Editor’s Note: One source has asked to be named under a pseudonym, indicated in italics. Additionally, certain details about sources are left purposefully vague for safety and privacy reasons. City on a Hill Press is committed to protecting the identity of these individuals. 

Justine Zolnoorian spent her first year at UC Santa Cruz in the Stevenson College dorms. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the campus during her second year in 2020, she moved back to her family’s home in Ventura County.

But by the time Zolnoorian returned to Santa Cruz to finish her fourth year in 2022, housing options were few and far between.

“When I tried to find housing, it was actually impossible to find anything, and anything that was even possibly available was insanely expensive,” she said.

After combing through rental listings on Craigslist, Zolnoorian came across a 1993 Ford Econoline for about $1,500, which she equated to less than an average month’s rent in Santa Cruz. She used her financial aid refund from the university to purchase the van, and planned to sell it once she graduated.

Zolnoorian spent her first night back on campus parked in the Stevenson College parking lot — an area she knew well. Suddenly, she felt sick to her stomach and desperately needed to use the bathroom. She searched her general vicinity alone, in the small hours, unable to locate one, and ended up vomiting on the ground outside her van.

“Oh fuck,” she thought. “This is going to be really hard.”

Zolnoorian’s gritty introduction to van life is not uncommon. Because UCSC guarantees only one year of on-campus housing before relinquishing students to Santa Cruz’s rent market, notably the priciest in the country, many resort to alternative modes of living while attending UCSC.

Whether it be living in a car, van, truck, trailer, on a couch, living room floor or even outside, students have historically made informed — and sometimes risky — decisions about their housing.

Searching for a substantial living space in Santa Cruz leaves students combatting a two-fold issue: the lack of available university housing, and the city’s exorbitant rent market, where the housing wage for a two-bedroom rental home in 2025 stood at $81.21 an hour, substantially higher than the national average of $33.63.

Drawbacks to Van Life

Despite having previous camping experience and a small cohort of fellow vehicle dwellers keeping her company in campus parking lots, Zolnoorian was not immune to van life’s common yet unpredictable drawbacks.

As the California heat intensified, Zolnoorian grew more uncomfortable. Getting her period during the warmer temperatures “fucking sucked.” She recalled having to relocate her van to the Merrill College parking lot, which does not require a parking permit on weekends, so she could be right next to a bathroom.

“The hardest thing was just the isolation of it,” Zolnoorian said. “I had friends living in the dorms that I would go and hang out with, but it was weird to not have a common place to just hang out.”

Justine Zolnoorian’s van set-up

Jane Van Laiff, a fourth-year transfer student currently living in her van, expressed similar frustrations over the meager spaces to decompress. She noted the lack of privacy in her fishbowl of a vehicle, forcing her to constantly remain mobile throughout the day. Napping or lounging in her van is not an option, leading her to spend copious hours at McHenry Library, outside or in campus cafes.

“I go to my car when it gets dark, and I leave as soon as it gets light,” Van Laiff said. “I’ve had to find other ways to occupy myself. I’ve never had a life where I need to figure out what I’m going to do for the next 12 hours of every single day.”

Van Laiff originally looked into housing in Santa Cruz on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, but said that everything she found was at least twice the cost of what she paid when living in San Francisco. With no luck finding an affordable unit, she moved into her old family van, and spent the summer before moving to Santa Cruz converting it for optimal livability.

As a transfer student who receives sufficient financial aid from the university, Van Laiff said the majority of her refund checks go toward the preservation of her van. At one point, she even maxed out her financial aid due to stacked car payments.

“In a way, I am sort of paying rent,” she said. “But at the same time, I do think I am paying substantially less than somebody who is paying $1,000 a month for a place, and most people here are paying more than that anyways.”

She mostly eats out for meals because the fridge in her van can’t keep things colder than 50 degrees, about 10 degrees above the safe refrigeration temperature recommended by the FDA.

