This Fall’s Housing Crunch Is So Urgent One University Is Asking Its Professors for Help

“The need is real, and it is urgent,” read a plea issued on August 27 by Dave Keller, executive director of housing services for the University of California at Santa Cruz. Keller was asking faculty and staff members to consider offering rooms in their homes for rent to several hundred students without housing guarantees. There are “not nearly enough” rentals in the college’s community listings to accommodate them, he wrote.

Santa Cruz’s housing crunch is extreme for a number of reasons, but hundreds of colleges are short of space, said Michael Fischer, a senior research analyst at EAB, an education consulting and technology company. Some are just a little short, but others — like Purdue University and the University of Maryland at College Park — face more serious challenges.

Colleges are turning study lounges into dorm rooms, doubles into triples, triples into quads. They’re putting up students in off-campus apartments and hotels. Resident advisers expecting a single are discovering that they now have a roommate.

In the wake of a March tornado, Jacksonville State University, in Alabama, ordered 22 mobile homes. The University of Georgia offered students $1,000 each to live off-campus and a $3,500 discount to anyone willing to live in a more-remote dorm. A couple of Central Washington University students grew frustrated enough that they said they planned to buy some land and build themselves a house.

Fischer cited a number of factors in the crowding: regional growth and corresponding enrollment surges in larger cities, both coasts, the Southeast, and the Southwest; booming enrollments at state flagships and more-selective institutions; and more out-of-state and international students without local housing options.

Thomas Carlson-Reddig, a partner at Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, said many postwar dorms, built to handle the initial waves of GI Bill recipients, are deteriorating, have code and environmental problems, and aren’t worth their maintenance costs, so colleges are juggling demolition and replacement plans with the current student surge.

The housing scramble is fueling public-private partnerships, otherwise known as P3s, to build dorms on or next to campuses. Commercial student housing is a $9.8-billion market, said Fischer, citing statistics from CBRE, a commercial real-estate services and investment firm, that were reported in National Real Estate Investor.

Peter Aranyi, a principal with the planning, architecture, engineering, and design firm Clark Nexsen, said P3s usually have a retail element — “a restaurant, coffee or gelato shops. … One project we just did leased to Lululemon.” P3s get beds in use faster than working through state-funding channels, he said.

Shortages and Surpluses

Large institutions aren’t the only ones scrambling to keep up with demand. Some smaller ones, including Husson University, in Maine, are also trying to find beds. Husson, where about 1,100 of 3,500 students live on campus, is welcoming the largest incoming cohort in its 120-year history, including 829 undergraduates, a 16.9-percent increase over last year.

First- and second-year students are required to live on the campus, said Pamela Kropp-Anderson, dean of student life. A few years ago, Husson realized it had a serious housing shortage, so it rented about 40 off-campus apartments for 130 upperclassmen, and that worked well as an interim solution. Meanwhile, it built suite-style dorms and townhouses. Even so, it is 6 percent over capacity, so some lounge spaces this year have been converted into triples, and some students are rooming with resident advisers in what are now doubles.

But even as many colleges are dealing with an overflow, said EAB’s Fischer, an increasing number of colleges, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast, are calling him for help with surplus space from sagging enrollments. Some are mothballing or demolishing buildings with major deferred maintenance, concentrating students in newer dorms.

The colleges are also converting some buildings into specialized living spaces for adult students 25 or older, military veterans, and graduate students with families. Or they are turning them into places where commuter students who have time off between classes can study and grab a bite to eat.

The picture is very different, though, in large cities, especially coastal ones, like Boston, write David Damon and John Long, principals of the architecture and design firm of Perkins + Will.

“In 2013,” they write, “more than 152,000 students came to the Boston metropolitan area to pursue postsecondary degrees. Today the number of students is nearly double that figure. To complicate matters, for years, the City of Boston has coped with a housing inventory that puts students in direct competition for beds with the community.” A citywide plan would add 16,000 new undergraduate and 2,500 graduate-student beds by 2030.

Squeezed in Santa Cruz

The University of California is striving to add 14,000 new beds on its 10 campuses by 2020, and 3,000 of them will be at Santa Cruz. Meanwhile, however, students there are scrambling to find housing in a tight, expensive market exacerbated by a number of factors, said Casey Beyer, chief executive officer of the Santa Cruz Area Chamber of Commerce.

Straining the market are some 30,000 workers who reside in Santa Cruz County but work in job-rich Silicon Valley, where salaries pay upward of 30 percent more than similar positions on the coast.

A rent-control regulatory bill on the November ballot seems to have encouraged developers and landlords to put off some building projects and rental agreements until they know the outcome. And a vast expansion of short-term vacation rentals has pulled many properties off the market for students and other local renters.

More fundamentally, said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics, a research and consulting firm in Los Angeles, the California tax system, dating to the passage of Proposition 13, in 1978, biases cities toward retail development and against housing because the municipalities have to rely so heavily on sales taxes.

Moreover, he said, Santa Cruz has a particularly acute case of “Nimby-ism” against residential projects larger than single-family homes, even though limited housing is a prime constraint on the area’s economic growth.

That wariness, however, is warranted, say opponents of the university’s expansion. Santa Cruz’s enrollment has risen from 16,543 in 2013-14 to 18,063 in 2017-18, and its chancellor, George R. Blumenthal, would like to see it grow by another 10,000 students by 2040.

Ted Benhari, a board member of the Coalition for Limiting University Expansion, said that in addition to the bed shortage on campus, housing is inadequately subsidized by the UC system, so students find it cheaper to live off-campus, straining an already-pressured market.

Transportation and utility infrastructure are also inadequate for the campus’s planned growth, he said, and “we want Santa Cruz to remain a small town and not have a lot of multistory apartment buildings.”

Lawsuits over such issues arose in 2005, and Benhari said the university is reaching out to activists and politicians to help the planning go smoother this time around, and to present a united front in dealing with the UC system’s Board of Regents.

Such frictions in college towns across the nation complicate what James Baumann, communications director for the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International, said is an already-difficult balance between enrollment projections and student commitments.

“It’s part science and part art,” he said, “and probably a little bit of magic as well.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a senior editor and oversees Idea Lab. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.