A while ago, and it wasn’t yesterday, a baker outlined for me a sea change disrupting her business in ways she couldn’t yet fully grasp.

She had built her business from scratch, had a good location and loyal customers. And then suddenly, almost, the bottom fell out of her employee pool. That pool consisted mostly of recent UCSC grads, young people who had grown to love Santa Cruz, weren’t sure where or if they wanted to attend grad school, but knew they didn’t want to boomerang back to living at home, and so hung out here long enough to enjoy their friends and make up their minds.

But Santa Cruz had ceased to be a safe haven for them. They couldn’t hide from rising rents, so they left as soon as the folding chairs had been stacked and their bookshop tab settled. And the baker was left to herd cats; high school students who were at least living rent-free.

What was most interesting to me about this story was that the baker herself had come here for the university, had stayed and prospered and had contributed greatly to the culture of this community. At the time we spoke, she was in fact serving as mayor. And I found myself adding up the collective impact of the many people that I knew personally or by name who had come here for an education and then stayed put. Entrepreneurs, politicians, yes, but also musicians, artists, poets, teachers, builders, craftspeople, farmers and volunteers to myriad good causes. And I wondered, almost 25 years ago now, what Santa Cruz would be like if that river of freshening waters dried up and then stayed dry.

We waste a lot of time these days bellyaching about the design of buildings, as if esthetics ever had an actual impact on the character and nature of a community. I’ve studied the subject to death and I can assure you that it does not. It’s people that make a community, or rather the generosity and tolerance and commitment of residents that determines the live-ability of places of settlement. And it’s our lack of tolerance and generosity that has made Santa Cruz off-limits to the very people with the energy, capacity and the will to sustain community — the young.

Not that long ago, someone wanted to hire me to draw up house plans for a lot along the Westside rail trail. He showed me the floorplan he’d sketched out. A narrow house with living/dining/kitchen in front and six bedrooms along a double loaded corridor stretching to the rear yard setback. An off-campus, unsupervised dorm in a residential neighborhood, with a parking lot for five cars, it conformed to all zoning regulations. He’d worked out the design and the cash flow; he just needed someone to make it pretty. I told him I wasn’t interested. But that approach has proven itself inevitable, given our attitude and the roadblocks we’ve thrown up against change. The dissolution of stable community has proven itself the path of least resistance.

I am still interested, however, in how we ourselves might transform our neighborhoods into real communities that welcome old and young, rich or not. We have the tools to do it. We just lack the political will, the administrative know-how, and the commitment.

That same Westside lot could now, under current state law, accommodate two young families, four local workers and two retirees and, in the process, offer the security of ownership to four separate parties. So why have we turned our backs on that demographic in favor of second-home-buyers, investors and the otherwise entitled? And to be clear, and to paraphrase Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, obsessing on “inclusionary” affordability within expensive new housing construction is a fool’s errand, a specious and self-serving diversion from broad and broad-minded solutions to our housing crisis.

Midrise housing will support neighborhood businesses — like bakeries — along corridors and arts and culture downtown. But welcoming young families, our local workforce, retirees and our own children back into our neighborhoods will make us whole again.

Mark Primack would like to hear from you at mark@markprimack.com.