“A lot of what I do is just eat food that’s been left out for days and be like, ‘fuck it we ball,’” Van Laiff said. “So far I’ve been lucky, but I think that’s kind of a gamble because not having a stable bathroom for if I get sick is really a scene.”

In one instance, she had to book a hotel room because she was running a 100 degree fever inside her van, which she said can heat up to 100 degrees on warmer days. 

“I was worried I was going to get a heat stroke and die,” she said. 

Van Laiff mentioned another situation where she spent hours attempting to remove a mouse from her van, and eventually decided to shell out money for a hotel room until she could get the mouse out. She described feeling jittery ever since she encountered the mouse, and has gradually learned to attune all of her senses, even while sleeping.

“You’ll hear the tiniest crack and it will wake you up instantly,” she said, snapping her fingers. “You’re on edge without even trying to be.”

Just a Wellness Check? 

While rodents and sickness certainly contribute to a heightened nervous system, one of the foremost trepidations among unhoused students is the possibility of confrontations with law enforcement and unwanted interactions with strangers.

Though living in vehicles is not illegal at the state or local level, UCSC has a rigid policy against taking shelter overnight on campus property. 

According to UCSC’s Chief of Police Kevin Domby, the department responded to about 31 calls for service in 2025 related to reports of individuals sleeping in vehicles on campus property, but only one instance involved a student.

“Officers contacted the individual in the Core West Parking Structure as part of a welfare check. The student was advised of the applicable parking regulations, campus services, and was not cited,” Domby said in an email to City on a Hill Press.

Kevin Silberberg, a transfer student who lived in his car for all four years he attended UCSC, recalled the night he spent in the Core West Parking Structure after a long study session in spring 2025.

Silberberg woke up to two UCSC PD officers knocking on his car door asking if he was okay. They noticed he had a batoning knife sitting in his car that he used for chopping wood. Knives are prohibited on campus property, so the officers handcuffed him and told him to get on the asphalt while they searched his car.

“If they didn’t see the knife, I think they would have probably just left me alone and told me to leave campus,” Silberberg said.

Kevin Silberberg’s car set-up.

As a woman living alone in her vehicle, Justine Zolnoorian expressed often feeling unsafe. She remembered waking up one morning and opening her van to get some fresh air as an older man approached her in the East Remote parking lot. He complimented her setup and asked if she was staying in her van alone, to which she responded yes.

Luckily, the man left shortly after, but she remained uneasy long after the interaction.

“I realized I shouldn’t have told him that,” Zolnoorian said. “I had pepper spray, but I don’t know how that could have been prevented.”

Both Silberberg and Zolnoorian noted that UCSC PD is well aware of unhoused students sleeping in their vehicles on campus. However, current and former unhoused students City on a Hill Press spoke to said that campus law enforcement rarely extends a helping hand to their situation. For Zolnoorian, being ignored by law enforcement was as much a benefit as it was a sign of a bigger administrative problem.

“They let us do this and they look the other way, but then we also lose any feeling of safety that you get if you live on campus,” she said. “I felt like I was a second-class student in a way.”

Chief of Police Kevin Domby emphasized that when UCSC PD encounters individuals sleeping in vehicles on campus, their approach is mainly focused on welfare.

“Is it happening more than what we know about? Probably,” Domby said in an interview with City on a Hill Press. “But we’re responding less about a policy violation than we are to just check on the well-being of a person sleeping in their car.”

“I understand the challenges of finding housing here for our folks,” Domby continued. “But we would prefer to connect them with a resource rather than serve as a reminder of the rules and policies of the university.”

Evan Morrison, the executive director of People First of Santa Cruz County, a nonprofit serving the general unhoused population, said the university mirrors a common phenomenon he has observed in the policing of unhoused individuals.

“We have, for lack of better word, a tradition in this community and countrywide, of throwing police or security guards at every problem,” he said.

Morrison emphasized the need for UCSC to employ trained social workers in place of police officers to make contact with the unhoused student population, expressing that this approach may grant more trust between the unhoused student and the university.

