Surfing generates nearly $200 million a year for Santa Cruz — and coastal changes could put it at risk
In the summer of 1885, three teenage Hawaiian princes visiting Santa Cruz dragged hand-hewn, 17-foot redwood boards — each weighing more than 200 pounds — across the sand at Main Beach. Riding waves at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River , they introduced surfing to the mainland United States, an event that would help shape Santa Cruz’s coastal identity for generations. The cultural phenomenon they helped launch now generates nearly $200 million a year in Santa Cruz, according to a landmark report released in September by the nonprofit Save the Waves Coalition . But that economic engine, the authors warn, is increasingly at risk — not only from climate change and sea level rise, but from how policymakers respond to them. Those kinds of decisions have already reshaped the shoreline, including the historic surf break where the princes first surfed the California coast. In the 1960s, sand was dredged there to begin construction of the Santa Cruz Harbor, permanently altering how waves...