Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

I keep seeing short term rentals blamed for sky rocketing rents. Here in Santa Cruz, the University has grown by about 6-7000 students since when I first got here. The UC itself added maybe about 1k beds in the last 20+ years, some of that by cramming more people into existing rooms (doubles to triples, etc).

The 2-300 short term rentals in/around the city would not make a dent on the availability of housing. (Let's say, 1500 beds). Yes, it will impact price, but there is a larger issue than the rentals themselves.

In this case it is unrestricted growth without building the housing to go with it.

View on HN

UCSC is an interesting problem.

There are have been serious plans to expand into upper campus - which would destroy some beautiful redwoods which people don't like. But is it better to build an entire new UC campus somewhere else? That seems inefficient - there are already serious resources devoted to that campus and I think that more people experiencing UCSC will lead to a better, more educated, more socially conscious world. Maybe we should just increase capacity and build more housing in upper campus. But by increasing capacity we further increase demand for water in a drought stricken area... We can't win without more water. So maybe we need desalination, but to make that work we need obscene amounts of excess electricity... environmentally and socially conscious growth is hard.

Santa Cruz gets enough rain to sustain itself. However, adding a new reservoir was stopped in the 80s. The area is beautiful, but the same people who preserved a lot of what is special about the place also put policies in place that are destroying it. It's a lack of balance.

Sadly local municipalities can't control the decisions that a given UC makes. UCSC should have had enrollment capped at a sustainable level -- water, housing and traffic. Adding more in upper campus, eh, there is really still only one way in -- no eastern access, etc.

I understand the benefit of exposure to environmental and socially conscious issues, but reality should factor into planning and that should be a lesson as well.

I'm struggling to find a less snarky way to say this because it should be so obvious, but it turns out that real estate issues are frequently unique to their locations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com