“Security guards are not trained social workers,” he said. “I have never met a security guard who is trained in connecting people with resources, or who understands the nuances of motivational interviewing and trauma-informed care.”

“No wonder these students feel left alone by the university, and no wonder our general homeless population on the street feels left alone by our community,” Morrison continued. “They’re interacting with law enforcement, not with people who are there to actually help them.”

For Tomas Tedesco, a 2019 alum who lived in his van, UCSC PD’s approach falls under the guise of a wellness check, and is actually doing more harm than good.

“Wellness check, my ass,” he said.

Tedesco made the preemptive decision not to sleep on university grounds out of fear of police harassment. He began parking on city streets when he first moved to Santa Cruz, all the while searching for a place to park safely. He recalled the psychological stress he experienced in the first month of sleeping in his van.

“I was always sleeping with one eye open,” he said. “You start to develop a sixth sense for when you’re in danger.”

For one week, Tedesco and his friends decided to test out sleeping in the East Remote parking lot together. He described it as a “beautiful week,” consisting of cooking meals as a group and hanging out in the evenings after class. One night, all three of them were abruptly awoken by UCSC PD.

“I remember the violent knocks and spotlights flashing into my eyes. It was four in the morning, and I had class in two hours,” Tedesco said. “I remember feeling like such a criminal for sleeping.”

He exited his van and was met with three patrol cars and five police officers. The officers told him they were just checking to make sure Tedesco and his friends were safe. 

“I was like, ‘I felt safe until you came, to be honest,’” he said. “It was a very hard experience.”

Banana Slugs to Snails

After that jarring night, Tedesco had endured enough. He began organizing other unhoused students to implore the university to create a safe parking program for overnight sleeping and to end their policing of unhoused students. They called themselves the Snail Movement, self-identifying as transient slugs that carry shelter on their backs — much like the shell of a snail.

The Snail Movement shared their needs through a petition that circulated among the broader Santa Cruz community. A number of campus groups endorsed their petition, including the Student Union Assembly and the Santa Cruz Linguistics and Philosophy group, composed of UCSC faculty and graduate students.

The Snail Movement garnered enough support to turn their requests for basic needs into an ongoing dialogue with campus administrators and the UC regents in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“At the core of the movement, we just wanted the safety of sleep, so we could carry on our education,” Tedesco said.

Tedesco described some of his conversations with the UCSC administration at the time as “very helpful,” while others as “fastidious.” He unveiled several instances in which UCSC administrators turned down the Snail Movement’s proposal for allowing students to sleep in their vehicles on campus.

City on a Hill Press obtained an email exchange from December 2018 between Tedesco and Dean of Students Garrett Naiman that reveals the dismaying rejection of the Snail Movement’s requests.

“Unfortunately, talks with various administrators around campus have not led to the outcome you were all looking for,” Naiman wrote. “Jaye and I have been informed that the campus is not willing to back such a policy because of the safety and legal issues it would present,” Jaye Padgett, who is referenced in this line of the email, was vice provost for the Division of Student Affairs and Success at the time.

Tedesco responded to Naiman’s email, asking the dean if he could be more specific about the aforementioned legal and safety barriers. Naiman replied with a written policy, copied and pasted from the Student Policies and Regulations Handbook, stating that camping is prohibited on university owned, controlled or leased property, which includes sleeping on top, in or under any parked vehicle. The policy, written in Article 102, Section 28 of the current student handbook, remains evident: sleeping in cars was, and still is, against the rules. 

“There are several other land use, risk, and cost related considerations that are not ‘policy’ but that would limit our ability to implement such a program,” Naiman continued in the email. He did not elaborate on what exactly those considerations entailed. 

Tedesco noted the sizable wealth gap between the unhoused students who made up the Snail Movement and the administrators they corresponded with, which he said “didn’t really seem fair.”

