State Senate bill aims to boost affordable housing for students

SACRAMENTO >> Amid a torrent of state bills attempting to ease California’s housing crisis, a new proposal aims to help one group that is struggling mightily: college students.

Senate Bill 1227 hopes to spur the construction of affordable housing designed especially for students. Today, argues the bill’s author, Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Oakland, state housing law provides no clear way for students to prove they are eligible for subsidized apartments, regardless of their need. Developers, in turn, can’t tap into the economic incentives that California hands out in exchange for setting aside a portion of their development for lowincome rental housing — and so they don’t build it.

Skinner’s proposal would allow students to submit financial aid documents to qualify for lowcost housing, and it would explicitly extend state affordable housing incentives to private developers building apartments geared to full-time students.

“With the housing shortage that California now has, their costs can be so high that it can be prohibitive for them to go to school,” she said in an interview Wednesday.

Finding an affordable apartment in California has proved impossible for many students. California’s three public college systems — with campuses in Berkeley, San Jose, Palo Alto and Los Angeles, some of the highestrent cities in the nation — have reported alarming levels of homelessness. A California State University study released in January found that nearly 11 percent of its students reported experiencing homelessness in the past year; among black, first-generation college students, that figure shot to 18 percent.

At UC Berkeley, 10 percent of those surveyed, including graduate students, reported they had been homeless at some point since they arrived on campus.

And 1 in 5 Los Angeles Community College District students had been homeless in the past two years, according to a study commissioned by the district’s board of trustees.

“Right now, students are in a state of emergency,” said Max Lubin, a UC Berkeley graduate student who helped launch Rise California, a group advocating for tuitionfree college. “This bill is a good first step, but we need much much more housing for students because of the magnitude of the problem.”

The bill is sponsored by the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored public policy group based in San Francisco. The proposal will make it “faster, cheaper and easier” to build housing for students facing deepening housing insecurity, said Adrian Covert, the council’s vice president of public policy.

“This has reached crisis level,” he said, “so we have to get creative to address the problem.”