No room in the dorm? California students get creative with housing.

Le’Ana Jackson, a senior at the University of California, Riverside, is ambivalent about campus housing.

In her freshman year, the school didn’t tell her until a month before classes started that she and her roommate could share a $1,750-a-month one-bedroom apartment. They couldn’t sign their lease until the second week of October, so she had to pay to stay in a hotel.

“My parents were angry. They said, ‘Just change schools.’ Come home to Sacramento State.” But I waited two weeks,” Ms. Jackson said.

Students in one of California’s three higher education systems face a range of situations. Some people have lived in vehicles or traveled long distances from home. Schools have increased dormitory capacity. Housing costs and rental prices have skyrocketed after the pandemic.

California is a snapshot of how this issue has played out for students across the United States. Frustration with campuses across the state is common as we enter a new school year.

“We need to be able to continue to expand our housing,” said Gerry Bomotti, vice chancellor at UC Riverside, “but at the same time we need to be aware of (a wide variety of) cost options and offer them to people … so they can afford to come here to come and get an education.”

Le’Ana Jackson makes no secret of her ambivalence toward the University of California, Riverside, campus housing office. Questionable experiences during her sophomore and junior years forced her to be more proactive as a senior.

She applied for on-campus housing last March — and never heard back from the school. So she and two friends split a six-bedroom house near campus with three other female students they don’t know.

“UCR has a reputation for awarding more housing to students than it can accommodate,” said Ms. Jackson, a political science major.

Although that school is the center of Mrs. Jackson’s misery, a report found that there were as many as 417,000 California students who lacked stable housing in the state’s three higher education systems: the University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges. Some students have lived in vehicles or traveled long distances from home – a few by plane. Schools have pushed dormitory capacity to the limit, where units that once housed two students now house three students. The problem is two-sided: the lack of inventory for students to rent and affordability. Housing costs and rents have skyrocketed here after the pandemic, as they have elsewhere in the United States.

California is a snapshot of how this issue has played out for students across the country. According to a report released in 2021 by The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, 43% of college students and 52% of community college students in fall 2020 reported experiencing housing insecurity. Students also reported higher rates of anxiety and depression, lower GPAs, and poorer health.

In California, the reality of near-homelessness can be bleak, and frustration on campuses across the state is common as you enter another school year.

“We need to be able to continue to expand our housing, but at the same time be aware of and provide (a wide variety of) cost options for people… so they can afford to come here and get their education, says Gerry Bomotti, Vice Chancellor of planning, budget and administration at the University of California, Riverside.

Mr. Bomotti says that unlike schools on the California coast, UC Riverside had plenty of private housing available to students at a reasonable price before the COVID-19 crisis. After the pandemic, 32,000 units were filled by people leaving the more expensive coastal areas for what is known as the Inland Empire, exacerbating the housing problem where UC Riverside is located. In addition, the UC system ensured that students in campus housing no longer had to pay rent and did not have to pay fines or remaining balances in the spring of 2020, when the pandemic hit, Mr. Bomotti said.

“Housing in general in the private housing market did not offer that option, and generally they held students to their leases. So I think a lot of students — not all of them, but a lot of them — learned from that and said, ‘Hey, I’m better off if I get housing at the university,'” Mr. Bomotti speculates.

Many California schools in the three systems serve first-generation and low-income students. Freshmen will be given priority to remain on campus, which officials say will boost retention and graduation rates by fostering a stronger bond with the school. Graduate students, many of whom already have families of their own, also need housing, as do community college students.

The state intervenes

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and other state leaders pledged more than $2 billion over two years starting in 2022 to build housing on 35 campuses. $1.4 billion was given to begin construction on more than a dozen of those campuses, followed by $750 million by 2023. More than $1 billion was initially committed to community colleges to build dormitories, but that money was pulled from the budget due to the shortage in California.

State lawmakers have also committed $1.8 billion in interest-free loans for school construction. More than 20,000 new low-cost housing units for students are planned, some of which are already starting construction. California has also provided tens of millions of dollars for initiatives such as free public transportation for students depending on the geographic location of their campuses.

At UC Riverside, where the school has added 2,326 beds since 2019 and plans to add another 1,568 on the north campus, the state just awarded $126 million for a project. The school will designate 652 of these beds for Riverside Community College District students. The hope is that the new building will open in the fall of 2025, Mr. Bomotti said. It is the second of a four- or five-phase housing development for their northern district, which will add thousands of additional beds to the 8,700 the school currently has.

This will go a long way in reaching the more than 3,300 students on the campus waiting list, Mr. Bomotti said.

“We have the capacity to grow our enrollment, and we want to do that to serve California students,” he said. “So housing, and its availability and affordability, is very important to us.”

Deferred leases, fly to campus

Ms. Jackson, at UC Riverside, went to college during the pandemic, which meant she stayed home in Sacramento for her freshman year. In her second year, the university placed her in an off-campus studio apartment for just under $700 a month. Her freshman year, UC Riverside didn’t tell her and her roommate until a month before classes started that they could share a $1,750-a-month one-bedroom apartment within walking distance of campus. School started in late September, but they weren’t able to sign their lease until the second week of October. In the meantime, she had to pay for a hotel.

“My parents were angry. They said, ‘Just change schools.’ Come home to Sacramento State.” But I waited two weeks,” said Ms. Jackson, who described the process as long and dreary.

One of the most compelling news stories to emerge about the housing shortage involved a UC Berkeley graduate student it flew from Los Angeles, where he lived, to Berkeley, where he attended classes three days a week. Cost was the reason he cited.

Graduate students, who already have fewer beds, have also felt the impact of the crisis. Rafael Jaime is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles and president of UAW 2865, a union representing more than 36,000 graduate student instructors, researchers and teaching assistants. He led the largest strike in American higher education in 2022, which resulted in significant pay increases for teaching assistants, increasing base pay by about 50% by the end of 2024. That helps pay the exorbitant rent, which is as much as 55 % of their wages. Housing was not specifically addressed in the contract, but should be in the next contract, he said.

“This makes it very difficult for the University of California to attract the best talent, but it also makes it very difficult for those who are here to actually be able to do the kind of research and teaching that we are here to do. And many of us, there are many who have been forced to leave because of the cost of living crisis,” says Mr. Jaime.

He believes that government intervention is necessary. A combination of not only students, but also school workers and residents not affiliated with universities is driving prices up, he says.

Mr. Jaime commutes at least 45 minutes by subway several times a week from his studio apartment in downtown LA to the Westwood neighborhood, where UCLA is.

At UC Riverside, Isaac Lin is earning a Ph.D. in physics. He is in the second year of his studies and had to look for housing while still in China, his country of origin. He found a roommate through his Ph.D. program. They each pay just under $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Moreno Valley, a neighboring town to Riverside, where he commutes by bus.

Rent ate up much of his salary as a teaching assistant that first year, he says. The pay increase he received after the strike contributed to housing costs.

“I tried to get housing on campus, but I quickly realized that wouldn’t happen,” Mr. Lin said as he walked around the sleepy campus recently. “They said something about a waiting list, but it was too long,” he says, shaking his head.