For most soon-to-be college graduates, studying for finals, packing up moving boxes and searching for future jobs are the main things on their mind before finally walking across the stage.
Instead, Gabriella Noack, a 24-year-old fourth-year majoring in sociology with a concentration in digital justice studies at UC Santa Cruz, is working on her Santa Cruz City Council campaign for District 6 representative. She has knocked on doors, given speeches and shaken countless hands to garner support for the Santa Cruz County primary election on June 2.
District 6 includes western parts of the UCSC campus, as well as the Westside and Natural Bridges areas. While Noack is well aware District 6 constituents may have doubts, she feels confident in her ability to be the voice of her prospective district.
“I’m a student and I’m running for city council,” she said. “The two things seem to contradict historically, yet I’m not the only young person running right now. I’m part of a movement, and that’s not random. We’re equipped with the lived experience to tackle the world’s issues that we’re seeing today.”
Noack’s main issues with the city of Santa Cruz lie in affordable housing, worker’s rights and engaging disenfranchised voters, according to her website.
She is running against incumbent Renée Golder, who has served on Santa Cruz City Council since 2020. Despite having similar approaches to district-wide issues, including a focus on environmental legislation to protect the city’s beaches and the city’s unhoused communities, Noack emphasized a determination to accurately represent constituents of District 6.
“I have seen [city] meetings where the constituents would express an opinion in unison in one way, and then I’d watch the City Council, in unison, vote the opposite way,” she said.
Noack intends to mitigate this by actively listening to and uplifting underrepresented community voices.
“Somebody who’s lived as housing-insecure for 10 years is an expert on what that experience is like. I think that those are the voices who should lead those solutions,” she said. “Voices that deserve not only to be heard, but actually listened to.”
Noack, Student Voices and UCSC
As a transfer from Cabrillo College, Noack observed the relationship between UCSC and Santa Cruz for over two years by combing through council meeting transcripts. A relationship, she noted, that is characterized by conflict and division.
“I think that the city and the university, rather than being at odds with each other all the time, could work with each other a lot more. If we spoke and we reached our hands out to each other, we’d realize that we’re all facing the housing crisis,” she said. “It’s not students that are causing that.”
Noack believes that the rift between students and administration could be solved by “stepping up to provide housing” for the roughly 9 percent of unhoused students.
She mentioned that this disconnect is highly evident through the experiences of those who live in Family Student Housing (FSH). As UCSC continues construction for the new FSH complex, tenants face a 30 percent rent increase. Noack says this increase conflicts with whether “people continue to live dignifiedly and have the means to do so.”
“The students are asking a lot [from] the school, and they’re not being listened to,” Noack said. “[For example,] they pleaded for divestment. They didn’t get it.”
That being said, she doesn’t see this as an unfixable discrepancy, but an opportunity for the university administration to listen to student voices.
Past, Present and Future
In her first year, Noack plans to hit the ground running starting with a tiered property tax for homeowners, essentially demanding more from people with higher-value homes. This would create a pool of wealth the City Council could then use to support other housing initiatives.
Noack would use this pool “to address one hundred percent affordable housing projects,” she said. “I would also like to use it to decrease the property tax for single homeowners, so they can continue to live in the town that they have called their home for generations.”
Endorsed by labor unions such as the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council, Noack intends to marry the issues of civic engagement with worker’s rights in order to give the Santa Cruz working class a voice in their local government.
“Fifty-seven percent of Santa Cruz’s workforce is in the lowest tier of wage earners,” she stated, “so our average worker in Santa Cruz has to have [around] two jobs.” Noack continued, “That means that they cannot come to city council. Point blank period.” She added that the average city council meeting is midday on a weekday, making it impossible for most of the city to attend and comment.
Huge motivators driving Noack’s decision to enter Santa Cruz politics are the communities she grew up with and is currently part of. As a child, she would beg every weekend to go to Santa Cruz from her hometown of Sacramento. As she got older, she hitched rides with friends or family members just to spend a day by the water.
“I owe Santa Cruz everything,” she said. “It was like I was in this magical place and everyone in the street was so kind. I could be kind of weird, and everyone really liked me because of it.”
While Noack’s age continues to be called upon as a symbol of naivety or inexperience, she emphasized the increased stakes she has in the district she would serve.
“I’m not willing to give it my all just because I want to be on city council, or I want my name to be out there,” she said. “It’s because this is my future, and it feels like if we don’t all give it our all right now, that there’s gonna be no future to speak of.”
