This episode was recorded on May 22, 2025.
About This Episode
Today’s guests come to us from one of my favorite corners of California Housing: student housing. It’s such an important opportunity space for team housing, one which addresses a serious housing need. Student housing can also be workforce housing, especially for the educational institutions who play a critical role in getting it built, or for the hundreds of thousands of California students who are workers. Student housing can be flexible and can serve many education institutions rather than one. Student housing also has the political institutional and economic potential right now to actually do something big. Part of this political potential comes from today’s guests. Kate Rogers and Ryan Lenney are co-chairs of the Student HOMES Coalition, a two and a half year old, student led, state-wide organization that has jumped into the housing pipe with both feet. I hope you enjoy our conversation, which ranges from their report on student housing, their impressively broad view of the problem, and their even more impressive success in getting the attention of state legislators and state housing organizations. Thanks to all of you who subscribe and help make this podcast possible, and if you haven’t done so already, please join our wonderful group of supporters. We need your help to keep this podcast going.
Read Student HOMES Coalition’s latest report:
This Episode’s Guests
Ryan Lenney is a recent graduate from Claremont McKenna College, where he studied Public Policy and International Relations. His path into housing policy began in high school, when he started a local initiative to organize in favor of mixed-income, affordable, and permanent supportive housing units, called Welcoming Neighbors Home. In the winter of 2022, he worked with other student advocates to start the Student HOMES Coalition to work on statewide policies to address the student housing crisis. He now works full-time in Sacramento as the Coalition’s Co-Chair and Organizing Director.
Kate Rodgers got her start in legislative advocacy as a freshman at UCLA in 2022. Working in higher education policy at Generation Up, she realized the importance of student engagement in state politics. She shifted her focus to student housing issues when she started working with the Student HOMES Coalition in 2024. Today, she co-Chairs the Student HOMES Coalition with Ryan Lenney while finishing her degree in Political Science.
Interview Transcript
Alex Schafran: Hey, Kate and Ryan, welcome to Housing After Dark. It's wonderful to have you.
Ryan Lenney: Thanks, Alex. It's great to be here.
Kate Rodgers: Yeah, thank you.
Alex Schafran: So I think you both know the drill here now here at Housing After Dark. This is a housing podcast for housers. Whether you've been housing for a really long time, or you've only recently become a houser, everybody starts by sharing their story. So Ryan, we're going to start with you, and then go to Kate. Tell us how you got into housing, which is a little bit related to the story of how the Student HOMES Coalition got started, because they're not too far apart. We’ll get to that in a bit. First let’s start with the individuals.
Ryan Lenney: My housing story started about five or six years ago now, when I was in high school and I had a good friend whose family became homeless after her dad lost his job. They were struggling for a couple of months trying to find temporary housing, and when that failed, they eventually just ended up sleeping in their minivan in local parking lots. I come from a background of social work. My mom and sister are both social workers, so my thought first was: there has to be some sort of program or some sort of assistance we could get them hooked up with. And that's when I found out that the waiting list for an affordable housing unit in Orange County is like 10 years long, and there really is not a whole lot in the way of direct housing support.
So I wanted to figure out what I could do. I started volunteering at a local homeless shelter, and when I was there, I met a lot of other folks in the community who also were disillusioned with the status of housing for our friends and our families. And once you do some research, you come pretty quickly to the idea that it's not just direct service that's needed, it's more housing production. And so I spent the rest of high school going to city council and planning commission meetings after class and speaking in favor of these new affordable and mixed-income housing projects in Orange County. And then once I got to college, I got more involved with policy at the statewide level, and met Kate and a lot of other students that wanted to keep trying to push the needle on this.
Alex Schafran: Kate, how about you?
Kate Rodgers: So my story is a little bit less interesting than Ryan's, actually, but I ended up doing advocacy at the state level, for education policy. When I went to college, I met some folks there who were in GENup, which is a statewide student led advocacy organization and I got involved in the ed space first, primarily focusing on issues of educational equity, Title IX, stuff like that. I really got my feet wet with the legislative process in California, got familiar with the legislature and the staff and how the whole system works. So then, actually, I met Ryan when he joined that same organization, and through hearing about Ryan's work and working with the HOMES team on housing policy, I kind of started to put together the pieces of how, really, out of all the issues that we face in the education space, particularly higher education, housing is really the biggest problem that we have to solve. And I personally think the area where we have the most work to do, certainly, but also the most opportunities for growth. I just really fell in love with the work in the housing space in particular, and I went forward from there.
Alex Schafran: It's interesting that the two of you embody the two different pathways. For some people, it's a really personal experience, whether it's them or somebody close to them, and you start looking for answers. Others of us are wandering around trying to search for sort of general societal answers for what's going on. But either way, you find housing.
