UC San Diego is continuing plans to build dormitories that will accommodate a total of 3,310 students to cope with the rapid growth of the university and the critical shortage of housing.
The expansion will increase the school’s housing capacity to 22,260 – more than the number of people living in communities such as Solana Beach and Scripps Ranch.
The La Jolla campus received help from the University of California Regent’s Board, which last week gave it permission to move forward with two major projects: Pepper Canyon West and Thurgood Marshall College Undergraduate Student Housing.
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Pepper Canyon West will house 1,310 undergraduate and senior undergraduate students near the recently opened Blue Line trolley station.
Students will live in two towers 22 or 23 storeys high, making them among the tallest buildings in the university area, next to which only the 23-storey Palisade apartment complex, which opened in the summer of 2019, can be measured.
The university says the towers will be connected by five-story buildings with outdoor terraces. The $ 350 million project will also feature retail space.
Construction is expected to begin this summer and be completed in 2024.
UCSD had planned to build the complex earlier, but this was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Pressure has risen to get things started after the campus experienced a record enrollment boom in the fall, leaving nearly 3,300 students on waiting lists for accommodation. The school now has about 43,000 students. Enrollment has risen by more than 14,000 over the past decade and is expected to rise again this fall.
The regents also gave UCSD permission to spend about $ 33 million to begin planning a complex with approximately 2,000 beds for Marshall College, one of the school’s seven undergraduate residential colleges. Most of the project will be located in a eucalyptus grove where low dormitories have existed for decades.
The UCSD will return to the fundraising regents in the fall. The framework plans predict that the complex will be completed in 2025. The school has not yet announced how much the homes will cost.
The project will be a competitor to North Torrey Pines Living and Learning Neighborhood, a community of 2,000 beds on North Torrey Pines Road and Muir College Drive that has become a focal point of campus life.
UCSD is also building the Theater District Living and Learning Neighborhood, a complex near La Jolla Playhouse that will house 2,000 students from the fall of 2023.
Meanwhile, the university will continue to accommodate up to three students in some dorm rooms this fall to tackle housing shortages.
The shortage arose mainly because the school dumped 2,000 beds to promote social distancing during the peak of the pandemic.
UCSD officials also said they had phased out some of the rooms for three students, or “triples,” because they had caused serious crowding problems.
Under the new plan, the university will add 700 undergraduate beds for the fall quarter. ◆