When There’s Nowhere to Stay, What’s a College to Do?

Peyton Quijano spent the summer time earlier than junior 12 months consolidating her life into her Honda.

She squeezed her pared-down wardrobe into two small bins, which match within the trunk. Faculty provides and a few packaged meals went within the passenger seat. The again seat grew to become her mattress.

Quijano, a biology main on the College of California at Santa Cruz, had hoped to win a coveted spot on campus, however she didn’t get one earlier than lessons started.

UC-Santa Cruz has sufficient campus housing for greater than half of its 18,000 undergraduates. That’s so much; the truth is, the college homes one of many highest percentages of its college students within the UC system. However Santa Cruz faces a problem: Housing inventory off campus is extraordinarily restricted and costly. Most residences are single-family properties with unbiased landlords, lots of whom are hesitant to hire to college students.

On campus, housing precedence is given to freshmen, new transfers, and sophomores, relying on whether or not they meet sure situations, in addition to first-generation college students from California, navy veterans, and worldwide college students. Even then, there’s no assure.

So Quijano began the 2022 fall time period residing in her automobile.

It’s not that college leaders oppose constructing extra scholar housing. They’ll’t — at the very least not simply.

The topography of the Santa Cruz campus — carved into the aspect of a mountain, surrounded by a protected forest — means there’s virtually nowhere to construct. When college officers discover land on campus and make a plan, they get sued by native residents who worry the impacts of progress. The court docket fights drag on for years. In the meantime, the College of California’s Board of Regents needs the system’s campuses to enroll much more college students, citing excessive demand for a UC schooling.

Throughout the nation, faculties wrestle with housing shortages occasionally, and directors make contingency plans. What’s occurring at Santa Cruz, although, isn’t a one-time crunch. It’s a systemic, structural logjam with no clear method out.

College leaders say they’re dedicated to easing the pressure, pushing forward on building tasks that may take years to finish. Within the meantime, many Santa Cruz college students should shoulder the stress of attempting to get by means of faculty with out having their primary wants absolutely met.

Ask any Santa Cruz scholar about housing, and so they’ll have a narrative to inform.

Their housemate who dropped out for 1 / 4 to economize for hire; their buddies who commute 35 miles from San Jose each day, up and down the notoriously hazardous slim shoulders and tight turns of Freeway 17; the man of their econ class who rents a driveway so he can stay safely in his automobile for $500 a month.

Most college students can even inform you that they didn’t know simply how onerous it might be to seek out housing till they arrived.

Homelessness and housing insecurity are longstanding issues in Santa Cruz, a seashore city nestled between the central coast and the redwood-forested Santa Cruz mountains that persistently ranks among the many most unaffordable locations within the nation to stay.

The united states sociology professors Miriam Greenberg and Steven McKay surveyed Santa Cruz County residents between 2016 and 2018, and located that fifty % of 1,737 respondents spent over half of their earnings on hire. The federal government defines that threshold as “extraordinarily hire burdened.” The researchers then needed to invent a brand new class, “obscenely hire burdened,” for the 26 % of respondents who stated they spent at the very least 70 % of their earnings on hire.

Then the pandemic hit. Newly distant tech employees moved in. The median value of a single-family house skyrocketed, as did rents. Off-campus homes that had traditionally been rented to college students had been purchased up and transformed into owner-occupied housing.

The squeeze grew to become untenable — and additional difficult an already difficult relationship between Santa Cruz and its largest employer, the college.

For a lot of the twentieth century, Santa Cruz was a sleepy retirement group. Because the U.S. economic system boomed within the Fifties, native enterprise leaders pushed for extra growth. They eagerly lobbied the College of California regents to decide on Santa Cruz for the following UC campus.

The college’s founding in 1965, although, caused a pointy political flip to the left. An environmentalist consensus took maintain that noticed any progress as dangerous. Residents didn’t need to see their city develop out or up. All through the Sixties and Seventies, metropolis and county leaders adopted measures to restrict housing density. They labored.

