Huge empty tracts all over and especially around Ben Lomond etc.
The flip side of all this is that a lot of long term residents love that their 100-200k houses are now worth a million+ with their property taxes capped at essentially nothing. They don’t want to give that up to allow their nieces and nephews to afford to grow their families in Santa Cruz.
This is how we get urban sprawl and habitat destruction.
In short, lots of houses would be great. (I'm a Santa Cruz resident, for the record)
There is another solution to this!
No need. We're solving a narrow problem: students' need to park on campus. Out-of-town commuter and part-time students will need a car. But everyone else is solvable.
Stop trying to solve the problem for California. Focus on the narrow problem. Universities everywhere operate as a parallel population.
UCSC is an enclave on a hill with limited transport routes to downtown or the rest of the world. And the UCSC leadership has its hands tied by many different things; they can't just say "OK no cars on campus except if you are a commuter".
Right, this is how you solve it. (Most students don’t need a car parked on campus to get to the rest of the world from Santa Cruz.)
Fortunately there have been modifications to CEQA last year to prevent these abuses of the law that result in worse environmental outcomes (students driving long distances rather than living on campus)