In 2019, Naiman received a gross salary of $189,698 as the newly minted dean of students. Notably, Jaye Padgett had a gross salary of $233,975 during this period of negotiations with the Snail Movement.

“You’re not letting us do this and you have enough money in two years of working that you could buy a house,” Tedesco said.

President of the Santa Cruz Chapter of the California Homeless Union, Alicia Kuhl, shared Tedesco’s sentiment, noting that people in a position of wealth and power are less likely to remain cognizant of the unhoused individuals they share a space with.

“If you really open your eyes, it’s obvious to a lot of people, but if you are comfy and cozy and well off, you may not be worried about homelessness or homeless people,” she said. “We really need everybody to understand that it is affecting you, even if it’s not affecting you directly, it’s affecting the fact that you’re losing community spirit, and it’s affecting the people around you.”

The Stigmatization of Being Unhoused 

Tedesco spoke to the trauma that leads people to live in their vehicles, and the trauma that a person can experience while living in a vehicle, stirring deep psychological and physical pain. He said this feeling hits him most when he goes on vacation in his van.

“I will park in a place that I know is safe and I’ll still have physical flashbacks to the fear response, and that feeling of not belonging,” he said.

David Jung, who graduated in 2024, started living in his car during his second year after spending his first year in a dorm. Before his second year, he thought he would find a place with friends and eventually split the rent like everyone else, but as time went on, he realized car living was more sustainable.

Jung described the stigma that came along with being unhoused as a student, often feeling like he had to lie to his friends about his living situation. He recalled coming back to campus for his second year and constantly hearing the questions, “Where are you living now? What are you doing for housing?”

“I remember getting asked that right off the bat was always unsettling. It was hard to tell the truth when you’re living in your car,” Jung said. “It was extremely embarrassing. I would lie to friends and tell them a little story, but the truth was that every night I would end up in the parking lot and sleep in my car there.”

David Jung’s car set-up.

Esmeralda Hurtado, a third-year critical race and ethnic studies major who was unhoused for nearly the entire year of 2025, shared Jung’s sentiment that it felt humiliating telling strangers, especially professors, about her living situation in order to complete her required coursework.

“It’s really unbelievably fucking humiliating constantly telling strangers, ‘hey, I’m homeless, I live in my car, and I cannot do what you need me to do, but can you help me out?’” she said, referring to the amount of times she had to ask for extensions on class assignments.

“It is already hard enough to take care of yourself while you are a student who is housed on campus with full-time dining hall access,” Hurtado continued. “It’s already hard enough to take care of yourself in those conditions … and when you multiply it by being unhoused and working multiple jobs to try and make money and survive, there is not enough time in the day to do what is asked of you by the institution.”

Justine Zolnoorian maintained a low profile while living in her van on campus, in case campus security or university law enforcement ever decided to approach her. The fear of being discovered left her feeling isolated and as though she was doing something wrong.

“It was a totally different side of school, because I was a student, but I didn’t really feel supported at all,” she said. “I had to hide this thing that I was doing just to be a student there.”

Alicia Kuhl explained that the broader misconceptions associated with being unhoused are more institutionalized than people may realize.

“When you lose your housing, you’re immediately othered. The stigma is centered around blaming the individual for this crisis that is so much larger than them,” she said. “There’s stigma involved in the way police treat you, there’s stigma involved in the way the community looks at you, and there’s stigma involved in going to a shelter where they put you in a database if you receive services.”

Evan Morrison serves the population of unhoused individuals in Santa Cruz County, which he noted is a large portion of the community compared to most regions in the country. Though he rarely sees UCSC students utilizing People First’s programs, he noted the hypocritical nature of placing judgement on the unhoused community.

“It is unusually difficult to keep a roof over your head in this culture, regardless of your circumstances,” Morrison said. “At the same time, we have yet to get to the point where we’re forgiving of people who fail in that endeavor.”

Jung admittedly held a different perspective on the unhoused community before becoming unhoused himself. He said that living in his car opened his eyes to a population he once perceived as lazy.

