Maybe the hot air you sense every time I post.
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Is this some law in Santa Cruz, or some UCSF rule, or what? Sounds like it would just force streets and buildings to be spaced just far enough apart so as to maximize the amount of wilderness which is ruined by being within view of a building or a street.
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I have lived in Santa Cruz since 1977, first as a student and since 1994 as a UCSC staff member. Other long term residents and campus affiliates may know more or have different opinions but here is my take on this:
Housing in Santa Cruz has been a problem for many years, at least since the 1980s. Although the Campus is a contributor to the problem, IMHO, the biggest factors are that Santa Cruz is a beautiful relatively tiny landlocked community within commuting distance of the economic powerhouse of San Jose. The high wages paid by some tech companies combined with real estate speculation have pushed housing prices in SJ to insane levels. If you are going to pay those prices and commute an hour anyway, why not have a nice beach house to come home to?
With a population in the SJ area of over two million and one in SC County of around two hundred and sixty thousand, the pressure on house purchase and rental prices in SC is severe.
This has been a major problem for UCSC students for at least the last decade with some students sleeping on friend’s couches and not being able to find housing for the first month or two of fall term. And this is in spite of the fact that UCSC provides on campus housing for a greater proportion of it’s students than any other UC.
The UC Regents have been trying to push UCSC to take more students for decades, basically since it opened and the Governor’s recent push to get all UCs to take more students has exacerbated the problem as well.
Originally, the people of California agreed to provide free tuition to all California residents but they reneged on that starting around the 1970’s and that combined with the high cost of housing makes it very difficult for low and middle income students to afford school here.
University housing is required to be funded separately from the rest of the campus budget and to fully recover all of it’s costs from student housing fees which makes it difficult to build new housing as fast as it is needed. The past few years the U has been trying to start a partnership with for-profit companies where the U provides the land, the companies build the housing and they split the income. But the first site they were looking at for this turned out to have a endangered species on it.
This leaves the next fastest site to build on as one of the meadows at the base of campus that all visitors drive by to get on to campus. Building there would change the pastoral feel of the campus which has some emeritus faculty and alumni up in arms. But, as some have mentioned, those people already have their housing and many of our students do not.
Lastly, the campus has put out this call to faculty and staff to help with student housing in many previous years. This is nothing new and I don’t really know why it would be national news at this point. Just a bad situation that local residents, the Campus and students have been dealing with for years.
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