HAC-Ed Highlight: Student Housing Policy + Modular Interior Innovation

California's housing crisis looks different depending on where you sit – at a policy desk in Sacramento, on a job site in Richmond, or in a dorm lottery you just lost. At this HAC-Ed, two speakers brought those perspectives into the same room.

Kate Rodgers, Chair and Policy Director of the Student Homes Coalition, made the case that student housing is one of the most underleveraged and politically achievable levers in the state's housing toolkit. Armelle Coutant, Co-Founder of Kit Switch, showed how a modular interior system is cutting weeks off construction timelines and meaningfully reducing costs once a project is actually approved.

Together, the session traced the full arc of the problem: from policy barriers to build-out bottlenecks.

Kate Rodgers | Student Homes  Coalition The Student Housing Crisis and the Legislation Trying to Fix It

Here's a framing that doesn't get enough airtime: for most California students, housing costs more than tuition.

At UC Santa Cruz, up to 80% of students are severely rent-burdened, spending more than 70% of their income on housing. Across the UC system, only 37% of undergrads live on campus. At CSUs, that drops to 14%. Of 116 community colleges, only 14 have any on-campus housing at all. Every year, roughly 30,000 students request on-campus housing and don't get it; and because off-campus leases near UCs are typically signed in October for the following academic year, students who get waitlisted in April often have nowhere to go.

The land use picture around campuses explains a lot. Student Homes  commissioned their own study (because the data didn't exist elsewhere) and found that the vast majority of land near California universities is still zoned for single-family, even as the legislature mandates around 2% annual enrollment growth at UCs. That compounds into thousands of additional students entering markets with nowhere to put them. 

Between 2013-2021, rents near UCs jumped 54%. The result: 24% of community college students, 11% of CSU students, and 8% of UC students have experienced homelessness, often not because they couldn't afford a unit – but because they couldn't find one.

What's being built and what makes each type work

Rodgers walked through the three main buckets of student housing development. P3s (public-private partnerships) are built on campus land with private financing but under university permitting authority: meaning no impact fees, no local zoning review, no traditional entitlement process. The university is its own lead agency, which means dramatically faster timelines. Campus housing projects use public financing with similar land use exemptions. Off-campus private apartments near universities don't get those land use advantages, but can access state streamlining law, including AB 130's CEQA infill exemption, and benefit from vacancy rates that often sit below 2% near UCs and demand that doesn't track broader market volatility.

The legislation moving right now

Last session, Student Hpmes  sponsored AB 893, which expanded AB 2011 to cover commercial parcels within half a mile of any UC, CSU, or community college (the "Campus Development Zone") bumping allowable density to 80 units per acre and height to 65 feet. The bill also closed two loopholes worth knowing about beyond student housing: cities can now only review the area a developer states they're building on during ministerial review (no more using adjacent drainage ditches or non-contiguous parcels to block projects), and minor easements – like the Beverly Hills sign easement that was weaponized to deny an AB 2011 project – can no longer disqualify a site from streamlined review.

This session's central bill is AB 2480, which creates a student housing density bonus. Projects near campuses that include a mix of low-income and moderate-income student units can receive up to an 80% bonus on a sliding scale, with unlimited density near transit. Low-income students are defined as Cal Grant, Pell Grant, or Promise Program recipients, meaning that it’s simple to verify. Moderate-income targets independent students, primarily grad students, whose TA stipends and part-time work don't cover market-rate rents. AB 2480 is paired with AB 2433, which would make density bonus approvals ministerial. Together, the two bills are designed to expand what's possible and speed up how fast it can happen.

The Assembly outlook is good. AB 2480 passed its first committee on consent with no opposition. The Senate is less certain. Senator Arreguin, who has spoken publicly about experiencing housing insecurity as a college student himself, is running a separate bill that would prevent developers from using density bonus concessions to waive local labor standards.

Along with the Student Homes  Coalition, HAC is watching this legislation closely as it will change the housing landscape for higher education across the state.

