No Place Like Home

The Project 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. Research No Place Like Home launched in Fall 2015 to research and represent these experiences and impacts, as well as to explore the roots of and potential responses to the crisis. We did this through a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, undertaken by teams of UC Santa Cruz undergraduate students, together with faculty, graduate students, and research center support. These methods include: – a renter survey – historical and policy analysis – targeted interviews – creative non-fiction – audio documentaries – photography – data visualization Student Engagement Students conducting the survey and interviews first worked directly with our community partner, Community Bridges, to get to know the issues that renters face, and to organize activities that address these issues. Students then went door-to-door in bilingual teams, with approximately 60% conducting surveys in Spanish. Students also helped develop the site’s multimedia content, from data analysis, to interviews with local experts, to data visualization and photo documentary. Many of our students are bilingual Spanish speakers and first-generation college students, and most chose to participate in the project due to their own experiences with housing issues.