While California’s housing affordability woes have received extensive coverage in the media, the experiences of university students have received comparatively little attention from journalists and policymakers. The historic strike among graduate student workers at the University of California last fall drew greater attention to graduate students’ struggles to pay for housing, but undergraduate students’ housing challenges remain mostly overlooked.

We are a group of UCSD undergraduate students enrolled in COMM 124B: Critical Design, Topic Studio. The course asks us to work collectively on a public intervention that aims to catalyze debate about an issue that concerns us, and we decided to focus on the issue of undergraduate housing at UCSD. To do so, we investigated the current on-campus housing conditions for UCSD undergraduates, examined historical factors that have contributed to the current affordability crisis among undergraduate housing options, documented what university and state officials are trying to do to resolve the crisis, and explored how student activism can lead to preferable futures.

Current Conditions

“Our housing program includes well-designed living spaces with engaging programming.”
- Hemlata Jhaveri, Executive Director of
UCSD Housing, Dining and Hospitality

“They clickbait you.”
- Ellie, UCSD undergraduate

As is well known, California renters are suffering a housing affordability crisis. With rental costs soaring across the state, many San Diego renters are especially hard-pressed to find housing they can afford. San Diego is currently ranked eighth in the nation in terms of rental prices, outpacing major cities like Washington, D.C. and Seattle.

Although the unaffordability of San Diego’s private rental market has been well documented, surprisingly few journalists and policy analysts have examined the affordability and quality of the on-campus housing offered to undergraduates by UCSD and other public universities. To address this gap, we investigated the cost and quality of undergraduate housing at UCSD, and we compared UCSD’s housing options to those offered in private rental markets locally and in other high-cost cities around the country.

To calculate comparable rents, we measured the total square footage of two undergraduate apartments at UCSD: an apartment in Muir College that opened in 2011 and an apartment in the North Torrey Pines Living and Learning Neighborhood, which is part of Sixth College, that opened in 2020.

We then calculated the total monthly rent for each apartment by aggregating each resident’s monthly rent contributions based on the fee schedules posted by UCSD (we discuss our methodology in more detail at the end of this report).

These two aggregates – total square footage and total rent per month – allowed us to calculate the monthly rent per square foot for each apartment, a figure we could then use to compare UCSD rents to average rents locally and in other cities with high housing costs.

What we found was disturbing. When calculated on a price per square foot basis, rent for UCSD’s on campus housing exceeded average rents in La Jolla, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Indeed, UCSD’s rental rates for undergraduate students approximate average rates in Manhattan.

UCSD’s above-market rates are especially shock-inducing since many of its housing facilities are decades-old and, as such, their construction costs should have already been paid off. Additionally, UCSD owns the land on which it has been constructing new undergraduate housing, whereas land prices are one of the main contributors to the high cost of private housing developments in California.

Considering UCSD’s above-market rental rates, one would reasonably assume that the quality of on-campus housing units significantly surpasses that of local off-campus units. But here, too, we found much to be desired; in our interviews with undergraduates, poor conditions and crowding within existing on-campus housing options was a common theme.  

A primary concern of undergraduate interviewees pertained to overcrowding within campus housing facilities and a lack of adequate infrastructure to support the density of residents. For example, one Muir College student reported that over 80 students are expected to share two washing machines, which has caused students to experience wait times of up to three hours for pay-per-load laundry.

Similarly, Kirsten Trinh, a first-year student, told us that there are “20 people using a sink” in her shared on-campus suite and that the sink and toilets in her apartment have had repeated plumbing issues due to frequent use and inadequate maintenance across decades.

Maintenance issues also plague on-campus dorms, especially in the older residence halls and apartment buildings. While students can report maintenance issues through an online ticketing system, several students reported to us that maintenance issues often remain unresolved for weeks or more at a time.

For example, one of our interviewees, Harris Dalal, reported that his dorm's showers began overflowing last August, but UCSD did not fix the issue until winter quarter. Another student, Ellie, who asked that we only use her first name, shared that the laundry machine in her facility was often broken. Other students reported issues with elevators not working, plumbing blockages, clogged trash chutes, lighting outages, frequent water shut-offs, and other routine maintenance problems.

Additionally, some students shared concerns regarding their health and safety with some of the on-campus residential facilities. For example, housing contracts include several hazard warnings of potential exposure to lead-based paint and asbestos in older dormitories built in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2021, a mice infestation broke out in Eleanor Roosevelt College’s dorms.

