When Matthew Smith and his partner Samantha Stringer got off the waitlist for Family Student Housing (FSH), the whole picture changed. Having dropped out of his PhD program for a year because he couldn’t afford to live off-campus, getting into FSH allowed him to return.

At FSH, Smith found a wonderfully diverse community. Residents host impromptu dinners and kids constantly play with one another. Toys lay scattered around the complex, shared amongst families. Many neighbors simply let themselves into each other’s units. 

But now, with FSH rent increasing by 25 percent as part of its move to a new site in East Meadow, Smith might lose this community.

“They basically de facto fired me by raising rent like this, because they’re not paying enough for us to comfortably afford living in these new units they’re building,” Smith said. “It means that I’m going to have to stop working at the school, and I’ll have to go back to part-time work in my old job.” 

As part of UC Santa Cruz’s Student Housing West Project, FSH is moving to a new 120-unit complex in the East Meadow. While construction on the new complex nears an end, the current FSH remains in chronic disrepair. 

Built in 1972, FSH is an aging collection of 196 two-bedroom apartments situated on the west side of campus that seldom receive maintenance. The beige dwellings are riddled with problems ranging from rampant mold growth and bad insulation to deteriorating retaining walls and power outages, according to residents. This all will be demolished to build other student housing upon the expected opening of the new complex in late 2025.

White sandbags surround a previously flooded Family Student Housing apartment, one of around 60 in the complex that now sit empty. This unit, along with 195 others, will be demolished upon the completion of a new FSH complex.

With the new complex comes a new price tag: $2,500 a month, which is $527 more than the current rate of $1,973. It will also have 76 less units.

“Seeing the public health concerns around the current level [of] deferred maintenance at our complex and then being told ‘We’re reducing the number of units by [almost] 80,’ even though there’s a massive waitlist, and ‘We’re raising rent by [nearly] 30 percent, we’re making the units smaller’ — all these things,” said FSH resident Aron Chang. “They really don’t make sense.”

Amenities Included, but at What Cost?

FSH residents currently pay for rent separate from utilities, giving them a degree of control over their expenses, though bills are often exacerbated by issues at the complex. The new FSH rolls utilities into the rent, removing their limited autonomy over living costs.

UCSC has touted the fact that rates are 49 percent below market rate, but residents point out that these units are not, technically, on the market.  

“It’s a bit of a red herring to make that comparison,” Chang said. 

On graduate student salaries, $2,500 a month constitutes rent burden even for a household earning a dual graduate income. Some FSH households rely on a single graduate income to support a family of three or four.

“Market rate is totally irrelevant to grad students. We only have the incomes that we have to work with, and the university knows that rent burden constitutes more than 30 percent of your income and they know severe rent burden is more than 50 percent of your income,” said FSH resident LuLing Osofsky. “They just treat us as tenants that they can exploit.”

The UC has around a 7 percent stake in Blackstone, a real estate investment group that actively contributes to rising housing costs. The UC is also the largest landlord in California, managing around 150,000 beds in student housing and $5 billion in direct real estate investments. 

“I think they definitely have an obligation to alleviate [the housing crisis],” Osofsky said. “But they’re doing the opposite and actively contributing to the housing crisis.”

A Ghost Town

“That one’s empty, that one’s empty, that one’s empty, that one’s empty,” said Osofsky as she walked around her block, pointing at red “VACANT” signs she plastered on some units. “The one on the right is empty, that one is empty — Wow, I sound like a broken record.”

To highlight the long waitlist and high demand for on-campus housing, Family Student Housing (FSH) resident LuLing Osofsky posts homemade paper signs onto the doors of vacant units throughout FSH.

60 units are unoccupied at the current complex, despite a cited three to six month wait for families with children. Some vacancies are part of a deliberate strategy to reduce occupants “in order to match the 120 household capacity of the new Family Student Housing buildings,” according to an email sent to residents from the FSH office. 

“We’re gradually reducing the population through attrition so that all families remaining in residence by fall 2025 will have the opportunity to move into a new home in the new Family Student Housing community,” said assistant vice chancellor of communications and marketing Scott Hernandez-Jason in an email to City on a Hill Press. 

Originally announced as a 140-unit complex, the new FSH was reduced to 120 units because UCSC “faced significant increases in capital development costs,” said communications director for student affairs and campus climate Erin Elliott, in an email to City on a Hill Press. “Many of which were further exacerbated by the pandemic.”

Even before the cut to 120, the original planned complex had still 56 less units than the current FSH. The reasoning for these cuts, residents say, hasn’t been properly justified.

“[The reduction in units] hasn’t been presented to us as a result of funding issues. It’s been presented to us as that they’re directly responding to the need. But there’s a two to three year waitlist, so that’s patently false,” said FSH resident Alexandra Stokes. “The reality is that what they’re doing is covering their own butts, because they don’t want to be seen kicking families out of housing that they desperately need when we move over to the new complex.” 

In addition to frustrations about the price and number of units, residents have expressed concerns about the new location, including the absence of trees, lack of an accessible bus stop, adjacency to a large road and general isolation from the rest of campus. 

“The sense that some of my neighbors have is that the university doesn’t really want to have to deal with families,” Chang said. “It’s like there’s no conception of what families might actually contribute to a campus.”