“The college’s and town’s points grew to become inseparably associated to the expansion and growth sentiments on the time, which was primarily 5,000 methods to say no to progress and growth,” stated Mayor Fred Keeley of Santa Cruz in an interview.

Metropolis officers have lengthy taken the place that UC-Santa Cruz ought to home its college students by itself campus. The college hasn’t accomplished a brand new dorm since 2004. However that’s not for lack of attempting.

In 2017, the college proposed a housing mission to accommodate an further 2,000 college students, a part of which might be constructed on the East Meadow, a 17-acre open discipline on the southern fringe of campus. The mission has been tied up in court docket ever since.

“It’s been extraordinarily irritating as a result of these lawsuits have actual impacts when it comes to what it means for UC-Santa Cruz college students,” stated Scott Hernandez-Jason, assistant vice chancellor for college relations.

This spring, the UC system’s Board of Regents accepted the college’s newest plan for the mission, referred to as Scholar Housing West. One lawsuit in opposition to the plan is pending. For now, building is slated to start in early 2024.

School, alumni, and group members who oppose the mission have argued that it might disrupt the aesthetics of the campus. One scholar retorted: “I don’t have the posh of worrying about aesthetics.”

Housing is one thing that Santa Cruz college students all the time have to consider.

For the primary three weeks of the 2022 fall time period, Quijano parked close to her buddies’ on-campus residence so she may use their bathe. She spent most of her free time on the library. In a pinch, she wrote a few papers within the backseat. It wasn’t comfy, and the Wi-Fi was spotty.

Then she heard about an open room within the Village, a sprawling assortment of cabinlike short-term buildings on the east aspect of campus. She reached out to the college’s housing coordinators and was positioned in one of many models, at a price of $978 a month.

The partitions had been skinny; chilly air and noise may simply get by means of. There was one shared kitchen. The placement was remoted from a lot of campus, requiring college students to hike up a 100-step staircase or stroll to the closest bus cease.

Quijano labored two part-time jobs: one at a day-care heart off campus, and one cleansing the college science division’s autoclaves. Her paychecks had been going solely towards housing, and she or he wasn’t even that comfy. She questioned: How would she pay her different payments?

On the finish of the autumn 2022 time period, she made the tough choice to terminate her housing contract. When lessons resumed in January, she was again in her automobile.

Zane Chaplin, in the meantime, shared a dorm room with three different sophomores this previous educational 12 months. The room was a communal lounge for the entire ground. “You’ll be able to inform as a result of that is right here,” Chaplin stated, transferring the hanging mirror apart to disclose an extended rectangular window on the door.

Over the previous 20 years, the college has positioned 3,300 further college students into current dorms by “rising the density.” Officers have added new flooring to some buildings. Some rooms host 5 or 6 college students in bunk beds.

So Chaplin and his buddies felt fortunate to have a bit of personal house, with lofted beds and desks positioned beneath. However as they regarded forward to their junior 12 months, they knew they probably wouldn’t have an opportunity at campus housing once more.

As a substitute, they steeled themselves for the off-campus bidding wars.

At one level, Chaplin and his buddies had been eyeing an eight-person home going for about $8,500 per thirty days — a fantastic deal, he stated, despite the fact that it was a “fixer higher,” to place it properly. However they knew at the very least 5 different teams of scholars desirous about the identical property.

Sometimes, Chaplin stated, college students are compelled to bid in opposition to one different. A landlord will inform a scholar that one other group has put in a suggestion and ask if the scholars needs to lift their bid. Or a landlord will simply give the property to the opposite group with out sharing the profitable value. “It’s a really secretive alternate,” he stated.

Some college students will try and get on a landlord’s good aspect by wooing them with baked items or guarantees of house enchancment. “I’ve a buddy whose group wrote a letter to their landlord about how they had been going to do a bunch of gardening whereas they lived there, and the owner ended up giving them the place,” Chaplin stated.

Chris Minnig, who graduated this spring, hit the jackpot for his final 12 months: a spot in Camper Park. The 42-space complicated “is just like residing in a campground,” the college’s web site states. It’s by far essentially the most reasonably priced campus-housing possibility, at round $700 a month.