In one particularly disturbing incident, a Muir College student tragically passed away in 2021 after falling from the window of a shared dormitory bathroom. The student’s parents have sued the University of California Board of Regents, alleging that the large windows in their son’s dorm lacked proper safety devices.

When these quality and safety issues are considered alongside the high cost of rent that UCSD charges undergraduates, UCSD’s significant markup on what is already an unaffordable housing market raises several important questions for UCSD officials, for policymakers, and for members of the public. These questions include: why are on-campus housing costs so high, where does the money go, and who should pay to support high quality public higher education in California.

To begin to address these questions, we first consider historical factors have appear to have led to UCSD’s current housing woes, we then note what UCSD and state officials are doing to try to address the on-campus housing crisis, and we conclude by noting several student activism initiatives that we think point towards more hopeful futures.

Historical Factors Contributing to the On-Campus Housing Crisis

To understand the current housing crisis at UCSD, it is helpful to look at how the relationship between the University of California and the State of California has changed over the past several decades. These changes can be summarized as, on one hand, pressure to enroll more students into the University of California and, on the other hand, decreased funding per student from the State of California. The combination of these entwined trends has changed how the University of California relates to undergraduate students, with student tuition dollars and fees becoming an increasingly important revenue stream for the UCs. As the University orients towards students more like a private enterprise, they have unsurprisingly tried to maximize revenue from students while minimizing costs, including in student housing.

According to a study by the Center in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, state disinvestment in the UC system was particularly severe during the recession of the early 1990s, with similarly dramatic cuts during the 2001 and 2008 economic downturns. During this period, the UC system saw their share of the State General Fund decrease from about 5.5 percent in the early 1990s to as low as 2.5 percent in 2012. Relatedly, while the state legislature provided nearly $20,000 per UC student in 2000, state provisioning per student dropped to just over $8,000 by 2016 (both figures are in 2021 dollars).

At the same time that the state divested from the UCs, both enrollments and tuition have increased dramatically. According to the UC Berkeley study mentioned above, between 1990 and 2015, enrollment at the University of California grew from 166,500 to 257,400. UCSD has grown especially fast during this period, effectively doubling from 16,496 undergraduates in 2000 to 33,096 undergraduates in 2022.

Alongside the dramatic growth in undergraduate enrollment, undergraduate tuition also increased substantially, especially for out-of-state and international students, which the UCs increasingly recruited in an attempt to make up for disinvestment from the state. From 2000 to 2022, California residents saw an increase from $6,794, in inflation adjusted dollars in 2000, to $14,504 in 2022. During the same period, out-of-state and international students saw an increase in tuition and fees from $24,986, in inflation adjusted dollars, in 2000 to $45,530 in 2022. During this same period, the share of total UC funding revenue derived from student tuition and fees grew from 8 percent in 2000 to 22 percent in 2015.

As the study by UC Berkeley’s Center in Higher Education notes, one consequence of this dramatic shift in how the UCs are financially supported is that the UCs now bear the brunt of most capital construction and maintenance costs, both of which likely affect housing costs on campus. While we have been unable to determine how UCSD spends the rent money it collects from undergraduate students, the overall budget picture we just detailed suggests that UCSD may well be using high undergraduate rents, now and projected into the future, to finance new housing development for ongoing enrollment growth.

How UCSD is Responding to its Undergraduate Housing Crisis

For numerous years, UCSD grew its undergraduate enrollments without proportionately increasing its stock of on-campus housing for undergraduate students. Instead, the University responded to increasing enrollments by increasing density within its existing housing stock – by, for example, converting single rooms into mini-double and double rooms into triples – and by reducing or eliminating its student housing guarantees. For example, UCSD started cramming 10 to 12 students into suites originally designed for eight, thus significantly increasing the rent per square foot that UCSD collects, and by reducing its previous four-year housing guarantee to two years.

More recently, and with some assistance from the state, UCSD has been actively building new dorms, including the recently opened North Torrey Pines Living and Learning Neighborhood at Sixth College, the Pepper Canyon West Living and Learning Neighborhood, and a planned Eighth College. According to plans, Eighth College will include a 21-story dormitory, one of the tallest on the west coast, and will house over 2,000 undergraduate students. Similarly, the Pepper Canyon West Neighborhood will provide approximately 1,300 beds for transfer and upper-division students. Additionally, the opening of the Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood in the fall of 2023 will add around 2,000 new beds for undergraduate students. Taken together, UCSD plans to offer an additional 5,300 undergraduate beds by 2025.