I think there's a whole group of us that just find ourselves interested in the buildings and the structures, and there's something about the built environment that we find interesting. And then you start to learn about the social side and the political side and everything. And I imagine that within the coalition that there are lots of different people that have taken lots of different journeys to get there.
So Ryan, you're going to give us a little bit of the background about the Student HOMES Coalition. I'm not sure how many of our listeners know about the coalition, so this is a good chance to educate them. I know I've been on a learning journey recently, and it's really exciting both who you are and what you've done in a relatively short period of time. Give us a little bit of the story of who you are and how you got here.
Ryan Lenney: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we definitely are still just getting started here with this work, but it began back in December of 2022 as Kate mentioned. Both her and I worked for, or volunteered for, a group called Generation Up that did statewide educational policy, and we started to look more into the housing space and how we might be able to kind of transition some of the focus the organization on trying to address housing concerns that students were facing, and through that, we got connected with students at a lot of other statewide organizations, like UCSA, which is the Statewide Student Association for the UCs, as well as folks over at the Student Senate for the California Community Colleges, as well as just other nonprofits that work on education policy.
And we learned that we weren't the only ones starting to see housing as a serious issue in the education space, both for educational access, but also for folks who are in higher ed, just being able to focus on your tests and all the other things that that students need to be concerned with, rather than how they're going to make rent at the end of the month. And so in that 2023 session, that was the first year we worked on a statewide policy, we kind of swung for the fences with a bill that was going to pretty drastically up zone land around college campuses. And although that one didn't move forward, we started to learn a lot more about how this sort of work might be done incrementally and more successfully. And so we came back the following year with a bill to clean up CEQA exemptions for on campus student housing, a bill to clean up the student housing density bonus that had been created a few years prior but never used, as well as a few student tenant focused bills. I'll pass it off to Kate to give a little bit more specifics on those.
Kate Rodgers: So I think part of our philosophy is that while students need more units, both on-campus and off-campus, the majority of students are currently renters, and when we think about how we're going to approach the problem of student housing in general, we want to make sure that we're kind of addressing the full breadth of students’ housing needs, whether that's access to units, affordability, but also just making sure they're not getting taken advantage of and the rental market. So to that end, we do some work in the tenant space as well. Like Ryan said, we have worked on a couple of policies in the past, one successful, one unfortunately not. We've cleaned up some of the law around providing security deposits and where landlords can and can't withhold funds from renters when they move out. That was a successful bill that we ran last year. We also have been involved in the fight around application fees for quite a while. I know there have been plenty attempts for reform here, so haven't been able really to get there quite yet, but it's definitely something we're continuing to think about as an important issue for affordability for students,
Alex Schafran: I really appreciate this focus that you've had from the beginning on, in the 3p language, both production and protections. The fact you've been working on the tenant side things and on production side things, I think is super critical. It's exciting to me, as somebody who has been observing and part of California housing space for a long time. It took so many organizations, including people who've been on this show and their organizations to get to the point where they can talk about production and tenants rights in the same breath. And the fact that you all were founded with that built in is just super impressive, at least to me.
I think maybe one of the reasons why you've been so successful or able to kind of wade in there so early, is that I think you've just been really smart about it. We're going to dig a little bit more into how you approach things and what you all think. There's a link on the website that people will be able to click on that will take us to a report that came out last month that really breaks down how the student home coalition sees the student housing challenge in California. So Ryan, you're going to start off by giving us a little bit of an understanding. We're going to come back to some of the legislation, but give us a little bit of that breakdown about how we can understand the general challenge of student housing in the state.
Ryan Lenney: Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, we have this report that we put out last month. At the Student HOMES Coalition, our legislative work is guided both by our research, like this report, and also by the experience of students that we work with across the state. We'll talk a bit more later about our organizing philosophy and how we try to get students involved with this work as well. But one of the main things we hear, as Kate mentioned, is that students are having to go off-campus to compete for a pretty limited number of units. And so we highlight in this report the fact that the UC only provides housing for about a third of its students; at the CSU level that's under 15%; and community colleges are the worst off. Only 14 of the 116 community colleges offer any housing at all, and those colleges that do offer housing often have a pretty limited number of beds, and so the majority of students in California are off-campus renters, just like everyone else.
But unfortunately, our colleges and universities, especially the UCs, are located in some really high cost areas. You think of UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz especially. I mean, these are colleges where students are going into the surrounding community and having to pay $2,000+ a month to be crammed like sardines into some single family home that really wasn't built for them to live in. Unfortunately, that has spillover effects for the surrounding community as well, because when students are competing with each other for this limited number of units, they're also pricing out folks who just want to live in San Diego and in LA and in Santa Cruz and and all the other major, beautiful cities that our colleges and universities are based in.