“I myself didn’t really understand what it meant to be homeless, and I always thought that homeless people were people that didn’t work hard enough,” Jung said. “But after an experience like that, it made me realize how much of a difficult system is to get out of. Once you’re homeless, it’s really hard to get out of it.”

Jung expressed having unwavering support during his time as an unhoused student through a community of people that rallied behind him, offering food, shelter and resources.

“It was totally doable for me, just by the way I set up my routine and everything, and by the support I was able to receive from everyone,” Jung said. “It wasn’t possible without the help I got from friends, faculty, even Slug Support.”

Slug Support and University Resources

While some unhoused students felt satisfied with the help they received from university resources, others found difficulty in accessing support and felt disconcerted by limitations in resources. 

Esmeralda Hurtado warned that when it comes to reaching out for help with housing from the university, it’s a lost cause.

“It’s one of those things that’s not even worth talking about. It’s why it doesn’t come up in conversation because it’s already understood without saying that there is no help, there is no support,” she said.

Hurtado said she received minimal aid from Slug Support, a university-operated program for students facing personal, financial or academic challenges, while she was unhoused. Despite picking up on the sentiment that staff members wanted to help her, she said they couldn’t because “their hands were tied.”

Hurtado joined Slug Support’s waitlist catered toward at-risk students to receive temporary housing in a hotel, along with links to other resources in Santa Cruz County such as storm shelters for unhoused individuals. She noted that many of these options were temporary solutions to a seemingly permanent issue.

“These are resources that are made for people living on the street, and even for them, it’s nowhere near good enough,” she said. “It’s below any semblance of the kind of care and help they need.”

Many students across the years expressed frustrations with Slug Support as a resource for housing and food insecurity. Kevin Silberberg found out about Slug Support in his second year and reached out for meal assistance. They gave him 14 meal swipes, equating to two meals a day for one week. 

In an email exchange obtained by City on a Hill Press, Silberberg asked for additional food assistance, to which Slug Support denied, stating that as “a crisis resource [they] can’t give meal swipes out every quarter to the same student.” While Slug Support offered to discuss other options he might qualify for, Silberberg expressed disappointment with what was provided.

“Why not support a student throughout their entire academic career rather than it just being for emergencies only?” he said. “If you don’t have housing and you don’t have food, is one week worth of food and one week worth of housing really going to do anything in the grand scheme of things?”

For Jane Van Laiff, Slug Support was very helpful when she maxed out her financial aid due to van repairs, and even helped her obtain a parking pass when her vehicle wasn’t registered. However, when it came to food, she encountered lackluster solutions.

Van Laiff reached out to Slug Support asking if there was a way she could obtain a discounted meal plan. She said she could not afford paying for the Blue Dining Plan — the cheapest meal plan option — which amounts to $1,452 per quarter. While they did not allow her to purchase a meal plan at a lower price, Slug Support offered her extra swipes donated from other students’ meal plans from the previous quarter.

She received six swipes — the maximum amount they could provide her for the rest of the year.

“That’s two days of food,” she said.

Van Laiff shared an email exchange between her and Slug Support with City on a Hill Press. In the email, she expressed that she lost her CalFresh benefits and needed more meal swipes, to which a staff member at Slug Support replied, “I will send you three right now since you are in a pinch. But yeah, unfortunately you are maxed out for the year. Still definitely let me know if something comes up though!”

Slug Support’s website explicitly states that “there is a cap for funding per academic year, and approvals are on a case by case basis.” The amount of assistance capped is not specified.

Van Laiff said she noticed an information gap between what the staff at Slug Support provided and what resources actually existed. At one point, she asked a staff member at Slug Support if there was a place on campus for her to store, cook and prepare food.

The staff member directed her to the Leonardo Commuter Lounge, which she was told had fully equipped kitchens. When she arrived at the lounge, she only saw a sink, a fridge that did not have rules about taking other people’s food, and a single hot plate.

