California commits $500 million more to student housing: “A drop in the bucket”
Dana Cuff is UCLA professor of architecture and urban design and director of the award-winning design research center cityLAB. Since receiving her Ph.D. from Berkeley, Cuff has published and lectured widely about spatial justice, the architectural profession and affordable housing. She is a recent recipient of prestigious awards for her leadership as an activist (2019, Architectural Record), educator (2020, AIA Los Angeles) and researcher (2020, Architectural Research Centers Consortium).
Free tuition is great, and California excels at that compared to the rest of the country. But with rents sky high, affordable housing has become the chief expense for most students – and relief is harder to come by.
Lawmakers have a plan for that: They’ve poured $500 million into this year’s state budget so that public colleges and universities can build affordable housing or renovate existing property.
The plan – part of a commitment of $2 billion over three years if the Legislature fully funds it – may seem like a massive sum, but the amount of housing the money can build is likely a rounding error in the total need for the state’s students.
“It’s a drop in the bucket, but every drop counts,” said Dana Cuff, a UCLA professor and director of CityLab, an urban design research center.
The housing program that lawmakers approved last week and that is awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s expected signature is new – part of the heap of surplus cash in the state budget this year. The governor initially proposed $4 billion for student housing but it got halved during negotiations with the Legislature. The deal:
- Creates a grant process that colleges apply for, committing 50% of the money to community colleges, 30% to California State University and 20% to the University of California;
- Caps rents for low-income students at a low percentage of what the median income is in the area. In Los Angeles, monthly rent would be $700 per student;
- Says the money is meant for full-time students only, which by default excludes most community college students.
If the full-time requirement slows down applications from community colleges, “we can adjust in the future,” said Nancy Skinner, a Democrat and state senator from Oakland who chairs the Senate’s budget committee.
That would require another act of the Legislature to change the terms of the housing program, but she doesn’t rule out that the promise of cheaper rent may compel more community college students to enroll full-time if their campuses take up the money. A full-time schedule means graduating faster, but often students can’t attend that many classes because of work obligations. — Mikhail Zinshteyn, Sept. 16, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the CalMatters website.
HEADER IMAGE: Newly-built student housing at UC Merced on August 2, 2019. Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters
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