We're seeing student housing become a serious barrier to education. We talk about this a bit in this report, we went through and looked at the on and off-campus housing costs for all the UCS CSU and some of the biggest community colleges in the state, and what we found is that the cost of housing is often the same, if not much greater, than the cost of tuition itself. And so we see at UCS, it's roughly the same between housing and tuition, but at CSU, the cost of student housing is about twice the cost of getting a degree, and at community colleges, it's about seven times greater. So when we talk about wanting to expand access to higher education, increasing housing development, and trying to decrease those costs, we have to be a part of that conversation.
Alex Schafran: I think it's really important to emphasize what you just said about housing as this barrier. There are some, not just in higher education, but also in K-12 education, where it's more focused on teachers and folks working in the system than it is on students themselves. There can be an understandable desire to kind of keep the main thing the main thing, it's a reason why there's the expression, and oftentimes it's good advice. But I think you all make a really good case in this report about how this thing that is not it has nothing to do with education, is such a fundamental barrier. Whether or not the universities themselves should be the developer or that's something that can be outsourced to people who, for whom the main thing it is the main thing, I think you make a really compelling argument about why it's such an essential piece if the goal is to get people educated and to do it in a way that involves being in person, then the housing has to be a piece of it. But you don't just stop there, right? So the report digs into other issues, like zoning. So give us a little bit more tour of the other barriers you're looking at.
Ryan Lenney: As you mentioned, one of the main things in the report was we looked at those monthly housing costs compared to tuition. And the other main part of the research we were doing was looking at zoning around California's largest public colleges. So we looked at the zoning around the four largest UC, CSUs and community colleges, and what we found, I think probably unsurprisingly to folks who work in the housing space, is that the land around our colleges and universities is disproportionately zoned for single-family use. So on average, across the segments, we saw around 50% of the land around the largest colleges and universities to be zoned for single-family use, while only about 15% was zoned for multi-family and there's there's some cities that are doing better than others. UCSD, for example, it's about equal between single-family and multi-family but at most of these large colleges and universities, there are few opportunities for multi-family development, while there are ample opportunities for single-family. We see this as being really the core issue when we talk about there not being enough housing opportunities for students. Whereas a developer looking at building a new housing development in a given city has to worry about vacancy rates, has to worry about whether or not there's demand for that, it's pretty much a captive market when you look at students coming to these universities. I mean, you can be assured, that year-over-year, there are going to be tens of thousands of students looking for housing in that surrounding community, and that many of them currently aren't able to find it. We should be seeing new student housing developments pop up all across the state, around these major colleges and universities, but we aren't, and we think that the lack of multi-family zoning is really to blame for it.
Alex Schafran: Kate, tell us a little bit about the issue of cosigning. Again, this is the tenant side of things. Not that it should be shocking having witnessed what's been happening in Berkeley, not the most recent administration in the city of Berkeley who very much wanted to build housing, but many people in the city of Berkeley. There are all these ways that jurisdictions that have the benefit of universities still take multiple efforts to make it difficult to house the student body, not just the land use, but also ways of restricting ways that people can be tenants in different ways. Tell us a little bit about that.
Kate Rodgers: I think students are seen as sort of inherently undesirable tenants or renters. They're seen as sort of unreliable or potentially problematic when in large part, especially students at our elite public institutions here in California, they're there to learn and to better their opportunities in the future, right? So, Like Ryan said, there are tons of students that are in need of housing, and because these housing rental markets have such high demand, it's easier for landlords to be more selective and to try and sort of weed out students in that process, because there are plenty of community members also competing for that housing.
So a couple of ways that we see that happen is like with the ban on cosigners. A lot of students, particularly full time students, are not able to prove 3x or 4x the rent in income to be able to get that property on their own. So they have a parent or a guardian cosign but what landlords can currently do, right now, it's allowed under the Civil Code, is essentially just ban cosigners from their properties, right? So this is a de facto way of discriminating based on both age and student status, neither of which are technically supposed to be legal. But the cosigners loophole is an outstanding way that we see a lot of folks around UC Irvine, Santa Cruz, where students are essentially being kept out of available rentals.
Students are also far less likely to have the legal resources or the kind of general knowledge to fully digest and understand their lease. We actually did a preliminary report or survey on students in the UC system who are renters. And we asked “Have you even read your lease?” And about 60% said they hadn't even read it. So students are just signing a lease, any lease they can find. In my case, I go to UCLA, which is one of the most expensive parts of the entire city, and one of the most expensive cities in the country, right? And when all the housing options were getting snapped up, I remember my roommates and I were getting desperate and we just found the quickest available apartment. It was incredibly expensive.