When she reconvened with Slug Support to tell them about the lack of amenities the lounge’s kitchen provided, the same staff member had no idea that the services were sub-par.

“I think there is a lack of information being provided to the people who are actually trying to provide these services, so they are giving out misinformation just because they are being kept in the dark about what is available,” Van Laiff said.

Jane Van Laiff’s van interior.

Other services on campus are praised among the unhoused student community as being particularly helpful and easily accessible. Justine Zolnoorian went to Cowell Coffee Shop (CCS) every morning, a relieving ritual thanks to their transactionless services. CCS was the only campus resource she took advantage of because she didn’t feel like she had to explain herself. She expressed this as a widespread feeling across the unhoused student community.

“People in general might feel weird about seeking out that kind of help for housing because it’s like ‘am I going to get in trouble for what I’m doing right now?’” she said. “It’s nice to not be questioned and just have help with the thing you need.”

In an email to City on a Hill Press, Director of Slug Support Mariah Lyons acknowledged that while housing insecurity continues to impact students, the number of students requiring emergency services has declined in the last two years, from 37 students in 2023 to 21 students in 2025.

“While we are encouraged by this trend, we recognize that housing insecurity is complex and can look very different from student to student,” Lyons wrote. “While Slug Support is not a permanent housing provider, the office works intensively with students during emergency housing placements to help them transition into stable long-term housing arrangements.”

Meanwhile, Zolnoorian described the relationship between the unhoused student community and UCSC as having a growing “rift” of distrust when it comes to on-campus resources.

“I don’t really know of anyone who was utilizing whatever other resources there would be, because I feel like there’s just a general lack of trust for it.” she said. “You guys are aware of this thing happening but won’t actually do anything about making us feel safe and having a designated space to do this.”

The Closure of Camper Park and the Reflection of University Priorities

Calls for the university to create an officially sanctioned campground for the unhoused student population are coming from inside — and outside — the house. Many unhoused students and houseless advocates have acknowledged the importance of safety in numbers and securing each other in community. 

However, the university’s decision to close down the Camper Park, its most affordable on-campus housing option, right before summer in 2024, left students and community members disillusioned.

“Camper Park met a need that nothing else met,” Evan Morrison said. “Knowing that there is a need for units at that price range, and to see that UCSC’s decision was to end the Camper Park was very unfortunate.”

Natalie Twilegar, a fourth-year environmental studies major, lived at the Camper Park during her second year, which was the reason she applied to UCSC. When the university threatened to close the park towards the end of that academic year, she spent the rest of her second year organizing a community to rally against its imminent closure.

“The university was facing lawsuits, and Camper Park, at the state it was in, was a liability for the university,” she said, noting that at the time of the park’s closure, student activism was at its peak. Twilegar referenced the height of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and the outrage that followed the death of Dan Stevenson, the bus driver who died in the fatal loop bus crash of December 2023.

While the Camper Park faced countless maintenance issues, including mold and gas leaks, Twilegar emphasized that an alternative student population reminiscent of UCSC’s counterculture movement from the 1960s and ’70s contradicted the university’s goals at the time.

“Authority figures having students, who are pulling forward this legacy of resistance, congregated in one place is a threat,” she said.

While campus administrators determined the fate of the Camper Park, a lot of “Parkies” waited on finding housing until they knew the Camper Park closure was finalized. Twilegar expressed the lack of timeliness when it came to the university providing support to Parkies during this time of uncertainty.

“They definitely did not offer resources in a timely manner, and did not keep us in the loop about a transparent decision making process,” she said.

When the Camper Park shut down with barely a few weeks’ notice, Twileger said the administration connected them to housing resources through a few links in an email, but the support ended at that.

“There was no ‘we will help you find housing,’” she said. “And at that point, I had lost my trust with the university and the desire to live on campus anymore.”

Twilegar said the “top-down” structure the university follows by essentially “taking orders from the UC office of the president and the UC regents,” perpetuates a corporatized ethos beyond the control of individual administrators.

