
UC Santa Cruz asks professors to house students - prostoalex
https://qz.com/1381382/silicon-valley-is-getting-so-pricey-a-university-is-pleading-with-professors-to-house-students/
======
patient_zero
My knee-jerk reaction: So a place that benefits from government guaranteed
student loans and ever-higher tuition rates is asking the lowest paid (other
than the adjuncts i suppose) to take on the burden of not only providing the
education that the university profits from but also the room and board?

The article is short on details but I can't see this as anything other than a
sad joke. If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are
buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem.
Certainly there is money _somewhere_ that could be used to purchase space
(even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. After all, the
University will have far more access to funds or loans.

However, that would come at a cost of _the profits_.

How myopic for them to even consider professors housing students to be an
option.

~~~
ASpring
>If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are
buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem.
Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even
though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem.

Campus dorms are thousands of students over original capacity. All the lounge
areas are converted to bedrooms, double rooms became triples and quads etc.
Due to a long-standing feud with the city UCSC also cannot purchase any
property in town that will house students. They are further restricted in
where they can build on campus by both geological natural features, student
protests (eg. 2 year tree sit that held up building in the 2000s), and also
general NIMBYism. You are totally right in characterizing the situation as a
sad joke. If only these emails were the extent of it..

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nostrademons
Santa Cruz isn't really the Silicon Valley metro area - it's in a different
county which frequently isn't considered part of the Bay Area, the commute is
more like 45 minutes than the 30 quoted, and there's only _one road_ over the
mountains, so if there's an accident on Highway 17 (which happens frequently)
you're looking at 3+ hours to get over the hill. I had one or two coworkers
who tried to live in Santa Cruz and work in Mountain View, and they lasted
about 1-2 months before they just got a place on the peninsula. It's more
common as a weekend getaway for engineers who worked at a company that IPO'd.

The real estate market is distinct from Silicon Valley for that reason too.
It's expensive, but it's expensive because it's an attractive beach community
on the CA coastline, and the inland (no beach access) houses are significantly
cheaper than anything you could get in the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale
area.

The real story here the university admitting 7000 students for 5300 spots,
which is an epic admissions fail and will cause problems for any college town.
I've heard of Berkeley (CA), Brandeis (MA), and Ithaca College (NY) all having
similar issues in various years, with similar drastic housing measures.

~~~
llukas
If you can set up 1-2 days of WFH and you have flexible hours then commuting
from SC to SV is just matter of choice.

There are plenty of people that do it (at least in my bubble).

~~~
newnewpdro
Yep, I was going to mention how insignificant the commute is if you only do it
once a week. I spent a number of years in the coastal communities around the
area, mostly working from home or cafes for startups in either SF or SV/MTV.

The massive influx of moneyed people from the tech industry has had a
substantial impact over the last 10-15 years, for the entire region.

Edit:

I just remembered a relevant experience I had two years ago:

While seeking a room to rent through the wet winter, I found a house in Felton
(~10 miles into the woods, away from Santa Cruz and the coast) renting all the
rooms for $800/mo each. The owner was living in a container in the yard,
powered via extension cord! This was basically the cheapest option I could
find, and it was a total shit show. One bathroom, 7 tenants, most college-
aged, and the owner's 5 year old daughter was living in the living room while
the owner was in the container. Even large closets were being rented as rooms.

Obviously I passed on this option, but it was quite illuminating of how much
opportunity there was to capitalize on; this guy was risking his daughter
sharing a house full of strangers without him even inside.

That same week I had a conversation with a young park ranger who had recently
moved to Boulder Creek, which is even further into the woods like another
10-15 miles down a twisty road. She had just moved from the east coast and
couldn't find anything affordable in Santa Cruz or Felton, and just barely
affords a shared place in Boulder Creek.

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nikhizzle
Big changes since I was there about a decade ago. I had a $1300 stipend as a
CS PhD student, and rent for a modest studio on pacific avenue ate up about
$750 of that. I was 2 blocks from the beach.

Pacific Avenue is the main strip downtown, and is relatively nice. In
retrospect, I was getting a bargain.

Notably, non science and engineering grad students got smaller stipends. So it
was tough for them even then, hopefully the university has raised their
package since then.

I’ll also add than non-cs grad students did not get lucrative summer gigs to
soften the blow. 3 months at Google can make life much easier the rest of the
year.

