UCSC sits on 2,000 acres

Unconscionable that they off-load student housing onto the city of Santa Cruz

Gavin Newsom should lead by example and guarantee that no UC student will go homeless

Looking at the satellite view in Google Maps, there appears to be massive plots of open space dead center on campus and also to the east?

And the entire campus is far less dense than UVA (for whatever that's worth - another small city campus that's extremely picturesque albeit for different reasons). 60% of UVA students live off-campus, but there doesn't seem to be the same problem with obtaining it. Prices are higher than you'd expect in a non-college town, because it's a captive market.

There are cow pastures right on campus

They have tried building more, but I think someone found an endangered frog or bird living on a creek by the new development site

Plenty of students want to live off campus, as adults, instead of being on campus.

It’s unconscionable that the city would be so un-accommodating to students while exploiting them for rent money and economic gain.

> Plenty of students want to live off campus, as adults, instead of being on campus.

Sounds like an adult choice to me then

> It’s unconscionable that the city would be so un-accommodating to students while exploiting them for rent money and economic gain.

How can they be both un-accommodating and yet get rent payments, by definition they are being accommodated

> How can they be both un-accommodating and yet get rent payments, by definition they are being accommodated

The article said there is a huge population of students who live in their car because they can’t find housing, on campus, or off.

The students want to live off campus in a paradise for as close to free as they can.

It’s an impossible situation.

> Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC?

Don't know numbers on rental market, but total population of Santa Cruz is ~64K people and UCSC has nearly 20K students. So it's a huge amount of students for a small town which already has very little housing for anyone (student or not).

> It seems like the college shouldn't be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house.

This is ultimately the only solution.

> At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that's feasible based on town layout).

UCSC is the only entity who has very large amounts of undeveloped land in the area. They have all the space to build more than enough housing, they just don't want to.