The University of San Diego is pushing to more than double the number of students it can house at its campus in Linda Vista, becoming the latest local school to seek relief from the shortage of affordable homes on the open market.
The private Catholic university recently got permission from the San Diego Planning Commission to increase its housing capacity to 5,701. Currently, the school can accommodate 2,600.
USD is hoping the city council will green-light the expansion, possibly by the end of the year.
The proposed increase has the support of Linda Vista’s community planning group, reflecting USD’s stable relations with its neighbors.
If the expansion is approved, the university says it will phase in the new housing over many years and will build only low-rise dwellings.
“A best practice in education is having your students live on campus,” said Ky Snyder, USD’s vice president of university operations. “(And) we have an acute housing crisis in our community.”
Linda Vista is a small rental market with around 2,670 apartment units, according to CoStar, a real estate tracking company. The average rent is $2,453 a month, and the vacancy rate is 3.6 percent.
Countywide, the average rent is $2,495 a month, and vacancy rate is 5.3 percent. So while rents are about average in Linda Vista, homes are harder to get due to the lower vacancy rate.
By comparison, USD says it charges students roughly $12,200 per academic year for housing on average, although that can vary based on how many students share a room. With few exceptions, freshmen and sophomores are required to live on campus.
Nearly 5,800 of the school’s 9,100 students are undergraduates. The university charges $58,420 in tuition; its academic year begins in early September and ends in late May.
San Diego County’s three public universities — UC San Diego, San Diego State University and Cal State San Marcos — have added thousands of units of housing in recent years to accommodate enrollment growth and demand.
UCSD has done so on an epic scale, adding 5,300 beds so far, mostly in high-rises. A high-rise village currently under construction will add another 2,400 by next fall — a boom that has greatly increased student access to UCSD but hasn’t always been welcomed by the university’s La Jolla neighbors.
UCSD enrolled nearly 42,400 students last fall. That figure will be broken late this week when fall 2024 numbers are released, the university says.
Staff writer Phillip Molnar contributed to this report.