~~~
noobermin
What about this, as an immediate remedy, how about the state and the
government (on some hypothetical day they care about this) incentivize sending
students to other schools across the country, and then investing money into
said schools to improve them?

~~~
ASpring
Or even just other UCs. Merced/Irvine/Riverside are not experiencing housing
crises at this level. Sending more students to UC Santa Cruz is just
irresponsible.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Possibly wildly unpopular opinion: Offer relocation to academic staff to other
UCs and sell the UC Santa Cruz property to developers, upzoned, and
reinvesting the proceeds into the UC school system. It increases housing
available, and it's financially beneficial to UC (which could buy up land for
student housing around its other campuses, insulting it from this occurring in
the future).

Sometimes you have to retreat when the sea (of rising property costs) is
invading your costal property.

~~~
twblalock
I doubt very many professors at Santa Cruz would want to move unless they
could work at a more prestigious university, and all of those are located in
areas with high housing costs like Berkeley and Los Angeles. Actually, a lot
of professors at UC Davis commute from the East Bay because they don't want to
live in the Central Valley.

It's a pretty tall order to convince successful tenured professors living in a
beachfront community, most of whom are homeowners and contribute to the
NIMBYism of the area, to move somewhere else.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It's a pretty tall order to ask taxpayers to subsidize the cost of a college
beachfront community. We could just close up UC Santa Cruz and call it a day,
no relo offer on the table. If you can't terminate tenured professors because
you've closed the facility down, buy them out with revenue from selling the
campus.

Tax dollars for education should not subsidize expensive real estate markets.
You can still have your job, we're not under any obligation to keep it within
walking distance of your beach front property.

~~~
twblalock
> Tax dollars for education should not subsidize expensive real estate
> markets.

How can that be avoided? Should we build every university in the middle of
nowhere, and then move them around every 30 years because the university drew
in enough people to cause housing to become expensive?

~~~
prostoalex
Is popularity correlated with high costs? Looking at this list
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_univer...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_university_campuses_by_enrollment)
do College Station, Orlando, Columbus, Miami, Gainesville and Minneapolis
carry significant premium as far as cost of living?

Miami might, but it seems like it’s more due to the beach proximity and
tourism industry than FIU.

------
twblalock
With the tuition increases and the massive increase in housing costs, going to
a public college in California costs several times what it did a few decades
ago. It's a serious problem.

However, students living with professors is a terrible idea. There is already
too much sexual misbehavior with weird power dynamics in academia, especially
between professors and grad students, and this all happens without them living
together. It would only get worse.

The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near
campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is
unlikely to provide them.

~~~
noobermin
It's kind of upsetting the first thing you think about is sexual assault. If
they can't be trusted to share houses with students to they point that they'd
assault them, they probably shouldn't teach them.

~~~
twblalock
Sexual assault is only one of the many kinds of sexual misbehavior that
happens at universities. Even consensual relationships between students and
professors are problematic. There are a lot of degrees of sexual misconduct
between consensual relationships and physical assault to worry about.

~~~
noobermin
Do people who lease out their homes on airbnb regularly assault the tenants?
Do they regularly have consensual relationships with them? I'm aware they may
be an issue, but it certainly hasn't been as much an issue that it made the
headlines, the most common issue I read about is airbnb raising the ire of
neighbors and local governments.

You're making the argument that there is something inherent in professors that
makes it more likely they will engage in sexual relations with people, which
is problematic and strange.

~~~
alex_anglin
There is a risk that professors can be exposed to allegations of impropriety
as a result of housing students. The university does not bear this risk for
that. Nobody is justifying assault or improper relationships, but the point is
that the universities solution to the housing problem in Santa Cruz has a
number of complications that seem not to have been addressed.

Perhaps a better solution would be to reduce the student population and
university size to what the local housing market and community could support,
given opposition to construction of student housing. Obviously they’d need to
eat humble pie for that to happen, which is why it’s not being discussed.

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ezxs
Here is the crux of the matter (in mathematical terms): "university admitted
about 7,000 students this year, up from 5,300 last year, according to the
Santa Cruz Sentinel."

"The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing
unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop
the development"

So they planned on having 3000 more housing units (staff, students and
additional personnel), they didn't get it. There is your shortage. The plan
was flawed because it didn't account for the fact that local residents might
not go along with it.

Pinning this on the tech industry is another example how lazy politicians push
their problems on tech industry because it's a popular target.

~~~
Invictus0
They massively overadmitted, yes, but that wasn't the plan at all. Correctly
identifying the matriculation rate is extremely difficult when most students
are applying to 10-20 colleges, and of course only attending one. The obvious
recourse would be to rescind admission for thousands of students, but the ill
will generated by such an action would be extreme, as all the matriculants
would have already lost the opportunity to attend the other colleges they were
accepted to.

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outside1234
We should not be putting more and more UC students in Santa Cruz, San
Francisco, LA, and other high cost areas. For the love of god, expand the
campuses in Davis, Merced, etc.