“The UC system is a business,” she said. “It runs like a business that prioritizes profit over people, but I do think the individual humans that are a part of the system are not inherently evil or trying to make decisions that cause students harm.”

To this day, many students grieve the loss of the Camper Park and condemn the university for seizing up the remnants of a mainstay counter movement.

“I was so incredibly devastated by the loss of the RV campground,” Jane Van Laiff said. “It is such a big sham. I think it’s very obvious that they cleared the area under the guise of fire safety, but the real intent was to just get people out so they could charge them more money for housing instead.”

Proposed Developments, Ignored Solutions

Deciding how to build housing, what that housing looks like, and how much housing is built is entirely at UCSC’s discretion. Founder of the UCSC Housing Coalition, Zennon Ulyate-Crow, described how this individualized approach to housing development means that the university is not fully using “economies of scale” to solve the problem.

Ulyate-Crow spoke to the concept of the UC system lacking a centralized housing authority that can build housing to disperse across all nine campuses.

“You could do a lot more for a lot less money,” Ulyate-Crow said. “But because there’s really limited coordination between campuses, that doesn’t happen.”

He brought up various flaws in the university’s financial model for building more on-campus housing. “The more money that you have as collateral for building housing, the better loans you get.”

Right now, UCSC uses a revenue bond model to build student housing, meaning the cost to build is paid off over time through auxiliary funds and revenue generated from student rent.

Ulyate-Crow said if the university shifted its model to a general obligation bond, which would leverage the tuition backing of the entire UC system rather than the individual campus or project, UCSC would have more money to build affordable housing through loans.

“There’s a whole bunch of things they could do on a bigger scale, but the real conflict is that the UC doesn’t see student housing as a part of their educational mission … they see housing as an auxiliary,” he said.

“There’s an institutional unwillingness for the UC to shoulder the burden of providing housing for their students, which is fair,” Ulyate-Crow continued. “Most university systems around the globe do not do this, but obviously we have a uniquely acute housing crisis in California, and there’s a need for them to take a more active role in actually investing in the experts and the capacity to build student housing at the scale in which we need it.”

Laura Arroyo, associate vice chancellor for Colleges, Housing, and Educational Services (CHES), commented on how housing affordability and insecurity impact students at UCSC and on a statewide scale, stating that they take these issues seriously at CHES.

“UCSC has continued making substantial investments in student housing and support systems. The campus currently houses more than 50 percent of undergraduate students on campus, one of the highest percentages in the UC system, and approximately 98 percent of first-year students live on campus,” Arroyo wrote in an email to City on a Hill Press. “Importantly, for the first time in more than 20 years, UCSC exhausted its housing waitlist this year, meaning all students who remained on the waitlist and sought university housing were ultimately offered a space.”

City on a Hill Press could not confirm Arroyo’s statement that all students who signed up for the waitlist this year received university housing by the time of publication.

Arroyo also noted the emergence of multiple housing projects, including Kresge College, Delaware apartments, Family Student Housing, upper-division housing on Heller Drive, and a housing partnership with Cabrillo College, to expand long-term housing capacity for students. 

While Arroyo mentioned in her email that “UCSC continues strengthening off-campus housing support, emergency housing response systems, coordinated student care services, and partnerships that help students navigate housing challenges with greater support and stability,” she did not answer the question about what immediate action the university is taking to help unhoused students, nor did she specify any actionable items.

“We recognize that housing concerns can create significant stress and uncertainty for students,” Arroyo continued. “We remain committed to continuing this work in partnership with students and the broader community to strengthen housing access, support, and long-term student success.”

Some former and current students remain skeptical of the proposed housing developments.

Tomas Tedesco said that the university’s plan to build more housing is “bullshit” and not actually catered towards housing the unhoused student population.

