For three days last January,
the county tried to evict Brian Wayne Tomasso from the house he rented. Tomasso had barricaded himself inside the house--screwing the doors shut from the inside and pushing back from the other side of the door against the sheriff's deputies. Finally, and unfortunately, after breaking down the front door and two interior doors, the Sheriffs arrested him. At the time, in court and in the press, Tomasso was dismissed as a crazy motherfucker. Back in 2006, he had been convicted of reckless discharge of a firearm (in the same residence that he defended four years later). Now, he was trying to affirm an impossible fact: That that place that he lived was his, not his landlord's.
Santa Cruz is the
third most expensive place to rent nationwide. In an interview with the Sentinel, Ken Cole of the Santa Cruz Housing Authority declared:
We’re the perfect storm for high rents. We’re small urban county, almost completely built out from a zoning standpoint, and locked up by mountains, oceans and agriculture. It’s an extremely difficult market.
