UC Santa Cruz will provide two years of guaranteed university housing for incoming first-year and transfer students, a reflection of the campus’s longstanding commitment to advancing student success.
The expanded housing commitment was made possible by years of thoughtful planning and intentional investment in expanding student housing.
“I am thrilled UC Santa Cruz is able to offer this housing commitment to our incoming undergraduate students,” Chancellor Cynthia Larive said. “We are helping more students build a strong foundation for academic and personal success by offering them housing certainty for their first two years.”
UC Santa Cruz currently provides housing for about 9,300 students, roughly half of its undergraduates and one of the highest percentages within the UC system. Under Chancellor Larive’s leadership, the campus has been pursuing an ambitious plan to increase student housing by more than 40 percent.
The plan has been a success with several projects scheduled to open in the 2026-27 academic year and more projects on the horizon.
Is this where an alumnus wanted to build a dorm where rooms wouldn’t have windows in order to maximize the number of rooms on a small plot? (I don’t think it passed).
In any case that’s EXCELLENT news because UC Santa Cruz is an excellent university with a beautiful campus that’s almost like in a forest by the sea, and it’s got some real specific academic strengths but the housing situation had lately made all of it fade.
I think that was Santa Barbara.
UCSC has been struggling to attract enough transfer students, in no small part because of the cost and scarcity of off-campus housing. Guaranteeing two years on campus to transfer students should go a long way toward addressing those concerns, and hopefully make the campus a more attractive transfer destination for community college students who might otherwise have been deterred by housing concerns.
I absolutely loved the campus when I visited. And it’s really good for Video Games, Environmental Science, all sorts of Informatics, they’re even one of the few UCs with a Business Management major if I recall properly.. programs I’d expect would draw students but all hobbled by lack of housing. So this is really excellent news 
Absolutely. I used to live near San Jose City College, and I knew a number of students there. Santa Cruz used to run a variety of programs aimed at transfer recruitment; they were getting dinged by the UC system for failing to meet transfer matriculation targets, and were trying really hard to attract Bay Area community college students. And from what I heard, many of the students would have loved to attend a UC in general, and Santa Cruz in particular. But when push came to shove, the housing struggle at UCSC was a hard sell when SJSU was commutable and also highly regarded.
This won’t solve the fact that commuting from home is still cheaper than living on campus… but it will at least stabilize housing costs for those who want the residential experience and a UC degree.
That was the proposed Munger Hall at UCSB: University of California abandons plans for “windowless” Munger Hall
The area around UCSC has a housing shortage. Santa Cruz is A Housing Nightmare - by Darrell Owens describes it as follows: