UC San Diego Planning to Add 3,310 Dorm Beds to Prevent Housing Shortage

The University of California San Diego is working on two student housing-focused projects that foresee the construction of dormitories that would provide accommodation for some 3,310 students.

The projects are expected begin this summer and be completed by 2024 in order to deal with the rapid increase in number of students at the university. As the San Diego Union Tribune reports, adding 3,310 dorm beds will increase the university’s capacity to a total of 22,260 beds.

The university received permission from the Board of Regents last week to proceed with the two projects – Thurgood Marshall College Undergraduate Student Housing and Pepper Canyon West. The latter will accommodate some 1,316 transfer and upper-diversion undergraduate students close to the Blue Line trolley station that has opened recently on campus.

According to the university, students will be accommodated in two towers which will be the highest buildings in UTC as they are expected to be 22 or 23 stories tall. A total of $350 million has been allocated for the project, which was planned to be implemented earlier, but due to developments related to the pandemic, the university had to delay it.

During fall last year, there were around 3,300 UC San Diego students who needed rooms. Currently, there are 43,000 students enrolled at the university, increasing by more than 14,000 students over the previous decade. Another increase in enrollment has been projected to occur this fall.

The Board of Regents has also allowed the university to begin plans to make available some 2,000 beds for Marshall College students, a UCSD residential college. The amount that the university is allowed to spend in this regard is about $33 million.

UCSD is also planning to complete the construction of the Theater District Living and Learning Neighborhood, a building near La Jolla Playhouse that will provide housing for 2,000 students during fall 2023.

According to Statista Research Department, there were 2.66 million student beds in the United States during 2018, which number was projected to increase in 2021, to 2.84 million. Statista revealed that in 2021, the University of California – Riverside, CA had the highest rental increase for student accommodation compared to some other universities in the US. Rents in Illinois State University, for instance, decreased by 2.4 percent.

UC San Diego was founded in 1960 and is now recognized as one of the top 15 research universities in the world.