On a Tuesday afternoon in late November, a three-piece string band played on the sidewalk in front of the O’Neill’s store downtown. With three members and two open guitar cases on the ground, the band was breaking the law.
In October, the Santa Cruz City Council hastily passed extreme restrictions on the ways in which street performers, artists and political demonstrators may express themselves: They must be 14 feet from a handful of downtown features such as sidewalks and lamp posts, and they must keep themselves contained within a 12-square-foot area. For reference, 12 square feet is about the size of a card table, plus a couple of inches.
Larger musical acts are now required by the city to file for permits from the Department of Parks and Recreation; they are free and must be obtained 36 hours before the desired performance date. However, since the ordinance took effect on Oct. 24, only four permits have been filed, according to the Parks and Recreation Department’s files. This means that the vast majority of larger acts aren’t following the directive laid out by the new law, they’re just playing downtown like they always have.
While street musicians and supporters of local culture consider this a good thing, it raises the question of why councilmembers created a law they had no intention of seeing enforced in the first place. The police department has to date issued zero citations for violations of the ordinance, and SCPD officers have clearly been put in an awkward position trying to balance Pacific Avenue’s performance-friendly tradition with the seemingly arbitrary new rules.
Across the street from the string band, SCPD officer David Albert looked on. When asked if he was going to tell the group they were breaking the law, he said no, adding that he uses his own judgment and only asks such groups to move if they have “a whole bunch of stuff lying around.
“That’s not something we’re going to enforce,” he said, “unless we get a complaint. Then we kind of have to play by the rules.”
A homeless street artist selling her scarves around the corner from the string band, Kate Wenzell, said she was “probably breaking” the 12-square-foot law, but hadn’t heard anything about it from law enforcement or downtown hosts. However, she had been told a few times that she needed to move to be 14 feet from certain features downtown. “They use their discretion,” Wenzell said. “They decide what laws are a little over the top.”
Santa Cruz criminal defense attorney Jonathan Gettleman has spent several years battling what he calls “anti-vagrancy type ordinances targeted to keep homeless people from the downtown area,” and he considers the new ordinance to be just one more attempt.
“If you look at the ordinances that have passed in the last four to five years, they’re all related to the same thing: the fact that there are certain elements of people that usually are associated with homelessness that are not aesthetically pleasing, and the desire is for them to not be able to linger in any one place in a manner that’s not desirable to the Downtown Business Association. If you look closely at these ordinances you’ll see that’s who’s behind them,” he says.
The downtown hosts, who as a practice do not make comments to the press, are employed by the Downtown Management Corporation, a collection of business owners who collectively pay $150,000 in fees to fund the host program. When a musical act is too loud, taking up too much space or is otherwise undesirable, business owners call the downtown hosts, and the hosts, who don’t have the power to write tickets, either tell performers to move along or get police officers to do so.
“If everything has to be completely planned out to the square foot and exact decibel level and you can’t be 14 feet from an ATM, it becomes this matrix of laws that you just can never be in compliance with,” says Gettleman. “So then what happens is you’re always out of compliance with some law. It’s impossible to comply. What happens—and this is the real danger in all of this—is that artists will just stop showing up.”
