The East Meadow Before Student Housing West Lurched Eastward | Photo by Jim Clifford

Welcome to the East Meadow Action Committee’s Digital Archive

The East Meadow Action Committee, better known as EMAC, was formed in March of 2018 as an informal group to oppose a sprawling development of the heretofore protected East Meadow portion of the UCSC campus. The group was made up of faculty, students, alumni, and many other longtime supporters and friends of UCSC. What we had in common was opposition to a decision by the UCSC administration to move part of a much-needed on-campus housing project (which had been in the planning and preparation phase for about two years) from entirely on the west side of campus (and there called Student Housing West) onto the East Meadow, the iconic open space just inside the main entrance to the campus. That decision only became widely known in March of 2018, even though it had been made by the administration 6 months earlier.

EMAC has always supported a substantial increase in on-campus housing for students, and the administration’s original plan for this massive project of new housing for over 3000 students met with no significant opposition for the first two years of its existence. It was only when it became known that the administration had quietly decided to change the project, with part of the project moved to the East Meadow, that opposition arose and EMAC was created.

It may be difficult for future generations to grasp how large a role the East Meadow, and the wide-open vistas of the lower campus in general, played in UCSC’s self-conception, identity, and attraction to prospective faculty and students. In 1994 Todd Newberry, a Professor Emeritus of Biology and a founding member of the UCSC faculty, said in his oral history:

One of the unique strengths of our campus… is its beauty. …to go home down by the east pasture at the end of the day is still one of the great exhilarations – after 30 years to look out over that bay. What a redemption!

The bitter irony of this story is that EMAC advocated for the administration’s first choice for additional housing, and the administration insisted on their second choice. That second choice meant destruction of the East Meadow and the half century of the design principle that the open meadows of the lower third of the campus would remain the dramatic vistas for which the campus was widely known. It also meant that needed housing could have been provided many years sooner and at lower cost to students if only the administration had stayed with, or returned to, their first choice for how to meet the considerable backlog of needed student housing.

So whether you care about UCSC’s design principles and open vistas or not, this is a story of a wrong turn taken and a stubborn refusal to correct that wrong turn, even when it was obvious we were on the road not only to self-harm, but also to far greater cost to students, and massive delay for urgently needed housing. We offer this archive in the hope that this tragic story might serve whatever capacity humans may have for learning from experience.

Looking Back from August 2026

With the East Meadow portion of the project now about to open to students, and with the destruction of 17 acres of the East Meadow complete, we take a look back in this archive at how we got here.

Ten years ago the UCSC administration launched a project designed to provide much-needed on-campus student housing -- enough for 3000 students -- and to do so with little impact to their beautiful campus, all to be completed within six years. Since then this project has been so mismanaged that now, after ten years, they are finally opening new housing for a mere 120 students, and they’ve done that with massive amounts of damage to the natural beauty of the campus. Never has so much been lost for so little.

This housing for 120 students is family student housing to replace existing family student housing for 200 students, which the administration plans to tear down as their next step, a net loss of housing for 80 students.

If the administration had stayed with their original project, all that housing for 3000 students would have been completed by 2022 (by their own estimation, later extended to 2024). Because they failed to stick with their original project and switched to a revised version that unnecessarily put some of the project in the totemic East Meadow:

  • The entire community of Santa Cruz suffers and will continue to suffer a worse housing shortage than would otherwise be the case, as all those students who would now be housed in the original version of this project continue instead to desperately seek housing in the community.

  • Students suffer because adequate on-campus housing remains an off-in-the-future talking point, rather than a reality.

  • Students also suffer because what housing ever gets built in the far-off future will be much more expensive to finance and to build, and all those costs must be passed on to students in the form of higher rents.

  • The campus suffers because the iconic vistas across the meadow just inside the main entrance to the campus have been pointlessly despoiled forever.

The campus administration had many opportunities to return this project to their original design and get it built sooner and in its entirety, but they stubbornly refused to do so. To cite just two of those opportunities:

  • In the Spring of 2018, when they first revealed their full revised plan for this project, they were hit by a tsunami of opposition from many quarters and many groups, in contrast to their original version that had enjoyed widespread support. It was immediately obvious which would be the most direct and expeditious path to a completed project, but they refused to take it.

