My daughter is going to be a junior at UC Santa Cruz this fall and had to move out of her college sponsored apartment. The housing market is extremely tight in Santa Cruz, like many college towns, and having lost the lottery to keep her apartment, we are now tossed into the fray of competing with hundreds of other families looking for a place for her to live. Spending a few days viewing the available rentals last week, I quickly realized the housing situation in Santa Cruz is beyond ridiculous.
Think of the worst motel room you can imagine with a small kitchenette with about 500 square foot in total, running from $2500 a month or more. Yes, it’s that bad. Add in the fact that every available place we saw was either rented or had an application or three already submitted.
Since the market is so crazy, managers are slow to return calls, websites are inaccurate or don’t function very well and what websites do work are inundated with applicants. Santa Cruz is not ideally situated for easy access. If one wants to go further out to find something, you face monumental traffic concerns adding 30 minutes of stop and go driving in almost every direction.
It became apparent that to find a place, we had to switch gears and adopt the method of simply driving around and stopping in every apartment complex we could find that looked safe and trying to find a resident manager so we could inquire about something that might be coming vacant soon but had not yet been listed. Similar to one o.