→ Interested in student housing development or want to dig into AB 2480? Reach out to Kate at kate@studenthomescoalition.org.

Armelle Coutant | Kit Switch Ready-to-Install Interiors: Cutting Costs and Time After Approval

Rodger’s presentation covered the approvals side of the pipeline, and Armelle Coutant brought the conversation into construction — specifically, what happens once a project is approved and the clock is running.

Kit Switch delivers kit-of-parts interior systems for kitchens, bathrooms, and storage in multifamily housing. The core idea: prefabricate components off-site, so that on-site installation is faster, cheaper, and less dependent on coordinating multiple trades in sequence.

Why kitchens and bathrooms are the right place to focus

Kitchens and bathrooms represent up to 40% of total renovation cost in rehab projects. They require the highest concentration of skilled trades. And they're where the most sequencing friction lives: waiting for cabinet delivery, on-site countertop cutting, appliance installer scheduling, electrician and plumber callbacks after tile is done. A typical kitchen installation can span up to two to three weeks. With Kit Switch, delivery and install can happen in one day, with a typical kitchen done in a matter of hours.

This month, Kit Switch completed a 50-unit motel conversion into permanent supportive house through Project HomeKey, with one installer and an apprentice completing four kitchenette units per day after a single training unit. The Kit Switch system also simplified on-site prep work, as the plumber noted the difference between three hours of prep work versus two full days under a traditional approach.

How the system works

Everything arrives job-site-ready: cabinets, countertops, backsplash, appliances, fixtures. They are all aggregated into a labeled kit, delivered floor by floor in coordination with the general contractor. The back panel of the system arrives pre-wired with localized electrical outlets. Electricians and plumbers make final connections, about 15 minutes per unit, rather than being called back repeatedly throughout installation.

The compliance piece is also baked in. Kits come pre-verified for ADA compliance, with a configurator that flags accessible storage shortfalls and suggests fixes. For projects subject to specific procurement requirements, Kit Switch has already done the supply chain research on all of the kit components. For electrification projects, the all-electric kit with built-in outlets avoids tearing into walls for the minutiae of MEPS trim.

The cost case

Kit Switch materials tend to run slightly higher than traditional materials alone, but factoring in labor efficiencies, fewer RFIs and change orders, and earlier occupancy, they've consistently been able to generate cost savings compared to traditional bids. For a floor of 10 units, the Kit Switch team has been mapping two to three weeks of schedule savings against traditional schedules, savings that compound across floors. On a multi-million dollar project, one month of earlier occupancy alone can be worth several hundred thousand dollars in carrying costs.

Regional pricing varies: LA runs slightly below the Bay Area, and Washington state production has shown to bring cost savings compared to California. Kit Switch currently operates made-to-order, with production partners close to each job site. The longer-term goal is enough volume that a 6-unit project gets the same economies of scale as a 100-unit one.

The biggest barriers Coutant flagged aren't necessarily on the job site, but rather with getting an ecosystem of stakeholders familiar with a different process. Lenders aren't always set up for off-site production payment structures, which require partial upfront payment to start manufacturing. GCs that are used to all products being procured by subs also aren't always set up to contract with a product vendor in more of an end-to-end and design-build manner. At HAC, we know these barriers are solvable, but they reflect how much of the construction financing ecosystem is still built around traditional on-site sequencing.

→ Working on a rehab or new construction project and want to explore what Kit Switch could do for your timeline? Reach out to Armelle at armelle@kitswitch.com.

The Throughline

California is leaving a lot of housing on the table, and the barriers aren't mysterious. Near universities, single-family zoning surrounds institutions with tens of thousands of students and nowhere to put them while enrollment mandates keep growing. In construction, sequencing overhead adds weeks and cost to projects that are already financially marginal.

The Student HOMES Coalition through AB 2480 and Kit Switch are working on different parts of the same problem: making it faster, cheaper, and more viable to build the homes California keeps saying it needs.

Want to connect further or request topics you’d like to hear about? Reach Brianna at brianna@housingactioncoalition.org.