Saving the Beach Flats Community Center

The hub of social programs and government outreach needs to become unforgettable

After spending most of its history in “la trailita”—a double-wide trailer parked next to Poet’s Park—the Beach Flats Community Center (BFCC) thought it had found a permanent home in 2003, when the Santa Cruz Redevelopment Agency completed construction of the colorful Nueva Vista housing development at 133 Liebrandt Avenue. The community center was given space at the heart of the ground floor with a computer lab, day-care center, and classrooms, surrounded by 48 units of low to very-low income housing. But only five years later, what the city had given would now be taken away; the building still stands, but the public funding for the BFCC, what Resource Coordinator Reyna Ruiz calls “the liaison between Beach Flats and the city government,” has disappeared into the void of deep budget cuts and economic woes.

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1987 meets 2010 It’s been fantasy baseball drafting time around here. I’ve got all my teams lined up already, and now I’m just biting my nails through Spring Training hoping nobody gets hurt. I’m also reading up, belatedly, on who’s expected to have a breakout year. That’s what initially drew me to MLB’s official fantasy preview. But my jaw hit the floor when I saw the visual treatment, putting every player in an authentic 1987 Topps baseball card. I drool at the thought of these being on sale somewhere. I mean, just look at them. Beautiful.

Brother, can you spare a micropayment?

Dan Gillmor, the head of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, has been enjoying a feisty and controversial run as guest blogger over at Boing Boing, calling for, among other things, a bloody revolution against the government for its collusion with financial institutions. (Okay, to be fair, he’s merely been wondering and questioning, loudly, why such a thing hasn’t already occurred.) Now, he posits a future for the news industry, in which the nation’s largest papers coalesce their newsrooms into one hegemonic entity that charges a subscription, thereby locking all the in-depth breaking news behind a wall.

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