We signed whatever lease we could find. And now that I'm fully entrenched in tenant advocacy, and I sort of understand how these things work, I've gone back and I read my lease, and there are tons of unenforceable clauses in there. There's a $500 fine for having more than a couple guests over. You can't have an instrument, that's a $200 fine. There are all sorts of these legally questionable things that are being kind of forced upon students, right? And I think it would be naive to think that this doesn't interact with the land use policy that Ryan was talking about earlier.
The reason why students are being forced into these situations is because there are no units available, because we have to just accept whatever we can find. We have to approach the problem from both sides. We have to be able to build more units so that more students can have more affordable options, walking distance from campus, while also making sure that the students who are in existing units are not being taken advantage of. By adding supply to the market, we can both bring down costs, address student homelessness and require landlords to treat their tenants better.
And one more thing I’ll add is that I think it's important to highlight that the recent data that's been released on student homelessness indicates that 24% of community college students are homeless, 11% of CSU students, and somewhere between 4%and 8% of UC students. So these are hundreds of thousands of higher ed students in the state that are experiencing homelessness in a given academic year. I think it's time that we really like center housing as the main issue in education, particularly higher education, because a quarter of community college students are homeless. We can't let that go unaddressed any longer.
Alex Schafran: I have this relationship with San Jose State. I know it's been just a huge issue there for students struggling in Silicon Valley, which is a brutal place to try to find housing. Add on top of the fact that it's, for many students, the closest CSU that might have that program that they need for miles and miles. Maybe they're staying home with family, but it's a two hour commute each way, or hour and a half commute each way, and so people are sleeping in their car. Sometimes it's because there's not enough housing close enough that is affordable, and sometimes it's because we need to do a better job bringing education closer to them.
When I think about some of these practices, it's a frustrating mix of bad politics from local jurisdictions and, at times, bad practices from local landlords, combining to make a really difficult situation even worse. So much of it is about students being treated as if you all are noise. That was the big fight over, you know, they literally had to amend CEQA. The state legislature had to take a step to amend CEQA, to declare that you are not noise.
So let's talk about the noise that you are making in the state capitol, around housing to outlaw students being treated as noise. There's a couple of current bills, I think Kate, you're going to run us through what you've been doing, and then I want to talk a little bit about how you're being perceived as the new youngest, noisy folks in Sacramento. What, what are you running this year in housing bills?
Kate Rodgers: Happy to report no casualties yet. We got our first bill that I'll talk about here, which is AB 893, through feeling good about appropriations, so definitely on the up here. This is our main land use bill for the year. We're basically expanding AB 2011 from Wicks, which created a ministerial process for mixed income, mixed use developments on existing commercial lots. So AB 2011 has some restrictions around access to transit, as well as location along commercial corridors and some sort of lower density allowances than we think that makes sense for students. So what we've done is taken the framework of 2011 and we've built on it in what we're calling “campus development zones.” So those are the set of parcels that are within half a mile of a UC, CSU, or community college.
And for those parcels, any commercial parcel in that campus development zone, we're allowing for that same ministerial process allowable under 2011 with the same sort of affordability requirements and labor requirements, but we're allowing a little bit more density and a little bit more height for some of these sites, just to help make those projects both pencil and also work for the dense campus town, college community that really we want housing for students to be designed for. Additionally, we are allowing students to access the affordable units in these developments via Cal Grant, Promise program, or Pell Grant eligibility. So traditionally, students are banned from accessing affordable units. I think that makes sense in a lot of ways because while a lot of students don't have an income, they don't necessarily have need, right? If their parents are paying for their housing or for their education. We certainly don't want students that are not working because they have family wealth to be able to access affordable units.
But there are certainly plenty of students that do have a really, really dire need for affordable units. So we're creating that pathway through Cal Grant, Promise program eligibility, but then also leaving those affordable units up to open to community members and lower income faculty and staff as well. So that's AB 893, that's our main bill on the private development side.
Another bill that we have focusing on development on the community college level is AB 648, we're also cosponsoring this bill, along with AHLA and some community college districts, LACCD and Santa Monica City College, and this will provide community colleges with the same land use authority that UCs and CSUs already have to build housing for their students and faculty. So you know, UCs and CSUa, as state agencies, are already able to kind of use that state authority to go around local zoning, which allows them to have a much more streamlined process for development, as well as just more liberty on deciding what their populations need, by way of land use and objective design standards for that building.
