I love my hometown, but Santa Cruz’s golden beaches and misty redwood groves mask a darker side.

The new Jordan Peele movie, “Us,” only deals with the obvious problems stemming from a family of murderous doppelgangers that emerge from the tunnels beneath the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to take the place of a beach-going family, the Wilsons. It doesn’t dare deal with the other stuff.

Santa Cruz has the crime rate of a big city. Santa Cruz has an endemic homeless problem. Santa Cruz is one of the most expensive places in America to live compared to the average income of the area. And in the vein of “Get Out,” Jordan Peele’s other horror film, Santa Cruz’s wokeness is not matched with the demographic reality.

There are 2,500 homeless people in Santa Cruz County out of a total population of 275,000. Many of the old-time homeless are counter-culture types or UCSC dropouts drawn by the warm weather throughout the year and the traditionally accommodating attitude of many Santa Cruzans — people smoke a lot of weed. The situation only soured as California experienced an unprecedented housing shortage propelled by tech’s ascent over the hill in Silicon Valley. Now people with homes are losing them.

Growing up it was normal to see the many homelessness camps that formed in our parks and in our streets. One becomes accustomed to the pain and suffering of the homeless if you live beside them, but continue to ignore them. Eventually, you stop noticing them. It’s only when you have guests over from out of town that you have to explain the homeless problem is “out of control.”

The tethered in “Us,” the tunnel-dwelling clones of the family above ground, similarly live shunned from society and forced out of view. Their existence not acknowledged by “us” aboveground.

You can compare the struggle over Santa Cruz’s future to Adelaide’s and Red’s fight to the death in “Us.” Each new housing development is seen as an attack on the quality of life that Santa Cruzans enjoy: Roads are clogged, there is no parking downtown, and in the next drought there won’t be enough drinking water say development opponents.

Peele could not have picked a better city to film in. Though not blatantly murderous, the horror of Santa Cruz reaches a deeper societal denial: how can people justify buying a million dollar home a few miles away from a homeless camp? Are we that callous?

This rotten core is embodied in the Not In My Backyard movement (NIMBY), which blocks desperately needed housing development in Santa Cruz. Older and whiter residents obstruct a younger and more diverse crowd from reaping the benefits of the community.

In 2018, the message of “Us” was heard early in Santa Cruz when two progressive candidates, Drew Glover and Justin Cummings, were elected to the Santa Cruz city council creating a progressive majority. They have upended Santa Cruz’s usual sleepy political scene with calls for committees on housing and diversity.

Glover and Cummings have also been accused of sexism by other members of the City Council and have been stymied by the slow pace of the procedural council. Not to mention there are no easy fixes to Santa Cruz’s many woes, but the tension on the city council seems to point toward an appetite for substantive change. The problem now is the lack of political machinery to turn the will into action.

As the city is torn apart by the lack of housing and the growing homeless camps it might be useful to recall a line the Tethered say in the movie Us: “We’re Americans.”

Although seemingly out of place in the movie, the line alludes to the overarching and vast inequalities of the American system. It sure means a lot to me as a kid from Santa Cruz.

Stuart Woodhams grew up in Santa Cruz and attends Wesleyan University in Connecticut.