While these additions to UCSD’s undergraduate housing stock are welcome and much needed, our investigation into one of UCSD’s most recent undergraduate housing complexes, the North Torrey Pines Living and Learning Neighborhood, suggests that UCSD is pursuing a model of development that increases housing capacity without significantly decreasing costs or increasing quality. In keeping with the Muir Apartment we detailed above, the new apartments in the North Torrey Pines Living and Learning Neighborhood cram many students into limited space.

As such, the price per square foot of the new apartments in the North Torrey Pines Living and Learning Neighborhood are also significantly higher than local averages in high-rent cities across the US. According to our calculations, a two bedroom apartment in the North Torrey Pines Living and Learning complex totals 790 square feet and houses four undergraduates, who, collectively, pay $4,872 a month in rent. That density calculates to $6 per square foot per month, which is higher than the average rent per square foot in any US city except Manhattan.

Additionally, while the new North Torrey Pines facilities appear attractive from the outside, many of the residents with whom we spoke complained about similar issues that affect students living in older dorms, most of which stem from overcrowding.

In sum, while UCSD should be commended for building new undergraduate housing, the model of development that it is pursuing, as exemplified by the North Torrey Pines Living and Learning Neighborhood, suggests that UCSD new housing stock will also be exceeding expensive for what is offered, thus continuing the trend of treating students as sources of revenue in lieu of state support.

More Hopeful Features

We conclude our report on a more optimistic note by pointing to what we see as potentially promising recent developments in undergraduate student activism around the UC’s housing crisis. As mentioned, the historic graduate student strike from this past fall drew international attention to the plight of UC graduate students, much of which stems from high housing costs. Alongside this effort, undergraduate students in the UC system are also increasingly working to make affordable student housing a matter of concern for UC officials and state policymakers.

For example, the system-wide University of California Student Association (UCSA) has recently shifted its focus to the housing crisis. “A lot of students face insecurity when it comes to finding affordable housing while undergoing their undergraduate career,” Eduardo Tapia Jr-Urbieta, the UCSD undergraduate coordinator for the Fund the UC Campaign, told us. “So the Fund the UC Campaign is trying to work on addressing the failures of the UC system when it comes to housing,” he elaborated.

Currently, UCSA is advocating for housing legislation, such as AB 1630, the Housing Density and Upzoning Bill, and it is also working to pass an accountability measure that would let UCSA audit the UC system and bring greater transparency to the system’s approach to financing and provisioning on-campus housing.

In addition to UCSA, student lobbying and advocacy groups at UCSD are pushing for legislative solutions. In an interview with Alec Parra-Miranda, executive director for Triton Lobby Corps, he explained how their advocacy group has partnered with UCSA to help lobby the legislature on behalf of the Fund the UC Campaign. “The association is asking members to present [the Fund the UC] campaign to each of their representative offices,” Parra-Miranda explained. “The goal is to [present our case to] every state legislator and member of congress within the California delegation,” he said.

Parra-Miranda also cautioned against students taking a purely adversarial approach towards UCSD officials and to instead focus on pressuring the state to reinvest in the UCs. “Working together with each other, instead of seeing one as an enemy, can go a long way,” he stated. “At the end of the day, we’re all a part of the UC system. [There should be] relationships between the student body and administrative bodies to ensure a mutual understanding between the two. We need unity,” he elaborated.

While we share Parra-Miranda’s optimism, much work needs to be done to rebuild trust between students and university officials. For one, UCSD officials can be much more inclusive than they have been when it comes to campus planning and development. As Marissa Islas, the Housing and Education Assistant for the Hub Basic Needs Center on campus, put it to us, “Invite us into [the] conversation surrounding campus planning, student retention, and policies that align with our areas of expertise.”

In addition, UCSD officials can be much more transparent than they have been about why housing costs on campus are so high and how they spend the rent monies they collect from students. As long as these financial issues remain hidden from undergraduates, students are right to be outraged when they learn they are paying premium, above-market rent for subpar housing. If the University of California wants to reclaim its proud tradition as a first-rate public university, then housing affordability and quality, not just capacity, must be central to its mission.