And we really see a lot of community colleges running into issues where local governments are blocking their projects or just preventing them from building the amount of units that they need through limiting the number of beds, etc. What we really want is to make sure that these projects are happening and they're happening quickly and as cost effectively as possible. So we see providing CCCc with that same land use preemption as really a first major step to shifting the conversation. I think for a long time, folks have seen CCCs as commuter schools, right? We don't need housing at CCCs. But as you know, we talked about earlier, 24% of community college students are homeless within a given year. That statistic is just screaming that we need housing at community colleges.
And then the last bill is AB 357, which pertains to universities and colleges that are located within the California Coastal Zone. So as you know, right now, the Coastal Commission controls a lot of the development that happens in the coastal zone, and unfortunately, that has led to major delays of student housing projects, particularly at the two big UC campuses there, there's UCSD and UCSB, and then also parts adjacent to UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine are affected as well. And Coastal Commission review was, of course, necessary to some extent for private development to make sure that we're not seeing ecological harm. The Student HOMESCoalition is not for destroying the environment. But definitely where you have a situation where a university is a public developer at state agency and the Coastal Commission is another state agency coming in and regulating that process all the way down to really sort of subjective aesthetic design standards causing long delays, increases of project costs to the tunes of millions of dollars, which ultimately comes back to the taxpayer when these are publicly funded projects for students. And then you have the added consideration of hundreds if not thousands of students that are actively homeless at these campuses. It just really kind of shows that we're ripe for reform here.
So what this bill will do started out actually as an exemption for university housing projects from the Coastal Commission. It will now be a shock clock. So essentially, any student housing project has to be processed within 90 days. We are also working on a couple other bills that we have on our support list that are more in the area of tenant protections and wraparound homelessness services for students. But those are our main co-sponsored bills that are in the land use development space this year.
Alex Schafran: It's an impressive list. I want to do a little work breaking down the first two bills that you talked about. It's super exciting to me. Shout out to our friends at Abundant Housing in Los Angeles. I saw Azeen Khanmalek the other day in a building that had a student housing building that had been built by the UC in San Francisco. They have a really, really exciting program.
One of the things that excites me about student housing, and has excited me about student housing for quite some time, is the fact that universities do have this particular capacity and power in terms of land use preemption, and so it's something that has been reserved for CSU and UCs, but the goal is to extend it to community colleges. Correct? Tell us a little bit more about this expansion to community colleges and so again.
Kate Rodgers: Yes. So, like I said, I think we're seeing a little bit of a sea change on the issue of community college housing, and I think a lot of that has to do with those homelessness numbers at the community colleges for students, as well as affordability for faculty, right? Like we see housing as a major issue that's really pushing folks out of the profession of teaching. And if we want our next generation of Californians to be able to kind of access financial success and security, we really need to have community colleges, as the most affordable public higher education option and potentially a bridge to a UC or a CSU for that four year degree.
I think the appetite, really, for student housing at CCCs has really been on the up in the last couple years. I think this is the first really big bill, certainly the first really big bill that we've been able to work on that has really been helping to push that along. I know that there are a couple universities or a couple colleges, I should say, pursuing really exciting projects. Give a shout out to Compton City College, which is working on a modular housing development right now. Love to see those more affordable options coming on the market. There's San Diego City Community College District working on some developments there. Then, of course, Santa Monica College, who's co-sponsoring this bill with us, super, super happy to be working with them, and really glad to see that they're working on getting those units online.
This will be a huge step towards addressing the homelessness crisis for community college students, of course, but also allowing community college students to come on-campus and really experience the full breadth of what higher education has to offer. I think living on-campus allows you to make connections with students and professors and promotes academics in a way that commuting, particularly for students that are experiencing homelessness, just simply can't do.
Alex Schafran: I will make a plus one for the transformative power of being a young person living in community with other young people on campus. It was absolutely as much or more part of the transformative experience that was higher education for me as anything I learned in the classroom. I think that the debates I had at midnight in the dorm room were truly the most formative experiences, and that's where lifelong friends and business partners, and my social capital that I think has helped me along the way come from.
Shout out to the folks at College of Marin, Jonathan Eldridge, is president there has been really a leader there and trying to move College of Marin into this space in lots of exciting ways, including potentially part of a collaboration with a few different collaborations with the K-12 system. I think there's exciting opportunities I'm starting to hear about in San Francisco in terms of collaboration between community colleges and four year institutions, and I think in other places where it will make sense that the collaboration is between elementary and high school student educators and the colleges. It's as much about housing both experienced teachers and high level administrators and the lowest earning folks working in schools, assistant janitors and teaching assistants who really just don't earn enough money to be able to afford housing anywhere in the state of California but who are essential to making those machines run.