  • In 2020 the Santa Cruz County Superior Court ruled that the Regents’ approval of the revised version of the project was illegal and therefore void. The campus administration therefore had to seek a new approval from the Regents in any event, and that would have been a perfect opportunity to go back to the Regents with the original version, not the revised version. The administration failed to take that opportunity and instead stuck stubbornly to the revised version that created all the problems. The meager results since then speak for themselves.

Overall, this is a sad story of missed opportunities and unnecessary damage, with ongoing harm to students, the campus, and the Santa Cruz community at large. If the administration had stuck with, or returned to, their original version of this project, as we urged, many more students would have been housed, much sooner, at significantly lower cost, AND the grand vistas in the lower part of the campus would have been preserved.

Using this Archive

This archive is organized in reverse chronological order, most recent first, and then going back in time step by step.

It is important to note that from the outset the administration was very vague about why they had made the change from the all-on-the-west side Plan A to the also-in-the-East-Meadow Plan B. All the public was told in the early months of Plan B was that it had something to do with a frog. Even some members of the administration were puzzled by that: it is common for large development projects, including some earlier projects on the UCSC campus, to encounter a habitat issue. The solution is usually some type of modest mitigation, perhaps elsewhere on campus. The reason for launching the project in a very different direction, in this case deciding not to build on half the proposed west site when it was clear that a minor mitigation would have sufficed, was a mystery.

That mystery was solved only at the beginning of 2020, when, because of our litigation, we obtained the right to see the internal administration documents about that decision. It turned out that UCSC staff knew that the frog issue could be resolved with only a 6 month impact to the project schedule. However, the higher-ups decided to refuse that quite reasonable and normal solution and instead went down a different path that was obviously going to have far greater delay. They had just spent a year and a half doing the necessary site surveys and studies for Plan A and had not done any of that for Plan B’s site in the East Meadow. It was therefore obvious that, even with the additional 6 months, Plan A was still going to be the faster road to completion. The staff knew that, but the higher ups refused to heed that advice. And of course there was also the massive opposition that Plan B caused, which led to further delays.

As of August 2026 it is a fact that the administration saved six months of delay at the cost of at least 6 years of delay (it now appears that the earliest they can complete the rest of the project is 2030), but that may yet become an even worse trade-off than it now appears.

What all this means for our documents in this archive is that before 2020 we could not and did not know why the administration had so drastically changed the project in mid-stream. And that meant that in our earliest comments we were missing a key part of the story.

It is also important to note that this archive is the record of EMAC’s engagement with the University on the issue of the administration’s changed plan for Student Housing West. EMAC did so from the perspective of being supportive of UCSC, of the need for more student housing, and of wishing the best for UCSC, its administrators, its faculty, and its students. We approached this as an ally of UCSC. But EMAC was not the only opponent of the second version of Student Housing West – there were others, and they had a variety of their own perspectives and arguments.

When our efforts at constructive persuasion fell on deaf ears, we litigated. There was also another litigation by another party. They launched their litigation before ours, and they continued theirs long after we ended ours. What is reflected in this archive is our efforts to put this project on a path that would do less damage, cost students less, and produce needed housing sooner. We do not speak to or comment on the opposition of others.

We also do not include here the legal briefs and related documents filed in court on our behalf by our attorney. We approved his filings and believed his arguments to be correct and legally necessary. Our only avenue of legal challenge was the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and contrary to popular understanding, CEQA is basically just a requirement of full public disclosure of possible harms caused by a public project. CEQA litigations are therefore ultimately about the adequacy of the disclosure, not the merits, harms, or advisability of the project. Thus the documents in our legal case illuminate the disclosure issues rather than the planning, design, cost, and merit of the proposed project. We therefore do not include them here. They are a matter of public record and can be obtained from the courts.

If you are seeking a basic overview of the history of this struggle, we suggest the Timeline – Student Housing West (SHW), February 2024. If you are seeking a single document that would comprehensively illuminate the issues as we saw them, we suggest our EMAC letter to the UC Regents, 3/12/23. But there are many others here worth the time of any serious student of this issue.

What is crystal clear is that something went very wrong. This archive is therefore the proverbial cautionary tale. What is less certain is whether future stewards of the campus will learn from this tale. We can only hope.

12/2020: Chancellor Larive decides to stay with the second version of the project, which destroys the East Meadow, rather than revert to the original version, which does not.