Quick Take
Construction on the 2,900-bed Heller Drive student housing project at UC Santa Cruz will start in 2027 and be completed sometime in the 2029-30 school year; it was originally slated to be finished in 2028. Mayor Fred Keeley excoriated the University of California system’s governing board, faulting it in for the housing shortage and saying he's "disgusted with the way the regents treat housing in Santa Cruz."
The Heller Drive development, aiming to add 2,900 beds to UC Santa Cruz student housing, will begin construction in two years, according to university spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason.
“We expect to begin construction on the Heller project in 2027 with housing units coming online in 2029-30,” he wrote Lookout on Friday. Hernandez-Jason acknowledged he had erred on Thursday when he told Lookout the project would begin construction in 2029-30. Lookout’s story published earlier Friday morning laid out the history of the planned housing, its controversies and timeline.
UCSC had previously announced that the project would be ready for occupancy in 2028, adding much-needed housing supply to the Santa Cruz area. That means that the delay would now amount to two years. Asked again by Lookout to clarify why the project was delayed and if financing issues were at play, Hernandez-Jason did not respond.
Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley said he wasn’t aware of the delay and doesn’t know what caused it. He expressed serious frustrations with the handling of housing for UCSC by the University of California Board of Regents and the Office of the President, laying no blame on UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive.
“I have no quarrel, none, zero with our chancellor,” he said. “She is a wonderful person, a skilled academic, a great administrator, and she has nothing to say about housing being built on this campus, it’s not her fault. It’s the fault of the regents.”
He said the board of regents “could care less” about building housing and that they treat building housing as a business rather than a part of their responsibility to their campus community.
“I’m disgusted with the way the regents treat housing in Santa Cruz,” he told Lookout. “They are a direct and major component of the unaffordability of housing.”
The UC regents, he said, should be building housing in a similar manner that the university system builds its academic buildings and not treat building housing as a business.
“They don’t treat anything else as a business, except when it comes to housing,” Keeley said. “They treat it as a business and I think that’s disgusting. It’s irresponsible. It’s an insult to the city of Santa Cruz.”
He said that there’s been no reason to engage in any discussions with the UC regents as “we’re in litigation, and they are the most difficult entity I’ve ever dealt with,” with “a level of institutional arrogance that I’ve never experienced.”
The university and the city have been in legal battles for years as the city and county have sought commitments from the university to provide more on-campus housing for its students. In December, UCSC appealed a judge’s ruling against the university’s plans to grow its enrollment by 8,500 students by 2040. The judge said the school didn’t adequately address the affordability and environmental impacts the growth would have on the city.
Keeley said the case is on appeal and the briefing schedule is in process.
State Sen. John Laird, who chairs the California Senate Budget Subcommittee on Education, was not immediately available for comment about the project’s delay.
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