So I'm so excited to see community colleges really being not just pulled into this, but really starting to step up and lead themselves. I think they're a really critical voice on this. I want to ask you all about the politics of it, but I want to do that by digging a little bit more into AB 893.
People think that I'm a policy wonk, but I'm not really a policy wonk. I study the politics of housing, and what excites me again is both what you all are able to do and what you're working on technically, but also the approach you are taking politically. I can't say how smart and how sadly rare it is to see that you are building on AB 2011 and using that framework, which was a historical compromise that not enough people paid attention to, and in which we've not yet had enough examples of buildings being built, but there are some are coming, and more need to come and working with folks on on how to implement that. Can you explain a little bit more about that basic framework, how you kind of came about that decision to use AB 2011 as a basis?
Kate Rodgers: This bill idea really came through our research into past housing law. What has worked more broadly and what hasn't and how can we sort of adapt what California is already doing to really serve student needs, and also within that, where can we push farther. Where can we take what the state is already doing for everybody and make it go a step further, using the organizing power that students have? In doing that research, we obviously came across 2011 and I think we just kind of thought about it as a team, like, “What do we want California's college towns to look like?” “What do we want the areas immediately adjacent to our UC, CSUs to feel like? And how do we want students to be able to live in those spaces?” And I think the mixed-use model is kind of an ideal here, right? You want dense, walkable communities where students are able to live, work, and go to school.
And so thinking about 2011 and how that could really help transform our college communities, our college towns, that's kind of where the impetus for this bill came from. And when we were drafting it, we wanted to expand 2011 but also push a little farther where we could, right? So that's why we went for some increased density allowances, increased height allowances for certain parcels. Students are in dire need of housing, but they're also particularly well suited to dense housing types, right? Students love to be on top of each other, not in any kind of unsafe way, but love to all live together and make noise together, right? So that's why we saw those increased density allowances and height allowances, as a way to really push forward on this issue, but while sort of building on the great work of Assembly Member Wicks and and the whole coalition behind 2011.
Ryan Lenney: One thing to add on to that with this bill. As we stated, the author for this bill is Assemblymember Fong, who has long been a champion in the higher education space, and so started from that more education specific angle. Asm. Fong absolutely understood where we were coming from in terms of housing becoming aserious barrier to higher education. But we actually came out of the Assembly Housing Committee with five co-authors, including Assemblymembers Caloza, Haney, Kalra, Wicks and Wilson. They all shared in that hearing that they absolutely appreciated us trying to work campus communities into this broader conversation around housing.
2011 was trying to increase development around transit stops. Kate spoke a bit to this, but we made the argument that campus communities, the area within a half-mile, 10 minute walk of college campuses, very much fitted that same paradigm around transit stops. This should be a very livable, workable community where people aren't necessarily needing to drive, and where people should be able to live in an apartment and learn and work and sleep all in the same area. I think our experience showed that this is a message that resonates not only with folks in the education space, but certainly with those more traditional housing legislators as well.
Alex Schafran: Appreciation to Assemblymember Fong and the people of the same Western San Gabriel Valley. I'm not at all surprised that leadership is coming out of the San Gabriel Valley. Some people would be, but it's the kind of place where we need this kind of leadership to come out of. Something that will work there is something that'll likely work in a large amount of California. Thank you so much to Assembly Member Wicks and friend of the program, Steve Wertheim and other staff. Jay, Scott and Jacob and all of the carpenters who really set the tone by doing AB 2011 and taking the next step on making labor peace, or the possibility of labor peace.
If you're like me, a lot of us have worked a lot of low wage jobs on the way to and through college, and so our housing solution definitely involves people being paid a living wage to build that housing. It seems in California, we tend to make these programs, and then we don't double down on them. We don't work on expanding them, working on the implementation, until we get there. I see the fact that you've been able to bring in the student housing issue and universities to the challenge of implementing and building on 2011 as such a huge action, not just for you, but for 2011 and for that larger politics of housing that we're working on. Getting people to continue to collaborate and build on things is seemingly so hard. People want to move on to new issues and new fights, and then the solutions that we've worked on never going to work on their own.
I think one of the things we can learn from the ADU folks is that it took a decade, dozens of bills, a lot of collaboration, a lot of strange bedfellows, moving that space all over to be able to get there. And I think something like AB 2011 worked to turn older strip malls, underutilized commercial spaces on major corridors, into the kind of vibrant housing we need, all across the board, not just student housing, but senior housing, condominiums for first time home buyers, all kinds of options.