“That’s money that goes in their pockets,” he said. “That’s not housing that’s going to be used by students that are houseless. Saying they’re building more housing in the future means they’ll be making more money in the future from other students that can afford it.”

Are 9 Percent of UCSC Students Actually Unhoused?

Despite the purported statistic that 9 percent of UCSC students experienced homelessness at some point during the 2019-20 academic year, the actual number of unhoused UCSC students remains shrouded in mystery. Originally unearthed from the 2020 Undergraduate Experience Survey, this percentage is, in essence, riddled with limitations.

“It’s not statistical at all. It’s who has time to fill out the survey,” said Zennon Ulyate-Crow. “People that are marginalized and that may be living on the street are the ones that are the least likely to take part in this kind of information gathering,” he said.

The survey, conducted every two years across all nine UC campuses, faced dwindling response rates between 2020 and 2024, with overall response rates at UCSC dropping from 29 to 23 percent. Additionally, the survey question of where students are living for the academic term faced a sharp decrease in respondents over the years, going from 4,181 in 2020 to 2,817 in 2024 — a 32.6 percent decline in raw data collection.

Ulyate-Crow said this lack of data is partially attributed to the university not conducting proper statistical analysis on findings from the survey.

“It’s very clear that the university doesn’t want to release statistics on student homelessness because it’s a bad look,” he said. “They don’t want to be held accountable for the number of students that are experiencing homelessness.”

Tomas Tedesco said that during his time at UCSC, he had to “guesstimate” the number of unhoused UCSC students due to the sparse data available.

“They don’t keep track of how many houseless encounters they have,” he said. “They don’t think forest dwelling or van dwelling are viable ways of existing and they don’t want that reputation on themselves.”

Definitions of “homelessness” have changed over time, and heavily depend on how individuals who lack a permanent house address identify their living situation. Don Lane, a UCSC sociology lecturer who teaches a class called “Solving Homelessness,” noted that the term “virtually homeless” can be used to describe a lack of stable, secure or permanent housing, which differs significantly from street houselessness.

“In homelessness, there’s a lot of lingo that has nuanced meaning,” he said. “That’s where the number gets pretty high,” referencing the 9 percent statistic generated from self-reported data.

Esmeralda Hurtado emphasized the distinction between street houselessness and student houselessness, noting that students can hold a level of discreteness that is not often feasible among the general unhoused population.

“The fact that we have access to cars and some modicum of shelter is itself a privilege,” she said. “The fact that any student is homeless in the first place is already an indictment of how the system is working.”

Lane echoed this sentiment on a broader scale.

“In a sense, homelessness is the number one gauge of seeing how broken a system is,” he said. “If your system is leaving a lot of people living on the street, then you’ve got a lot of people falling to the very bottom of the cracks.”

Collecting data on the unhoused population is notoriously difficult, often leading to persistent data gaps and the exclusion of people who go unaccounted for in self-reported surveys and headcounts. Evan Morrison often participates in the Point-in-Time Count, a federally mandated census of all unhoused individuals in a specific region. He said given the stealthy nature of unhoused students, he believes the Point-in-Time Count captures “almost none” of the UCSC students who are unhoused.

Lane also pointed to the fact that unhoused students move under the radar, which he said can have an adverse effect on incentivizing university administrators and politicians to enact change and accommodate the needs of the unhoused student population.

“Think about what that means politically,” he said. “If you don’t see it, it’s not going to get the attention of policymakers.”

Zennon Ulyate-Crow explained that the less data the university has to reference the unhoused student population, the less opportunity there is for change within the UC system.

“The university should be transparent about the rate at which people are experiencing homelessness,” he said. “We can’t begin to solve a problem if we don’t even understand it.”

Simply put, there is no exact number of unhoused students at UCSC. Though the university has not indicated plans to disclose a specific number, the community has made it clear that they are and will continue to find alternative ways of persevering, surviving and thriving. 

“The university is not and cannot be our salvation,” Esmeralda Hurtado said. “It cannot be our helper, because it is our executioner.”