At less than $18,000 per year, tuition at the University of California at Berkeley is cheaper than at some other U.S. institutions of higher education. But finding an affordable place to live in this leafy but crowded college town is another matter.
Up and down the state, California college students desperate for roofs over their heads have taken up residence in sedans, trailers, cheap hotels and their parents’ homes.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a package of bills that aim to encourage construction of more student housing using the same kinds of policy strategies that public officials are using to increase affordability in the state's most expensive cities.
The strategies seek to override restrictive local zoning and land-use rules to streamline student housing projects on and near California public universities and community colleges.
Rents near these major campuses have surged 30% since 2018, and over 400,000 students statewide are estimated to lack stable housing each year, according to the California Student Aid Commission.
The latest policy changes come as cities across the state are required to plan for millions of new residential units by the end of the decade, to increase affordability and keep residents from moving to cheaper areas.
Undoing red tape
The student housing laws aim to promote student housing developments in dense, walkable areas. The most ambitious, Assembly Bill 893, streamlines the development of private mixed-income and affordable housing projects in “campus development zones” within a half-mile radius of colleges.
State Assemblymember Mike Fong, who sponsored the law, said in a statement that it would allow “students to focus on their education rather than where they will sleep at night.”
The other laws tackle barriers to building student living quarters at particularly housing-starved institutions. AB 357 aims to ease red tape and clear hurdles to the construction of student housing projects in coastal areas, such as the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of California at San Diego. The Student Homes Coalition said residences at schools in the coastal zone have historically been blocked or delayed because they have been subject since the mid-1970s to an extra layer of approval by the California Coastal Commission.
State leaders have struggled for years to increase incentives to add housing for community college students, typically a demographic without dormitory options. Just 14 of the state’s 116 community colleges offer student housing. A 2023 report by the Community College League of California found that a quarter of students find themselves homeless at some point during the academic year.
Student Homes Coalition
Kate Rodgers, a recent UCLA graduate, became a student housing activist as a sophomore, when she realized that conversations about declining college affordability rarely touched on housing.
“I was fortunate enough to have my parents support my education, and housing costs were still a stressor,” Rodgers, cochair of the Student Homes Coalition, told CoStar News, recalling the "radicalizing" experience of sharing the $6,000-per-month rent for a three-bedroom home in West Los Angeles.
The cost of sparsely available dormitories and other housing for struggling undergraduates has been driven up by a combination of government red tape and college-student-averse neighbors who have historically blocked student housing, Rodgers said.
More than 30,000 students are on waiting lists each year for housing provided by University of California and California State University schools.
Schools are experimenting with new models to solve the problem. The fast-growing University of California Riverside has opened a 429-unit complex with 1,568 beds to house students from both UC Riverside and the Riverside Community College District, calling the $285 million construction project the first public intersegmental student housing complex in the United States, meaning it serves students from both systems.
In Berkeley, the owners of an iconic record store, Amoeba Music, have hatched a plan with a developer to build student apartments atop the California chain’s flagship store on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, just a few blocks from the University of California system’s flagship campus. The college town suffers from a particularly dire shortage of student housing. UC Berkeley houses only around 22% of its more than 45,000 students, the lowest percentage in the University of California system.