No Place Like Home: UCSC's research project on housing in Santa Cruz County

No Place Like Home is a community-initiated, student-engaged research project on the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County. Based at UC Santa Cruz, the project grew out of two ongoing research initiatives: Critical Sustainabilities, led by Miriam Greenberg, and Working for Dignity, led by Steve McKay. Community partners working with low-income residents initiated the research by identifying affordable housing as their most important need, while joint research found the lack of affordable housing is a primary driver of Santa Cruz County's high poverty rate (22%). Yet there was a dearth of data on, or representation of, how low-income renters experience the housing crisis, and on the multiple impacts of unaffordable and precarious housing for our community.