Coastal Housing Prices Shutting Students Out

SAN LUIS OBISPO —  Amy Hutchcraft, 18, and her dormmates set up housekeeping in a lounge next to a laundry room. Ashleigh Boslet, a freshman from Pennsylvania, was crammed into a conference room with five others.

They were luckier than Birgitte Marthinsen, who arrived at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo two weeks ago from Norway and still had not found a place to live when school started Monday.

“My mother was crying on the phone last night,” Marthinsen said as she dejectedly scanned the housing bulletin board in the campus union. “She said, ‘What’s happening to you?’ ”

What’s happening is that students here and at other coastal universities in California have been caught in the jaws of a serious housing crunch. From Berkeley to Santa Barbara, stories of students employing desperate strategies to find places to sleep have become the stuff of local legend.

The crunch reflects the same conditions, if aggravated, that have afflicted the broader housing market across California. Too many people are chasing too few beds, especially in desirable coastal areas where slow and no-growth pledges have become as much a litmus test for political office as a hatred of taxes.

The Central Coast through the San Francisco Bay Area has some of the most expensive housing in the nation, with vacancy rates for rentals often below 1%. Combine that with record student enrollments--this year it surged past 17,000 at Cal Poly and 11,900 at UC Santa Cruz--and you have the makings of a crisis.

There are tales of students showing up to look at an apartment and finding a dozen people ahead of them. Others scour the Internet in hopes of getting a key stroke up on the competition. Some property managers are being offered bonuses to jump applicants ahead in line. And campus housing officers have begun holding role-playing workshops to teach students how to impress prospective landlords.

“This hasn’t been a pleasant season because people are so desperate,” said Diane LaFever at Stenner Glen apartments in San Luis Obispo, which houses 600 students. Hundreds were on her waiting list. Some parents gave up and bought houses or condominiums for their sons and daughters.

“We call them ‘kiddie condos,’ ” said Bob Hart, president-elect of the Santa Barbara Board of Realtors. In Santa Barbara, he said, students no longer rent rooms but beds--the going rate starts at $400 a month.

In the Central Coast zone, average rental costs for a one- or two-bedroom apartment have increased up to 38% in less than five years, according to a recent UC report. The average monthly cost of a two-bedroom apartment in San Luis Obispo County was more than $880 last year.

That may not sound so outrageous in high-rent Los Angeles, but just a few years ago, San Luis Obispo was considered a cheap escape from the metro zones in Southern and Northern California. And that’s nothing compared to what’s happened in Berkeley, where landlords were restrained by rent control laws for two decades. The result of last year’s repeal has been a huge surge in prices.

One student competing earlier this year for a $900-a-month studio apartment was required to write an essay explaining why he should be chosen. Showing the gravity of the housing crunch, Berkeley’s new chancellor, who was from Texas, last year broached the idea of building dorms on People’s Park, the ‘60s monument to antiwar activism. The idea caused an outcry from those who remembered students stuffing flowers into the barrels of guns held by National Guard soldiers, but young students facing a different world said the idea had merit.

Although Stanford houses virtually all undergraduates on campus, graduate students have an extraordinarily difficult time competing for housing with the waves of new dot-com workers flooding Silicon Valley.

Some Creative Use of Space

At the same time, while high-priced homes are going up in some areas outside San Luis Obispo to serve retirees from both north and south, nobody is building apartments.

At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where there’s dorm space for 2,800 students, the campus has converted a number of lounges into overflow rooms. The idea is to get the students out as soon as other vacancies open up. Still, “I knew people who lived in overflow all year last year,” said Hutchcraft, a student in modern languages from Mission Viejo.

The room she shared with three others was designed to be a lounge for the laundry room, so her closet consisted of several industrial washers and dryers. There were advantages. Two huge sinks made washing dishes a breeze.

In the era of reduced expectations, she was surprisingly content with her situation. “I had a friend (going to a local community college) who slept in a car last year,” she explained.

Amy Yglesias of Santa Maria was not so adaptable. Her excitement at being in college quickly turned to disappointment when she was ushered into the laundry suite. The gift basket from the university, containing Starbucks drinks and other juicy edibles made things no better.

Those most in jeopardy may be foreign students. Marthinsen, 25, came from Norway to study landscape architecture, but found herself stuck in a youth hostel.

“I’m getting very, very desperate,” she said. “The last house I went to, there were 50 to 60 people there. I started classes today, and it’s really hard to concentrate on my studies.”

George Dunham, who worked the desk at Hostel Obispo, said guests are expected to move out quickly. “On the other hand, these folks come and your heart goes out to them,” he said.

Despite her travail, Marthinsen said she loves San Luis Obispo. “If I didn’t like the place, I would have gone home,” she said.

To Elizabeth Irwin, associate vice chancellor at UC Santa Cruz, the troubles in the rental market are an offshoot of the near-mania that has gripped the housing market in the Monterey Bay region. She cited a house in her neighborhood that recently sold for $100,000 more than its asking price.

In such a frenzied market, she said, students are learning to treat the apartment hunt the way they would approach an interview for a top job.

“We teach them to make that extra-special effort,” she said. Campus workshops allow students to practice interviewing skills, which include dressing well, presenting character references and filling out rental applications.

The university is entering the third year of the Slug Partnership Program. Named for the Banana Slug that is the school mascot, the program has signed up 13 hotels and motels to rent rooms to students on a monthly basis.

In Santa Barbara, said Hart, students now rent by the bed. “Typical is two people to a bedroom,” he said.

The rent this year on a three-bedroom can go above $2,400, Hart said. Beyond this, students must take the apartment for the full calendar year, not just the school year. To find a decent place for the fall, they begin hunting in January.

UC Santa Barbara students are luckier than some. The campus is adjacent to the student community of Isla Vista, with row upon row of blocky stucco apartment buildings.

In San Luis Obispo, 14,000 students must find places to live off campus. To help them, the Off-Campus Student Housing Assn. has created a Web site listing the six complexes that belong to the association. Students can check out amenities and things like the square footage of various apartments, along with pictures of the buildings and grounds.

The six complexes have room for only about 1,600 students, however, forcing many renters to strike out on their own. And these days, they’re having to range farther afield than ever, students say.

“Anecdotally, we hear of students traveling from as far away as Salinas,” which is 36 miles, said Irwin of UC Santa Cruz.

James Lokey, president and chief executive of Mid State Bank, the largest independent bank on the Central Coast, explained the conundrum facing students who want to go to school here.

“It’s a great place to come to school, and it’s a great place to live,” he said.

That is, if you can find a place to do it.

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Times staff writer Ken Weiss contributed to this story.