cities, can be read at academia.edu/16811303/Divisible_Cities_Acting_Local_in_a_Transient_World.