Cayucos is becoming a lonely, empty place

September 8, 2024

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” is currently on Amazon.

Cayucos, once a vibrant conglomeration of middle-class neighborhoods, has become a lonely, empty place, a preying ground for our wealthiest investors with so much extra money they zero in on places like Cayucos and buy up land or houses and build behemoths that sit empty and turn almost every street in Cayucos into a ghost street.

This is not about the good old hard-working venture of the American Dream, but of inexhaustible greed, the decimation of a small town’s tax base, the scattering of long-time renters who are literally priced out of town, and making it impossible for even relatively affluent young families to buy homes.

Not to mention the siphoning off of most of the character and characters who once lent this town so much of its personality and color.

Because of this, I feel a demoralizing sense of loss as well as a loneliness and emptiness. Because half the streets in town have been reduced to a handful of full-time residents. Because surrounding and towering over what remains are similarly constructed behemoths with no lawns, and which sit empty for not only months but years, until somebody with even more money buys them for still another investment so that only the very wealthiest people can afford to live in this last outpost of a beach haven.

Oh, and I can hear it now: “This is America, and the hard-working Americans who make their money are free to invest it any way they want and buy as many homes as they want and cock up your town, and if you don’t like it go to a Communist country.”

Work hard, my ass! It’s a money game that contributes nothing to the community and has shredded the middle class for decades, and it’s getting worse.

On all sides of me are these new continually empty behemoths (no longer vacation homes or rentals), and it’s almost as if I have no neighbors. Nobody to go to when 30 years ago I was bent over in agony with kidney stones and the man across the street on 14th rushed me to the emergency room and hung out for five hours while I passed them.

Or over 10 years ago when a neighbor rushed me to the ER for emergency eye surgery on a detached retina that threatened the loss of my eye.

Small towns are notorious for community togetherness, for looking out and after one another, for running into each other and visiting, catching up, of knowing there is support.

Empty houses do not do this. They sit idle, appearing so innocent and majestic, but they are squeezing every beach town in the state and possibly in the country into entities devoid of life, stunned into inertia.

Deadsville.

Hours go by and there is no sign of activity on my street, or the street below. Every once in a while, somebody will walk a dog but usually they’re holding onto a leash with one hand and studying a phone in the other. When somebody does pass and we manage a conversation, it feels like I am driven to extend the talk, like a person marooned on some faraway island.

On a walk downtown, only a few old neighbors remain. Strangers pass by, almost always lost with their  headphones or studying their own phones.

Never one to begrudge friends of mine in town who build these behemoths, or work on them, I always wait hopefully for somebody to move into them after they are finished. But that is a rare occasion, and usually the new neighbors are largely invisible and protective of not only what they own, but themselves, as they have nothing in common with the scattering of longtime locals still hanging on.

Hanging on to what?

Cayucos is one of the most beautiful places on earth. There is a quality of light and a drowsy languor that is almost tranquilizing, especially in the winter. It is home to perhaps the greatest dog beach and happiest dogs anywhere; and it makes you feel fortunate to be here, to live here, even as time passes and you wonder what it will be like 10, 20, 30 years from now, when the unquenchable grab-bag for property completely takes over and sends the rest of the middle class to America’s no-man’s-land.

Make no mistake, the people who buy or build these homes care not a lick about this town or its people—Cayucos is becoming an investment for ruthless money grubbers who never have enough.