Students lobby for bill to ease housing crunch
After studying at home during the pandemic, University of California Davis junior Michelle Andrews tried to find housing in the city of Davis when in-person classes resumed last fall.
On-campus housing was scarce; UC Davis only guarantees dorms for freshmen. Off-campus houses listed on Zillow received mountains of applications within days, with rooms close to campus going for as much as $1,800 per month.
So she ended up living with family in Woodland, 11 miles away. That distance made her miss out on spontaneous meetups with friends, she said, and made college feel a lot more like a job than it should.
The disappointment inspired Andrews, the legislative director for UC Davis’s student government, to advocate for new legislation that would fast-track university housing developments at UC, California State University and community colleges by getting rid of a secondary review currently required under the California Environmental Quality Act.
“It’s more about getting students housed than anything. Any legislator who wants to get students housed will need to get on board with this bill,” Andrews said.
Student activists supporting Senate Bill 886, authored by San Francisco Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener, want faster action on housing projects, which can get tangled in lawsuits and lengthy review processes. Critics, however, say this bill won’t actually solve the core problem: a lack of funding for housing.
The bill comes as California is facing a massive campus housing shortage, forcing some students into long commutes from home or living in hotels. Five percent of UC students, 10% of CSU students, and 19% of California community college students reported experiencing homelessness in recent surveys.
Universities trying to build more housing have run into pushback from residents and environmentalists concerned about the impact on surrounding communities.
Often, opponents invoke the California Environmental Quality Act, which was signed in 1970 by thenGov. Ronald Reagan and requires state agencies to analyze the environmental impact of proposed projects and mitigate potential damage.
CEQA lawsuits against UC Davis claim that its Aggie Square development, which would include four academic buildings and at least 200 beds, would bring gentrification throughout Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood. Lawsuits against UC San Diego allege that the Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood, which could add 2,000 new beds, would increase vehicle traffic in the area. UC Santa Cruz’s 3,000-bed Student Housing West project has faced charges that it would decrease the natural beauty of the campus and impact critical species such as the California red-legged frog.
“This has been a longstanding tool, this use of CEQA, to engage in battles to try to restrict campus growth,” said Jennifer Hernandez, an environmental and land-use lawyer of more than 30 years based in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Student government representatives and other student housing activists are increasingly working with organizations such as California YIMBY to push lawmakers and universities to speed up housing developments.
“It’s good that more students are being part of our higher education system, but we have to make sure that we have housing for them,” Sen. Wiener said of the bill, which the Senate Environmental Quality Committee passed unanimously last month.
But advocacy groups opposing the measure call it a blow to vital environmental regulation that fails to address the fundamental causes of the student housing crisis — poor planning by universities and insufficient investment.