UC San Diego growth means more on-campus housing is coming

Last Updated on May 1, 2025

The university is updating its Long Range Development Plan and moving forward with two large building projects with 8,400 student beds.

UC San Diego is growing rapidly, its growth outpacing its 2018 projections and necessitating overhauls both to its plans and its physical campus.

Those revisions are well underway, UCSD leadership said at the Feb 6 meeting of the La Jolla Community Planners Association, with housing construction on track to add 2,400 beds this year and another 6,000 by 2029.

Campus development is guided by the Long Range Development Plan, a general land use plan required for each of the UC campuses that functions as a “framework document,” said UCSD’s Executive Director of campus planning Robert Clossin.

LRDPs typically cover 15 to 20 years, “predicated on how quickly we build and develop.”

And with the UC Regents mandating campuses to increase enrollment, there is higher demand at UCSD, with UCSD being the second most-applied to university in the US, Clossin said, just behind UC Los Angeles.

“We received 157,000 applications last fall, which is both first-year undergrads and transfer undergrads,” he said. “That doesn’t even include graduate students.”

UCSD today has approximately 44,000 students, including undergraduate and graduate students, and has met the LRDP population estimates projected in 2018, Clossin said.

UCSD now estimates it will grow to 56,000 students and 40,300 staff and faculty members.

Physically, the campus has about 1,200 acres spread among the East and West campus and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The LRDP is also looking to add 8.4 million square feet, or about 193 acres, above what the current plan shows, Clossin said.

Much of that development will happen on the West Campus (the main part of the university) and the East Campus (where the medical center is).

There will be no change or development to SIO.

UCSD is in the process of preparing a subsequent environmental impact report, which will be available in the next several weeks for a public, 45-day review upon completion; email env-review@ucsd.edu to sign up for the EIR notification list.

“It’s so great to see the growth we’ve had,” said UCSD Senior Associate Vice Chancellor Hemlata Jhaveri.

And on-campus housing will need to increase to accommodate that growth.

“Our hope is that if a student really wants to stay on campus for the entire four years, they should be able to do that.” Jhaveri said.

Currently, UCSD houses 17,000 undergraduate and 5,100 graduate students on campus.

“We still turn away a lot of students,” Jhaveri said, adding the university has a housing waitlist of thousands.

UCSD’s target is to offer housing to 65 percent of its students, which “seems to be the sweet spot [as] not everybody wants to stay on campus,” she said.

Ridge Walk North Living and Learning Neighborhood will provide updated administrative and teaching space and undergraduate student housing.
Credit Hensel Phelps/HMC/EYRC

To address that, the Ridge Walk North Living and Learning Neighborhood will open in fall 2025 with housing for 2,400 undergraduate students.

Additionally, the Pepper Canyon East District is in preliminary phases to redevelop about 20 acres that currently have 1,000 beds into a residential set of buildings for 6,000 students.

Pepper Canyon East is still in need of designs, review and approval; UCSD is aiming for a 2029 opening.