> Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. That's quite a g

> Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. That's quite a generalization and simplication of Santa Cruz situation. A non-trivial percentage of UCSC students are homeless, yes. That doesn't mean the homeless are literally all students, far from it. Most of them are well past university age and have no association with UCSC. > The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it. Again it's complex. Santa Cruz is a very small slice of land between the ocean and unbuildable steep mountains (a lot of it protected forest land, state parks and so on). It can't expand to the north nor to the south. The only direction to build is east (towards Watsonville) but transportation there and back is a huge problem so building to the east without addressing transportation won't solve anything. UCSC itself isn't helping, since they keep driving aggressive student population growths without any regard to where any of them are going to be able to live.