The UC Housing Question

How and where are we supposed to live?

This week I, like the approximately 48,000 other workers involved in the largest academic strike in US history, am not at work. We’re on strike for a fair contract, of course, and the sub-inflation “raise” proposals from the UCOP have been laughable. But we are also on strike as a result of the steadily disintegrating conditions graduate students have faced in the neoliberalizing academy.

Anyway, some data. I’ve been at UCLA in some form or another since 2015, and during that period our wages have been completely stagnant, with average asking prices (according to Zumper) for LA apartments ranging from 95-115% of our real monthly wages. Westwood rents, of course, are much higher– the neighborhood has been California’s most expensive. Compounding matters, we take home paychecks only 9 months of the year, and rent is due in all 12. The picture, as you can see below, is pretty bleak.

In fact, our wages have been more or less stagnant for an entire decade, and the post-recession era of 2012 was not exactly the zenith of academic prospects and grad worker power.

So what does this mean for grad labor at UCLA in our housing search? Well for one it means 90% of us are rent burdened according to our union’s surveys. It also means many of us face punishing hourslong commutes, sometimes necessitating cars we also can’t afford to get to campus. According to 2021 ACS 5 year data, which I have mapped here below, only 952 vacant apartments had asking rents affordable to grad workers within 10 miles of campus over that period. There are over 14,000 of us who work and study at UCLA, and many more people who are not grad students who also need those cheap units.

The university has promised to start on the construction of more student beds. That’s great insofar as it stops us from having to compete with other tenants for spots. Not so great in that the “subsidized” housing on offer costs about 80% of our paycheck this year. As a solution, it’s altogether laughable– there is no housing policy solution for an income of $24,000 short of a massively subsidized state program in the vein of postwar public housing. Students, of course, are in any case ineligible for most affordable housing subsidies.

This is just a quick post to put something on here as a down payment, but our geography, the geography of labor, is the kind of story I’ll be trying to tell here in keeping with the theme of populist geography. That theme will be the subject of my next post.

Welcome to the blog,

and solidarity to my union siblings,

Alex