UC San Diego officials broke ground Tuesday on a new campus housing development with beds for more than 1,300 students.
The Pepper Canyon West Living and Learning Neighborhood, immediately adjacent to the campus's main stop on the Blue Line trolley, will offer housing to transfer students and other upperclassmen, who can face stiff competition for on-campus housing.
Pradeep Khosla, the university's chancellor, says housing costs — whether on or off campus — are a huge burden on students.
"In San Diego, because there's already a shortage of housing, it makes it worse," Khosla. "I think as a campus we owe it to our students to use the land that has been given to us by the community effectively to build housing for our students."
The dorm project, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2024, is benefitting from a $100 million grant from the state government that will help keep rents affordable for low-income students. A July press release said the university would "allocate the financing savings due to the grant, $5 million annually, towards housing grants for eligible California undergraduate students living on campus."
Assemblymember Chris Ward said the state's grant program would help build student housing at public colleges and universities across the state — but UCSD's larger plans for more campus housing made it more competitive.
"Because we are shovel-ready, because the vision is there and everything is integrated, I think (that) really positioned UC San Diego to fare very well in this year's state budget," Ward said.
UCSD reduced the occupancy of its dormitories last year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — a move that meant sophomores were no longer guaranteed on-campus housing. Last month the university reinstated its two-year housing guarantee.
Khosla said UCSD hopes to one day offer a four-year housing guarantee to undergraduates. In pursuit of that goal, several other campus dorm projects are in various stages of planning and construction.
Among them is the Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood, which includes 2,000 dorm beds for undergraduates. The project's towering scale sparked fierce opposition among neighbors in La Jolla, some of whom filed a lawsuit challenging the project's environmental review.
In response to such lawsuits, the state legislature this year approved SB 886, which shields student and faculty housing projects from environmental lawsuits if they meet certain criteria. Ward said the bill, which is waiting for a signature from Gov. Gavin Newsom, would help deliver housing for students faster.
"Let's make sure that we are streamlining things so that we are not waiting a few more years to be able to actually break ground on good student housing projects like this," Ward said.
The lawsuit, filed jointly by the La Jolla Shores Association and the homeowners association of the Blackhorse gated community, was settled last year. When asked to provide a copy of the settlement agreement, UCSD spokesman Matthew Nagel asked KPBS to file a California Public Records Act request.
