Khosla has said he sees South County neighborhoods near the Blue Line as a viable location for student housing. Meanwhile, those of us who live in the areas surrounding this UC housing have been explicitly told by landlords that rents are going up by hundreds of dollars “because UCSD did it first.”
#CPLOT UCSD PRINT STATUS PROFESSIONAL#
Right now, the article points out, the average one-bedroom near UC San Diego rents for $2,686 - several hundred dollars more than my monthly salary.Īnd while UC San Diego is receiving $100 million in state funds to address the student housing crisis, it is in the middle of increasing campus rent for graduate and professional students by an average of 31 percent, and up to 85 percent in some units. But his blindness to our lived reality shows a stunning indifference to us and to the hundreds of thousands of other working people who are the economic engines of our region’s economy. Maybe Chancellor Khosla, gazing out at another spectacular ocean sunset from the deck of his rent-free mansion, can’t see the housing crisis that is so glaringly obvious to the rest of us. And neither could nurses, teachers, service workers or other renters. In no universe could any of us afford to squeeze into those tiny apartments. Reactions among my colleagues about these apartments have been mainly disbelief about their likely high cost and small size, followed by laughter. Tellingly, the project Khosla highlighted in that article was an 87-unit apartment building in Downtown San Diego. Without affordable housing, Khosla’s expansion plan is a formula for putting today’s housing crisis into overdrive for all renters, hiking rents even further, accelerating gentrification in the trolley corridor, and displacing low and moderate-income San Diegans, especially in communities of color. That’s a good thing, but he has no real plan to build the affordable housing that the expansion will require.
In an article published last month by The San Diego Union-Tribune, Chancellor Pradeep Khosla projected a grand vision of expanding UC San Diego enrollment.