So let's talk a little bit about politics. How have you all been received? I think last time we talked you did not have a contract lobbyist. You are still sort of the new folks on the block. Some of you have finished college, and some of you are about to. How have you been treated? By the way, if you do need a lobbyist, I'm sure I know that there's at least a couple of listeners to this podcast that are contract lobbyists who willbe happy to sell you their services. What has it been like trying to get involved and run bills when you're relatively the new folks on the block?
Kate Rodgers: Yeah, I mean, I'll say me and Ryan, with our background in ed policy at Generation Up, where we're pretty used to being scrappy. You know, GENup is an entirely volunteer based organization, and Ryan and I both put in a couple years there, I would argue, at cost to us, because whenever we would travel to Sacramento, it would be out of pocket. There really just wasn't much money to go around. We were kind of doing what we were doing because everybody there believed in it. I think we're kind of doing the same thing in a way at HOMES.
We definitely are not the most well established, you're right, but we definitely have experience making do with what we have and and trying to make our way into these spaces and and prove that we deserve to be there and that we are bringing good ideas to the table, and that students can actually be the source of real policy changes. Really happy to report that we've found a lot of folks willing to help us. All of the authors of our bills, Assemblymember Fong, we mentioned Assemblymembers Zbur, Alvarez, as well Senator Cortese, everybody that's come on as a co-author that Ryan mentioned earlier, as well as the staff that have really been fantastic and helped us along the way.
It’s been wonderful to have the support from other groups in both the higher ed space and the YIMBY space, we really see an opportunity for these two groups to come together and collaborate, and we're trying to sort of bridge that gap at HOMES, and of course, bringing students into the fold as well. Have to shout out the entire team at UCSA and you know, SSCCC, all those student organizations that Ryan mentioned as well. Ryan do you have anything to add?
Ryan Lenney: I absolutely agree. I'd say I think similar to the way we were talking about community college housing a bit ago, this is something that 5 or 10 years ago was really not thought about or discussed much at all yet. A few of these campuses were getting creative and trying to find housing for their students, but certainly there wasn't a statewide conversation about it. And you fast forward to today, and there's a bill that's passing with relatively light opposition, and there's a consensus that those community colleges should be able to provide more housing for their students, faculty, and staff.
I think broadly, that's what we've seen even just over the last couple of years working on these policies. You start out, and it just takes a lot more initial explanation to get people to come to a place of starting to see “Okay, you know, you're right. Student housing might be a part of this bigger picture.” Whereas, we work on these policies today, and it almost starts as a given that student housing is a part of the conversation of how to fix the housing crisis in California more generally. I think there are, as Kate mentioned, so many folks in Sacramento that have been incredibly helpful along the way. And I think in particular, those student organizations and folks at California YIMBY specifically have been with us since day one, back when it wasn't necessarily seen as such a given that this should be part of the conversation. You know, they've really helped lend their expertise and helped us get these policies to a place where today it is widely accepted.
Alex Schafran: Where are we going from here? I think you mentioned one important thing for me, which is people. Centering student housing is again, a fundamental part of addressing the housing crisis. One of the reasons why, for instance, the French housing system works really well is they have a vast system of social housing that is open to essentially anybody under 25 regardless of what university or what program you're studying in. They're not necessarily attached to specific universities. They're based on people being there. People do tend to go to university in the region in which they grew up, but they often are required to. It's hard to get into a college in which you get to travel across the country to go to school, but you almost always go to your regional school. But that doesn't mean you need to live at home with your parents, maybe in an apartment or a place that is not, not quite big enough to be an adult in as a third, not ready for a third or a fourth adult.
Where are you going from here? I know there's some organizing that you're thinking about doing. I know there's some work for year four. Some work you're thinking about doing in terms of widening the tent. Where is the Student HOMES Coalition going in the next couple of years?
Ryan Lenney: I think one of our biggest focuses is that organizing component. You know, I think typically in the YIMBY movement, we've seen a large challenge over the last 5 to 10 years to be able to turn folks out, not only for these statewide policies, but also for for projects in their local community, because the people who stand to benefit from new housing don't always live there, and when they do live there, they often work several jobs and don't have the time to turn out for these projects and for these policies. We think that students offer a unique solution to that problem.
We have millions of students in California who want a place to live after they graduate, and who need a place to live while they are currently studying. We're hoping to continue to build out our organizing apparatus and ensure that those students can be involved in the conversation. And we've learned to work really closely with the student associations, as Kate mentioned, but also just increasingly student-led and student-driven clubs at UCs, CSUs, and community colleges as well.