Residents need to do with out a few issues that almost all undergraduate college students would take without any consideration. “If having a constant web reference to dependable service inside your campus residence is essential to you, or for the tutorial work that you’re engaged in,” the college says, “then the Camper Park will not be an applicable selection for you.”

Nonetheless, every trailer has a full mattress, a kitchen with operating water, a mini fridge, and a small desk. If college students can put up with minor inconveniences, like sharing communal loos and emptying out the water tank each week, “it’s a frickin’ no-brainer,” Minnig stated. Particularly in contrast along with his lodging in 2020, as a first-term switch scholar.

On the time, Minnig stated, he managed to discover a place to stay off campus a number of days earlier than lessons started, for $400 per week. However he wasn’t certain how lengthy he’d have the room. The owner, he stated, was attempting to promote the property.

So whereas acclimating to campus life, an immensely worrying interval for brand spanking new college students, Minnig wasn’t certain the place he’d be residing the next week.

Students are pissed off. Some say they really feel lied to — as if the college inspired them to return to Santa Cruz despite the fact that there was nowhere for them to stay.

But many college students perceive the challenges. They don’t need the college to decrease acceptance charges; that hurts entry. They’re additionally nervous in regards to the environmental impacts of progress. And so they’re attempting to work with town to bridge the divide.

Zennon Ulyate-Crow is founding president of UC-Santa Cruz’s Scholar Housing Coalition. The group shares town’s view that the college has a accountability to accommodate its college students. However the coalition additionally believes that town has a accountability to offer for its constituents, together with college students.

The group has sensible objectives: extra housing, interval. Multifamily housing, particularly. Extra tenant protections, like hire management and eviction protections. And so they need to get extra college students registered to vote in Santa Cruz County.

“Each side are pointing at each other accountable for this disaster,” Ulyate-Crow stated of the college and town. “And ultimately, nothing occurs as a result of no person takes accountability.”

Ulyate-Crow stated the coalition has tried to forge a center floor, but it surely’s been tough. The group has even been met with resistance on campus when it has tried to associate with some scholar teams. There’s a “leftist purity check” that the coalition doesn’t meet when it endorses “imperfect” — in different phrases, market-rate — developments, Ulyate-Crow stated.

Santa Cruz — like San Francisco and lots of different cities in California — is markedly progressive on the subject of most social points. “And but it’s also town with a number of the most excessive inequality and the best reasonably priced housing disaster within the nation,” stated Greenberg, the sociology professor.

As a planning commissioner for town, Greenberg has seen firsthand how tough it’s to get householders to budge on laws that might make housing extra reasonably priced. There’s a scarcity of political will, she stated, to take steps to manage the market and produce extra reasonably priced housing. Lobbyists from the real-estate trade, statewide and nationally, and native householders’ associations have blocked many proposed adjustments.

Town has tried and failed many instances over the previous three a long time to cross native hire management. (California handed a statewide rent-control legislation in 2019, changing into one of many first states to take action.) Measure N, which was on the poll for Santa Cruz voters final November, would have taxed “empty properties” to lift funds for reasonably priced housing. However it died after Santa Cruz Collectively, a grassroots political group that claims it fights “radical” insurance policies, raised $140,000 to marketing campaign in opposition to the measure. The group acquired a $37,000 donation from the California House Affiliation.

UC-Santa Cruz officers don’t need to be the villains on this story. However for now, they’re working inside strict constraints.

In 2022, the college enrolled 700 fewer college students than in 2021, attributable to a scarcity of beds, marking the primary time in years that the establishment had diminished its variety of acceptances. Officers stated they’ll maintain enrollment as regular as potential till extra housing is on the market.

That method runs up in opposition to strain from lawmakers and the UC system for campuses to enroll extra California college students amid hovering demand. The college acquired practically 69,000 first-year functions for the autumn of 2023, a document. Final 12 months, UC-Santa Cruz admitted about 31,000 college students and enrolled about 5,100.

“Once we enroll college students to grow to be Banana Slugs, we wish them to return right here and succeed,” stated Hernandez-Jason, the college spokesman. “So we need to be sure that we now have campus housing out there, and that we really feel like if they aren’t residing in campus housing, that they’re going to have the ability to discover some housing in the neighborhood.”

