Santa Cruz is also a major college town with a large number of people who are 18 years or older and attending college. As is often the case in college towns, the many students that live in Santa Cruz have a strong influence on the local culture and entertainment scene, which may seem dormant by comparison in the summer months when much of the student population is away. In the fall, the return of students has a reinvigorating effect on the community. Because colleges are lasting institutions, they have a stabilizing effect on the economy by providing direct local benefits such as jobs for faculty and staff and spending by students. Santa Cruz’s economy is one such example of this.
Not only is Santa Cruz a city with many college students, but it also retains many recent graduates who are looking to start new careers, creating a very large population of people who are young, single, educated, and upwardly-mobile. That’s because Santa Cruz is full of single people in their 20s and 30s and who have undergraduate or graduate degrees and are starting careers in professional occupations. This makes Santa Cruz a pretty good place for young, educated career starters looking to find many people like themselves, with good opportunities for friendships, socializing, romance, and fun.
Santa Cruz is also nautical, which means that parts of it are somewhat historic and touch the ocean or tidal bodies of water, such as inlets and bays. Such areas are often places that visitors and locals go for waterfront activities or taking in the scenery.
For the size of the city, public transportation in Santa Cruz is quite heavily used. Mostly, people who use it for their daily commute are taking the bus. For Santa Cruz, the benefits are reduced air pollution and congestion on the highways.
If knowledge is power, Santa Cruz is a pretty powerful place. 57.09% of the adults in Santa Cruz have earned a 4-year college degree, masters degree, MD, law degree, or even PhD. Compare that to the national average of 21.84% for all cities and towns.
The per capita income in Santa Cruz in 2022 was $51,956, which is upper middle income relative to California, and wealthy relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $207,824 for a family of four. However, Santa Cruz contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Santa Cruz is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Santa Cruz home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Santa Cruz residents report their race to be White, followed by Asian. Santa Cruz also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 21.19% of the city’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Santa Cruz include Irish, German, English, Italian, and European.
The most common language spoken in Santa Cruz is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Chinese.