We've got about 15 affiliate organizations, as we call them, across the state. These are just local, social justice, social action, sometimes housing, homelessness specific organizations, but often just generally students hoping to make a change and recognizing that housing is one of the biggest issues facing them and the other folks in their community. Over the coming months, and hopefully years, we're going to continue trying to connect with those students and bring them into the conversation. And I think we also have some broader goals about how to kind of parlay that student organizing into broadening the YIMBY movement as well. Kate, do you want to talk more about that?
Kate Rodgers: I will say on the student piece first that I really do believe that students are a major untapped resource for the housing movement. I think a lot of students have a very visceral sense that we have a major problem with housing, but it's not always immediately clear what you as an individual can do about it, right? And what we want to do is help provide a framework under which students can get involved, and if that's through becoming affiliated with the HOMES Coalition and attending our advocacy events, or potentially us providing support for any of their local programs or having them involved in bill work. We really want to get that going so we really have young people coming into the political sphere with a really strong sense of how they can really get involved with housing as an issue.
But I think another really important element to this, beyond just the the student organizing angle, is, as Ryan mentioned, the broader widening of the the tent, so to speak, in that there are plenty of other groups, mainly groups focused on higher education specifically that haven't always seen housing as one of their main priorities, but they are focused very acutely on college affordability, right? What we're trying to do is elevate housing in that conversation of college affordability, and say, “College is actually not affordable unless there are affordable housing options.” And we've seen over the past couple years, and I'm sure Ryan would agree with me on this, more and more groups that are in the ed space coming to us and saying “Hey, we are really interested in housing, but we don't know where to begin.”
We want to kind of help continue to kind of build that momentum in the pro housing direction, and really get these folks more involved with both student housing and just the YIMBY movement more broadly. When we think about the problem, not just for students, but also for everybody living in this state, it's an all hands on deck situation that we're in right? We're kind of at DEFCON 1, and we need everybody who can possibly help to be pushing forward on this issue. That’s why we think it's really important to get students and young people involved, but also folks that are focusing on education or other issues, and really our collective effort towards solving the housing crisis in California.
Alex Schafran: I'm really grateful to both of you and to the Coalition for your work. I mean, you're doing two of the things, both organizing students and trying to convince people who are not in housing of just how important housing is to education. I hope they read your report. I hope they're convinced, as I'm convinced, when you see just how much the cost of housing is so much greater than the cost of education, and that's really the biggest barrier.
I hope people are also starting to appreciate all of the ways that universities using their powers, their financial power, their political power, their land use power, can and have to be a central part of that housing solution. Even though I do appreciate keeping the main thing the main thing, universities have vast experience, building buildings, managing buildings, maintaining buildings, it's not too far of an ask. And there are all kinds of creative solutions out there that for some situations, it won't make sense for the university itself to be the owner of that building. There are all kinds of ways that we can reshape ownership.
If we're including staff and the folks that help keep universities operating, keep them clean, keep classes being taught, we figured out ways to create even hybrid tenant homeownership opportunities that are not exactly the same simple homeownership that I might have, but that worked quite well. I think of some of my professor friends who are living in houses that the universities help them buy, that they sort of own, that the university sort of own. But it works out really, really well from them.
Universities have shown in California that when they want to get creative and attack a problem like housing, they're very capable of being doing it and doing it well. And I love that you all are nudging them to go deeper and deeper into that, and to start being hopefully more collaborative amongst them and across the institutions and across the systems. We didn't mention this at the outset, but Ryan, I think you are a graduate of the community college system and also in the private system now. And Kate, you are at a UC. Between you, you represent many of our systems. Private schools can be part of this just as well, this is not just something for public education.
And the last thing I will say is an appreciation of note is that we don't just need student voices in the activist ranks. I think you have both shown that you both belong equally, alongside all of us in the professional side of this game. Housing is a professional space. That's who listens to this podcast, that's who builds housing, that's who should be building most of our housing, and you have both been a breath of fresh air.
And I think one suspicion is that one of the reasons why you're so well received in Sacramento is that you both individually, and I think a lot of the colleagues that have come before you and that you're that are coming after you have really shown from day one that you belong in the professional ranks. And it's just great to have you. I wish I had seen the light earlier in my life, it took me a long time to get to even half of where you are both at. Really appreciate what you've done and who you've turned yourselves into, and the work that you've been able to do well.
Ryan Lenney: Really appreciate that, Alex, and appreciate you having us on the show and all the work you do to keep us all better educated and continuing to learn new things about the housing space.
Alex Schafran: Well, thank you and thank you, Kate. It's really been great to have you both.
Kate Rodgers: Thank you so much. It's been great.
Alex Schafran: Thank you so much. Keep listening. And if you haven't done so already, give us a subscription.
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