UCSC students list housing demands in on-campus protest
SANTA CRUZ » Poor communication by UC Santa Cruz about student housing for next year may have sparked the protest Friday at the school, but the hundreds of students at the demonstration took a broader view of the housing crisis afflicting them.
“This situation is unsustainable and we can’t let generations of students face the same struggles we are dealing with today,” politics major Zennon Ulyate-Crow, 19, told a crowd of about 200 outside Kerr Hall where UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive has her office.
“The university needs to create a plan for a four-year housing guarantee.”
The protest, organized by students and groups including The Student Housing Coalition, started at Quarry Plaza beside the student union. Several speakers took turns with a bullhorn to address students, many of those gathered holding signs with messages such as, “We have solutions, you have our money,” and “Can we live with you, Cynthia?”
Cognitive science student Mylah Ellis, 19, took the bullhorn and exhorted the university to “stop admitting more students than you can accommodate, and start building more housing.”
University data show the school has increased enrollment steadily since its founding in 1965, and that the number grew from about 12,000 in 2000 to 19,000 in the current school year, according to the university.
University spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason acknowledged that the school should have done a better job communicating about housing availability. Many students applying for oncampus accommodation online were notified that their preferred housing type was not available, but neither the website nor the university made clear that all students eligible for priority housing — mostly new students and certain second-year students — will be offered some kind of room, if not the kind they prioritized, Hernandez-Jason said. “We really regret the stress and anxiety that the students felt,” he said.
Students on the priority housing wait list now are primarily those entering their second year, plus some upper-division students, Hernandez-Jason said.
Housing offers could come as late as mid-summer, according to Hernandez-Jason.
For students not holding priority status, “very few” on-campus spaces are likely to be available, he added.
The university typically houses about 9,300 students on campus, half of them undergraduates, he
said. That leaves thousands to scramble for housing in a city where rental supply is very low and according to Los Altos-based homerental platform Dwellsy, rent is the costliest in the country, after a 28% jump from last year. The hundreds of homes destroyed in the 2020 CZU complex fire have made housing supply tighter in the region, and it appears that an influx of remote workers during the pandemic has further constrained the supply, Hernandez-Jason said.
At the university, Hernandez-Jason said, “There is more demand than the housing that we have.”
A plan to add 2,000 new beds to on-campus stock between 2020 and next year through the Student Housing West project has been mired in lawsuits. Completion of the two-site development would provide “real relief” for students and take some housing-related pressure off the city, HernandezJason said.
A major renovation underway at the school’s Kresge College includes a plan for 605 new beds by 2025.
During the march to Kerr Hall, environmental studies and biology student Malia Altshule, 18, said that while the school is promising housing offers to those on the priority wait list, “I don’t know if they’ll follow through.”