Guide to Creating Affordable College Towns
College towns can and should be affordable places for students, staff, and local residents to live together, but all too often they become microcosms of California's housing crisis. The Student Homes Coalition’s Building the Campus Community: A Guide to Creating Affordable College Towns provides local policy solutions for addressing the high cost of housing in campus communities.
Part one of the guide explores avenues for encouraging new housing development, based on case studies of cities across California. Building more housing is critical, but it is not enough for students experiencing homelessness today. Part two of the guide explores several steps that cities can take to provide immediate assistance to students who are struggling to stay housed.
Student Housing
Costs and Constraints Study
Housing is becoming increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable for students in California. A majority of higher education students in California are rent-burdened and thousands of students experience homelessness each year. Public universities across the state provide a limited number of on-campus beds, forcing the vast majority of students to compete for housing off-campus.
The Student Homes Coalition’s CA's Student Housing Crisis: An Analysis of Student Housing Costs and Constraints in California report aims to establish the true cost of living in campus communities and understand why those costs remain so high, despite a growing recognition of the need for more student housing.