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Silicon Valley University Asks Professors To Offer Students Affordable Housing (fortune.com)

Housing in Silicon Valley is getting so expensive that the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) petitioned 6,000 faculty and staff members to consider offering students "a room in your home." The college's housing director David Keller wrote in a letter that there are "several hundred students" at the university who don't have "housing guarantees" and need support. Fortune reports: Silicon Valley is notorious for its high living costs. And, according to the report, Santa Cruz and its surrounding areas have far more single-family homes than affordable apartments. Worse yet, a senior at UCSC told the CBS affiliate that some "landlords are kind of jacking up the prices because they know about this." The student, Leon Pham, told CBS that he'll pay $1,100 per month for a small room in a shared house.

Still, there are potentially negative implications to schools asking for professors to rent rooms in their homes to students. Professors are still required to fairly judge student work, and a healthy separation between professors and students is usually what colleges want. The housing crunch, however, might have forced the university's hand. And a spokesperson from the school told CBS that the college has policies that govern "the conduct of students and professors."

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  1. Re:Not Silicon Valley by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Informative

    It is considered as such by some. So is San Francisco which is even farther away than Santa Cruz.

    The "valley" in Silicon Valley is Santa Clara Valley. Neither San Francisco nor Santa Cruz is in the valley. SCV is bounded by the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west (the city of Santa Cruz is on the other side of these mountains) and the Diablo Range on the east.

    Santa Clara Valley