Six floors, five months, two crutches, one broken ankle and no elevator.

This was Kresge building B resident Lucy Rich’s introduction to her first year at UC Santa Cruz. 

“I picked Kresge because I read that it’s the newest, nicest building,” Rich said. “When I first got there I could tell it was a very new building. But it just doesn’t work like a new building. It’s having a lot of issues that I think a lot of people wouldn’t expect.”

 Just shy of midnight on Oct. 30, 2025, the elevator in Kresge dorm building B broke down with students trapped inside, according to UCSC spokespeople Erin Elliot, Scott Hernandez-Jason and the Colleges, Housing, and Educational Services (CHES). After emergency services responded, the elevator remained out of service until April 10, 2026. 

A City on a Hill Press staff member recounted their experience living at Kresge building B during the 2023-2024 academic year. That first year the building housed occupants, the same elevator was out of operation for several months.  

Students were restricted to using the stairs to access their dorms throughout both of these extended breakdowns.

For the most recent elevator malfunction, the university initially informed residents that the elevator would be up and running in about four weeks or so. As time went by with no word, residents began to feel hopeless. 

“We didn’t get a response beyond, ‘We’re working on it, it’ll get done sometime,’” said Kresge B resident Jackal Aldrige. “It turned from four weeks into two months into four months.”

Ultimately, the elevator was out of order for nearly six months, which is more than half of the academic school year. 

Students on the sixth floor of Kresge B created prediction polls on when the elevator would be fixed. They wrote them out on whiteboards and hung them outside their doors for passersbys’ to tally their guesses. 

A whiteboard left on the front door of a 6th floor Kresge B dorm asking passersby to tally their guesses for how long the elevator would be broken. Photo by Paulina Garcia. 

For some students, these elevator shortages were an annoying inconvenience, but for others, this obstacle required significant planning. 

“I had to take each stair one at a time and it took me 15 minutes to get up to my room,” Lucy Rich said. “I upgraded the size of my backpack and carried everything I would need for the entire day. I would leave in the morning and wouldn’t come back until it was time to sleep because it wasn’t accessible for me.

“With the crutches, I couldn’t carry anything,” she continued. “So whenever I got groceries or did laundry, I needed someone to come with me to bring it up to the floor because I physically couldn’t.” 

In an email to City on a Hill Press, Erin Elliot, Scott Hernandez-Jason and CHES explained that the five-month-long process was due to significant damage to the elevator door and its frame. 

This damage required CHES to order a custom-made elevator door that extended the anticipated repair timeline from weeks to months, with little transparency to residents in Kresge B. UCSC Physical Planning, Development and Operations and the elevator maintenance provider, KONE, collaborated to complete the repairs. 

As of May 20, 2026, the elevator is operational. Posted next to the elevator door is a a flyer requesting residents submit CruzFix tickets if it breaks down again.

As of publication, the Kresge B elevator has been fixed, although students are bracing for the possibility of relying on the stairs during move out. Rich in particular is concerned about the reliability of Kresge B’s faulty elevator, as according to her, it has been experiencing issues post-repairs.

“[If it breaks again] … I’m going to have to move out of my dorm without an elevator on the sixth floor,” Rich said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to move out all that furniture and all my bags and everything. I just don’t see it being something that will be fixed by then either.”

Rich reached out to UCSC’s Disability Resource Center (DRC) for support during this process to receive accommodations. They connected her to the campus-wide Disability Van Services (DVS), through which she received services for only two weeks. After that, she was hesitant to repeat the lengthy re-application process to receive further accommodations, as she felt that her experience with the DVS was also unreliable. 

Rich noted that the DVS often arrived late to pick her up, sometimes not showing up at all without notice. This resulted in many class tardies and conversations with concerned professors. 

Obstacles, Frustrations and Acceptance

While repeated elevator outages are a regular obstacle for residents, they are one of many issues within the Kresge residential buildings.

“They shut off our water about two weeks ago because one of the faucets came off,” said Kresge C resident assistant Logan Keeler. “The other buildings’ and ours were loose, and they gave us absolutely no timeline on when it was being fixed.”

The Kresge B lounge faucet has since been repaired, but other maintenance issues reveal a similar trend of unreliable amenities. Keeler noted additional issues located in the lounge, such as broken safety features for the windows, a broken radiator, a broken door and unfastened light fixtures. 

Throughout this experience, one question remains: if the Kresge dorms are the newest residential buildings on campus, why are they experiencing such a high volume of maintenance issues?

According to Scott Hernandez-Jason, “UCSC does not believe the available data supports that characterization. Between April 10, 2025, and April 10, 2026, Kresge residential buildings received fewer maintenance requests overall than Porter residential buildings during the same period.” 

However, this statement only raises further concerns on the state of other residential living spaces at UCSC. According to the Division of Occupational Safety and Health’s temporary permits — which can be found inside every elevator on campus — both Kresge building B and C’s elevators have not been inspected since August 2023. 

A Division of Occupational Safety and Health temporary permit is posted inside the Kresge building B elevator. It expired in September 2023.

When asked about the outdated permits and required routine elevator inspections, Hernandez-Jason failed to respond to the question. 

As a high volume of maintenance issues on campus persist, students are questioning the university’s priority in not only addressing them, but preventing them. 

“The new Kresge Buildings are a really easy example of how the school doesn’t take care of their students,” Keeler said. “Because something as small as inspecting the elevators every year ‘isn’t something that they could do’ with the really high housing costs that they have in these places.”