Construction began in early July on 161 homes on Ingalls Alley near Swift Street and the rail trail in Santa Cruz. The university is expected to sign a 30-year lease for the units in August. (Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local)
SANTA CRUZ >> For years Santa Cruz city and county leaders have tried to get UC Santa Cruz officials to tie enrollment growth to new campus housing. Although UCSC houses half of its about 20,000 students on campus, students living off campus have helped exacerbate a decades-long housing crunch in the city.
As the plan to add thousands of new beds on campus slowly progresses, the university is adding hundreds of student beds off campus — a move not all local leaders agree with.
This month, the university is expected to sign a 30-year lease for 161 homes under construction on Ingalls Alley near the Coastal Rail Trail in Westside Santa Cruz to rent to university students and staff. The project is part of the Delaware Addition, a planned development first approved by the Santa Cruz City Council in 2008 that was envisioned as a live-work complex.
The city council approved the lease of the units to the university in April with a 5-2 vote, with Councilmembers Martine Watkins and Sandy Brown opposed. Brown said the lease approval was at odds with the city and county’s ongoing lawsuit against the campus’ growth plan.
“It feels a bit contradictory to be, you know, in a lawsuit right now with the university over their refusal to commit to concrete milestones for development on campus at the same time that we’re kind of opening up the town,” Brown told Santa Cruz Local.
Building on the campus is the main focus for university leaders in their plan to bring more student housing online, said UCSC Vice Chancellor Ed Reiskin, but “we’re open to and exploring opportunities wherever they present themselves.”
City leaders and student housing
Housing has long been a point of contention between the university and City of Santa Cruz residents and leaders.
The problem, said Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley, is that the university has increased enrollment to almost 20,000 students — nearly one-third the population of the City of Santa Cruz — and has “done very, very little” to accommodate the housing needs of those students.
“They have done some things — they get credit for doing what they’ve done — but there is, in my view, a continuing disconnect about the growth of the university and this very small amount of housing on campus that they’ve built,” Keeley said.
Workers prepare the site of future student housing on Hagar Drive at UC Santa Cruz for construction. The project is set to include 120 homes for students with families and is the first phase of Student Housing West. (Jesse Kathan — Santa Cruz Local)
Student Housing West, the campus’ most ambitious on-campus housing project, was delayed by years in part due to litigation brought by an environmental group. The first part of the project broke ground in June but the lawsuit is ongoing. A ruling that halts the construction of the project is “very, very, very unlikely,” Reiskin said. “If we thought it was likely, we wouldn’t be proceeding.”
A separate lawsuit filed last month by a union is challenging the contract for the first phase of the project, but university leaders “do not have reason to believe the litigation will affect the project timeline,” said UCSC spokesperson Marc DesJardins.
As the university plans to enroll up to 28,000 students by 2040, local leaders have not been satisfied with the campus’ plans to limit impacts on housing, traffic and other issues. In 2022, the city and county of Santa Cruz sued the university over their 2021 Long Range Development Plan.
Behind closed doors, university representatives have negotiated with city and county leaders to potentially settle the lawsuit. The talks began around the time the UC Regents approved the 2021 plan, said former Santa Cruz County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty. They were unable to reach an agreement by the time Coonerty left office in January 2023, he said.
In another round of talks that began last year, Keeley met several times with UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive, Reiskin and attorneys for the UC. Keeley said his main goal was an enforceable agreement that links enrollment growth to more housing.
Keeley said the talks reached an impasse as that lawsuit, and a separate case brought by the university against the city related to water, awaited rulings.
A ruling in the city and county’s case against the university’s development plan could come by the end of the month. If UCSC loses, it could appeal the case.
“A negotiated agreement is better for everyone involved,” Coonerty said, rather than “never-ending litigation that just costs the taxpayers.”
If the university loses, it’s unclear whether a 2008 settlement agreement between the city, county and university could come back into effect, said Santa Cruz City Attorney Tony Condotti. That agreement was forged amid lawsuits over the campus’ 2005 Long Range Development Plan. It curbed enrollment growth and set benchmarks that linked housing to enrollment.
Attorneys for the UC Regents, the City of Santa Cruz and the County of Santa Cruz enter a Santa Cruz County Superior Court hearing about UCSC’s 2021 Long Range Development Plan on June 13. (Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local)
The 2008 agreement also limited the off-campus beds the university could count toward those benchmarks and required city approval to build housing in the City of Santa Cruz.
City and university leaders haven’t discussed at length if a future agreement would have a similar stipulation, or if the Ingalls Alley project would count toward a housing mandate, Keeley said.
“If they have the opportunity to build something here or there off campus, good,” Keeley said. “If that is new housing, and small enough and close enough to the university, we don’t per se object to that.”
Delaware Addition breaks ground
The project on Ingalls Alley “makes sense to the city, but as a fraction of what we need by way of an enforceable agreement for them to build housing,” Keeley said. “The vast majority of that’s going to have to be on campus.”
Reiskin, the vice chancellor, echoed that sentiment: “The great majority of our housing strategy will be to build on-campus housing.”
The Ingalls Alley project broke ground in early July and is expected to finish in 2026. It’s set to include three four-story residential buildings, one for employees of the university and two for students. The staff and faculty units will house about 60 people in one- and two-bedroom apartments. The student housing will be dormitory-style, accommodating about 400 students.
The housing component of Delaware Addition, a live-work planned development, broke ground in early July. The project was approved by city council in 2016 but had stalled and would not have moved forward without university involvement, said developer Doug Ley. (Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local)
Doug Ley is managing partner at Redtree Partners, the developer that bought the land at Delaware Addition almost 20 years ago and is partnering with UCSC to build the housing. The residential portion of Delaware Addition was approved by the city in 2016 but never got built.
Ley said without the university’s involvement, the project would “definitely not” be moving forward. He said the university and Redtree Partners have had discussions about mutual interest in the site ever since the city approved the master development plan in 2008.
“Every so often we’d communicate about it,” Ley said. “When the residential became more critical for them and for us, so about two years ago, we started talking about this.”
The project is “a win for everyone in the community,” said Coonerty, who was hired last year by Redtree Partners to bring the lease negotiations with the city over the finish line.
“The more housing the university builds and manages, that takes pressure off of our housing stock,” Coonerty said. “Anytime that we can have students move into housing that is designed for them, and not sort of sporadic all over neighborhoods, is, I think, a benefit to everyone in the community.”
A housing complex with three four-story buildings and other buildings broke ground in July at Ingalls Alley in Santa Cruz. (MBH Architects)
A map showing the location of the housing component of Delaware Addition, west of Swift Street and south of the Santa Cruz Branch Rail Line. (Map by Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local)
Read more:
- Union sues UC over student housing construction contract — Aug. 13, 2024
- 300 Ingalls Alley, Delaware Addition Phase II — Last updated April 2024
- UC Santa Cruz housing projects — Last updated September 2023
- Potential lawsuit could tie UCSC growth to campus housing — Jan. 14, 2022
- Animal habitat lawsuit stalls UCSC housing projects — June 13, 2022
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Nik Altenberg is a copy editor and fact checker at Santa Cruz Local. Altenberg grew up in Santa Cruz and holds a bachelor’s degree in Latin American and Latinx Studies from UC Santa Cruz.
