Santa Cruz is a Housing Nightmare

What people seem to miss is how awesome UCSC is. In typical HN fashion I see multiple comments talking dryly about college selection like it's a business decision. People flock to UCSC for its exceptional natural beauty, idiosyncratic culture and slightly unorthodox academics. Not because of a cost-benefit analysis. For people like me, it offered a big-campus college experience without the emphasis on sports and the Greek system. And it offered it in a culturally bizarre and incredibly beautiful corner of the country. That draw isn't going away anytime soon, especially since students can subsidize those crazy-high rents with student debt as I once did.

Santa Cruz native here: I can understand the author&#x27;s frustrations coming to Santa Cruz from the outside but there&#x27;s more to it. He&#x27;s describing a UCSC problem because the university is expanding without building enough dormitories and relying on development in the city instead. This is causing unrest among the natives who resent 5 story huge San Jose style apartment blocks going up in their beautiful city.<p>The second problem is Santa Cruz by the sea is a very desirable place to live and within commuting distance from Silicon Valley, so wealthy tech workers can buy up or build very expensive first or second homes here. However, Santa Cruz since the 70&#x27;s has been a very environmentally conscious no-growth city that recognized that San Jose style growth would ruin the city. This means demand far outstrips supply.<p>With the lack of supply, natives and others who work in services and support Santa Cruz&#x27;s biggest industry (tourism) can&#x27;t afford to live here. It&#x27;s a dark joke among family and friends that once you leave Santa Cruz you can never afford to move back. I have family that have moved away and the next generation like my kids and nieces and nephews will never be able to afford to buy a house there like my father did.<p>Homeless is a problem but Santa Cruz tries to handle it a progressive way, for example, by setting up the homeless camp next to the courthouse and providing it with services<p>Lastly, long time Santa Cruz residents are generally are not sympathetic to complaints from students that come here from the outside, because they consider UCSC to be a big part of the problem. People considering UCSC would be advised to secure housing beforehand or choose another university. I hear they opened a new nice one in Merced, which has more affordable housing.

My son just went through this and got super lucky to find a place, but out in Capitola.<p>UCSC&#x27;s campus is absolutely <i>massive</i> with huge areas of unused, unforested land [1]. There is more than enough space for more dorms and apartment houses as well as the accompanying utility systems needed. If they&#x27;re going to continue to increase enrollment, they need to bite the bullet and put up some goddamn buildings. They simply don&#x27;t want to.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.app.goo.gl&#x2F;qocsUGwbhcZaKbdX7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.app.goo.gl&#x2F;qocsUGwbhcZaKbdX7</a>

Such a great place to live except for the people. Long time Santa Cruz residents have zero shame about telling latecomers to get out.<p>And then there&#x27;s this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surfertoday.com&#x2F;surf-movies&#x2F;the-westsiders" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.surfertoday.com&#x2F;surf-movies&#x2F;the-westsiders</a><p>Anyway, end Prop 13 now.

So, I have to agree there is a major shortage of affordable housing.<p>But, I have to disagree that this is due to a lack of building.<p>20 years ago, there was no housing crisis. Period.<p>In 20 years, did the population suddenly increase by 20%?<p>No, of course it didn&#x27;t. In fact the US population is very flat in recent decades.<p>What changed?<p>Short term rental!!! A huge portion of the housing stock purchased, much by corporate buyers, and converted to AirBnB or VRBO.<p>The housing crisis is 100% created by the rise of &quot;short term rentals&quot;, a phrase that really means: &quot;convert a significant portion of the housing stock into unlicensed hotels&quot;.<p>People paying per night to rent houses are never going to be out-bid by people who want to rent by the month.<p>This whole BS about &quot;not building enough&quot;, is really &quot;not building enough to make up for all the houses now run as hotels&quot;.<p>There has NOT been a population boom. Ask yourself: Why were there enough houses a decade or 2 ago, but not now?

Sounds like looking for a place in Dublin&#x2F;Berlin except instead of 24 applicant in 24 hours, a Berlin apartment gets like 200 applicants.<p>Also in the Netherlands, several collage towns have students sleep in tents and container buildings or with university staff.

Sad to say but the only way to get administration to take these issues seriously is to transfer out. Santa Cruz is the bottom feeder of the UC system. The only reason people take it seriously is because of the prestigious &quot;University of California&quot; tag. There are plenty of better schools nearby (including non-UC ones like Cal Poly and several CSUs) that are more worth your money.<p>Or think even beyond that. I went to a top 10 school in the midwest and paid $300&#x2F;mo for my own apartment. After graduating I got a job working next to people from Berkeley, MIT and Stanford with the same career trajectory as them but a tiny fraction of the debt.

Unless housing is built and controlled by UCSC the housing will be snapped up by more of the same and not change the equation that much IMO. If growth is wanted and accepted by the majority of voters (which I don’t believe it is) then a unified plan that involves significant transport investment is needed. Traffic on highway 1 in both directions or mission street are clear indications of this.<p>I believe the university should be making sure it’s students are fully aware of the situation. Especially new foreign students who have no credit or even guarantors to fall back on for private rentals.

The recipe for what Santa Cruz is experiencing seems to be:<p>1. Locate the city in a geographically isolated, but beautiful area close to a major employment hub.<p>2. Institute strong anti-growth policies.<p>3. Invite a UC into town.<p>4. Allow the UC to expand without the matching requirement to build one market-rate housing unit per admitted student.<p>5. Wait a few decades.<p>What&#x27;s great about this is how everyone is trying to get something for nothing. The students are trying to get a &quot;UC&quot; brand without the highly-selective entry requirements of other UCs, and largely bringing in loans to pay for it. The university is growing the student population without building sufficient student housing. Property owners benefit from skyrocketing values without experiencing the pain of finding a place to live, or proportionally exploding property taxes. The city benefits from the money the students bring with them in the form of debt.<p>I suspect this process would go into reverse rather quickly by taking a single step. Cut the federal loans program by 50%, then 10% per year for every year thereafter.<p>For extra bang, repeal Proposition 13.

Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC?<p>It seems like the college shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house. At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that&#x27;s feasible based on town layout).

The thing I read in there that was disappointing was the administration response. However it is a state school so I imagine they don&#x27;t have the same funding for development of housing on site &#x2F; not to mention they are located between the SC mountains &#x2F; protected forest and the ocean. It&#x27;s a small area without much development space and that land is at a premium.<p>Feel for the students though.

When does growth stop ? What’s the end-game ?<p>As a techie, Santa Cruz renter and UCSC parent, I sympathize with the author<p>But living here and going to school here are choices, UC Davis, Merced &amp; Berkeley <i>exist</i><p>I’m sure someone can complain that I outbid them to rent a house<p>But driving up from Berkeley, seeing the housing issue, the homeless problem, and then saying “this sucks, but make room for me” strikes me as naive

There really is a lot of truth in Mark Twain&#x27;s old adage: &quot;Buy land, they&#x27;re not making it anymore.&quot;<p>I think there is a certain amount of delusion in expecting any static resource to meet monotonically increasing amounts of demand.

California can&#x27;t support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.

Santa Cruz is a tiny dot of land between the mountains and ocean. The only crisis is in overpopulation, brought about by the tiered UC&#x2F;CSU credentialism.<p>Does anyone really think UCSC provides a better undergrad education than the average CSU? They literally have the exact same state mandated curriculum. But FAANG will hire someone with a UC degree over a CSU, thus the system is overflowing.