New state funding particularly geared toward fixing the housing disaster throughout California campuses will assist subsidize a number of the value of growing extra housing.

The college’s most up-to-date mission — an growth of Kresge Corridor, which incorporates the development of a brand new constructing — will create 600 new beds by the autumn of 2025. Officers additionally plan to shift the roofline of the prevailing residence corridor so as to add one other ground. Of these new beds, 320 can be supplied to undergraduates at 20-percent beneath the common campus housing price.

Keeley, the mayor, stated town’s politics are altering. In the newest November election, he stated, each voter he talked to wished to see extra housing. It was, he stated, that about 70 % of the citizens opposed growth. Now, he estimated, about two-thirds of voters favor “applicable growth.”

That growth will take years.

In the meantime, UC-Santa Cruz officers stated they’re working to offer instant help to college students who’re struggling.

“No UC-Santa Cruz scholar ought to be with out a protected and dependable place to stay,” Hernandez-Jason stated.

The Slug Assist program gives a variety of housing sources. If college students discover themselves immediately with out housing, they’ll get linked with a case supervisor who can get them positioned in an area resort or associate shelter. College students may also search monetary help with a housing deposit, lookup tenant authorized codes, and get authorized assist with housing points.

“What we’ll usually see is a scholar is available in for housing help, but it surely seems they’ll’t afford meals both, and on prime of that, possibly they’re failing their lessons,” stated Estefania Rodriguez, a basic-needs program supervisor on the college. “It’s lots of the whole lot.”

The Redwood Free Market, which Rodriguez helps function, is one among a number of free-food choices throughout campus. These cafés, markets, and pop-up produce stands are operated largely by college students. The meals comes from native meals banks, and a number of the produce comes from the college’s backyard.

College students are persevering with their advocacy, too, regardless of hitting some roadblocks. In January 2021, a bunch of them tried to open a shelter for college kids experiencing homelessness. They talked with group organizations, church buildings, and the college itself, to no avail.

“Off-campus places would inform us to go looking on campus for a location, and the college would inform us to look off campus,” stated Guneet Hora, who was lately the co-president of Slug Shelter, because the group known as. “It was like a wild-goose chase.”

The membership has since pivoted to grow to be a basic-needs service for college kids, specializing in meals and clothes donations, in addition to mutual help.

The Scholar Housing Coalition is advocating for the college to create a safe-parking program for college kids who stay of their vehicles. Evan Morrison, an area resident who organized town’s protected RV-parking program, has suggested the coalition on its concept. (Scott-Hernandez stated {that a} parking program “will not be a viable short- or long-term answer for our housing challenges.“)

Morrison is the founding father of the Free Information, a nonprofit that serves the final homelessness inhabitants within the metropolis of Santa Cruz. College students largely don’t use the sources aimed on the metropolis’s homeless inhabitants, Morrison stated. Their wants are totally different.

“There appears to be a great portion of scholars whose plan to finish homelessness is to graduate,” he stated. “So whereas they’re at school, they’re not attempting to finish their homelessness. That’s a distinct set of wants than the final homeless inhabitants.”

Whereas Morrison has no definitive knowledge on what number of college students sleep of their vehicles, “my intestine is that if we had 30 parking spots, these can be full fairly darn fast,” he stated.

For a lot of the previous 12 months, Peyton Quijano was amongst them.

In the course of the hardest moments, she was comforted, at the very least partially, by the information that she wasn’t alone.

Then, a number of weeks into the spring-2023 time period, Quijano discovered a spot to stay — an off-campus residence. She signed a lease that may undergo the following educational 12 months, when she’s scheduled to graduate.

She and three roommates are splitting a one-bedroom residence with a loft in downtown Santa Cruz. The hire is sort of $900 a month per particular person. It took some convincing for the landlords to hire to them, she stated. Subletting would’ve been too difficult, so that they’re paying hire for an empty residence all summer time.

She considers herself one of many fortunate ones.