Quick Take
UC Santa Cruz will begin offering two years of guaranteed housing to its new undergraduate students starting this fall.
UC Santa Cruz will be expanding its one-year housing guarantee to two years for new undergraduate students starting this fall.
Students who started in the fall of 2025 or earlier are not eligible for the two-year housing guarantee.
“I am thrilled UC Santa Cruz is able to offer this housing commitment to our incoming undergraduate students,” Chancellor Cynthia Larive said in a statement. “We are helping more students build a strong foundation for academic and personal success by offering them housing certainty for their first two years.”
UCSC can now make this offer, alongside several other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UC Merced, after the addition of several new housing projects scheduled to open this year and next year. This fall, the university is slated to open the Delaware Apartments on the Westside of Santa Cruz for 350 upper-division undergraduate students and more than 60 employees. And during the 2026-27 year, the university expects to complete the Kresge College renovation, expanding its number of student beds from 395 to 993.
Additionally, UCSC expects to open a shared housing project with Cabrillo College in fall 2027. Located on Cabrillo’s Aptos campus, it will offer housing to 240 UCSC students and 380 Cabrillo students.
Further down the line, UCSC will begin construction on the Heller South development, which will provide housing for 1,290 upper-division students. University officials plan to open that housing to students by 2029. The second part of the project, Heller North, has yet to be approved by the UC board of regents but is slated to provide up to 1,650 beds.
Currently, and consistent with the past several years, UCSC provides housing for about half of its undergraduate students, or approximately 9,300. The school doesn’t offer a guarantee for graduate student housing or family student housing.
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