Lecturers/Adjuncts

Authors: Kyle Bonham, Eddie Lee, Allie Hughs, Aiyana Ascencion, Jacob Sur

Background

Housing affordability in Goleta and Isla Vista plays a major role in shaping the economic, social, political, and public health conditions of the broader UCSB community. While housing challenges are often discussed in relation to students and faculty, Lecturers and Adjuncts also face many of the same pressures in the local rental market. Reports about housing in the Santa Barbara area consistently describe extremely high rental prices, low vacancy rates, and limited new housing development. Because most university employees compete in the same housing market as students and long-term residents, the shortage of affordable units creates significant strain for those working at UCSB. For non-tenure-track faculty, these pressures can be especially severe. Lecturers and adjunct instructors typically earn lower salaries than tenure-track professors and often rely on short-term or part-time contracts. As a result, their income can be less stable and less predictable, making it more difficult to secure long-term housing in a high-cost region.

Research on contingent faculty across the United States shows that adjunct instructors frequently experience broader forms of economic precarity. Many are paid per course, receive limited or no employment benefits, and lack long-term job security. National labor reports have found that some adjunct faculty must work multiple jobs or qualify for public assistance to meet basic living expenses. In high-cost housing markets such as Santa Barbara County, these employment conditions can translate directly into housing instability. Some instructors are forced to live far from campus in places like Ventura or Camarillo and commute long distances, while others share crowded housing arrangements that may not be stable or sustainable over time. These patterns suggest that housing insecurity among adjunct and lecturer faculty is not only a local issue but also part of a broader national trend of labor precarity in higher education.

This video, an in-depth report explores the growing trend of adjunct professors becoming part of the gig economy, highlighting the stark contrast between their reality and that of full-time faculty: https://youtu.be/-at7InM0CjY?si=K1ys-JWBSBgXxcD8

The Why

This project matters because it shows that housing insecurity among Lecturers and Adjuncts faculty at UCSB is not just a personal financial issue, but a structural problem shaped by local housing shortages and university labor practices, and requires attention from university leadership, local policymakers, and higher education institutions more broadly.

Research Questions

This article will answer the questions listed below:

Main Research Question:

How do housing affordability and availability in Goleta/Isla Vista, along with university housing policies, affect the economic stability, and overall well-being of Lecturers and Adjunct faculty at UCSB?

Other Questions:

Significance

Policy / Institution 1: Quality Housing and Responsibility Act

Passed by HUD in 1998, the QHRA was a housing act that was meant to encourage employment and promote mixed-income communities by allowing low income and higher income households to be housed in the same apartments. However, it negatively affected low-income households. The QHRA Lowered the percentage of housing units reserved for poorest families and ended rules requiring public housing authorities to build one unit for every unit they demolished. Similar housing policy acts, such as HOPE IV, were meant to re-evaluate housing nationwide and create new housing or refurbish housing. Instead, federal agencies and landlords use HOPE IV to demolish dense housing where low-income families live. These policies, while they look good on paper, hurt those who make below the minimum wage. Since the median salary in Santa Barbara County necessary for housing is 125,000, and lecturers and adjuncts make around $68,247 (before their first six years, assuming they stay six years). This isn’t nearly enough for housing. On top of the waitlist for on-campus and off-campus housing, which is currently full, housing becomes difficult to locate.

Policy / Institution 2: LPSOE Policy for waitlist

Lecturers under six years (and adjuncts especially) are ineligible for housing. Lecturers with “potential security for employment” in other words, those working towards a Ph.D. at the university are eligible for the waitlist. The waitlist is not open to those who do not qualify for these positions, and this includes a good number of lecturers and adjuncts who are under that 6-year requirement. Adjuncts will not be eligible for said waitlists. Therefore, the university limits its housing opportunities for those who aren’t tenured or full-time professors.

Policy / Institution 3: Community Housing Authority (CHA) for UCSB

the CHA decides who can be a part of the board and the decisions for housing for all who are a part of UCSB. Although LPSOE candidates can be part of the board, adjuncts cannot. Furthermore, full-time professors constitute the majority of the board. The board has created Ocean walk, the newest on-campus housing being built, for those who are full time professors only. Even if you are a LPSOE looking for housing, the time allotted to make the decision Ocean walk housing is low, and your time to make a decision cannot be extended because of the long waitlist in place. When this timeline is combined with the median wage of lecturers ($68,000) the average lecturer cannot afford or find housing from UCSB. Although lecturers get access to housing from UCSB on paper, the majority don’t obtain “affordable housing” located on the west end of campus.

What the graph depicts: Even full-time lecturers are facing rent burdens (30% to 50% of income is used on housing), while monthly rent is around half of their monthly salary. UC Santa Barbara also ranks on the lower side of the median wages for UCs. If full-time lecturers are rent burdened in Santa Barbara, what does that say for part-time lecturers and adjuncts?

* Chart designed by Daily Nexus

Chart is depicting: Comparing salaries between Professors and Lecturers before UC-AFT union demanded a raise and multiple other demands during November and December 2022.

Data and Methods

To understand how housing affordability affects lecturers and adjunct faculty at UCSB, this project uses several sources of data that provide information about faculty employment and the local housing market. Because housing insecurity is difficult to measure directly, these data sources help estimate the scale of the problem by comparing faculty income with housing costs in Santa Barbara County.

Research on housing policy also suggests that housing markets are not shaped only by individual choice or market dynamics, but are strongly influenced by government policies and institutional decision-making. For example, Jacob Faber (2020) examines the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal program created during the New Deal era, and finds that its neighborhood rating system significantly increased racial residential segregation in American cities. Areas labeled as “high risk” were often associated with Black residents, immigrants, and working-class families, which limited access to mortgage credit and long-term wealth accumulation. Faber argues that these policies structured the racial geography of American cities and that their effects persisted long after the original programs ended. His findings demonstrate that housing inequality can be produced and reinforced through institutional decisions, making it important to examine how contemporary housing policies and market conditions affect different groups, including non-tenure-track faculty.

One important source of data comes from UCSB Academic Personnel and Payroll records. These records provide information about the number of lecturers and adjunct instructors employed by the university, their employment status, and their salary levels. By examining this information, it becomes possible to estimate the income available to non-tenure-track faculty and compare it to the cost of living in the surrounding communities of Goleta and Isla Vista. If the salaries of lecturers and adjunct instructors are significantly lower than the income required to afford housing in the local rental market, this suggests that many faculty members may experience housing affordability pressures. For example, discussions in class suggested that approximately $125,000 per year may be necessary to comfortably afford housing in Santa Barbara. However, the average salary of lecturers is significantly lower than this level. This gap between income and housing costs helps illustrate the structural affordability challenges faced by contingent faculty at UCSB. In addition, payroll data can show how the number of lecturers and adjunct instructors has changed over time, which may also indicate the potential scale of housing pressure among non-tenure-track faculty.

However, these data also have important limitations. Payroll and personnel records provide information about employment and income, but they do not directly measure housing conditions. The data do not indicate where instructors live, how much they pay in rent, or whether they experience housing instability or housing insecurity. The data doesn’t account for additional factors that influence housing affordability, such as household size, shared housing arrangements, or secondary income sources. Because of these limitations, payroll data can only suggest potential housing strain rather than directly confirm it.

In addition to university payroll data, this project also uses housing market data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and rental listings from Zillow. The American Community Survey provides estimates of median gross rent in the cities of Santa Barbara and Goleta, while Zillow listings provide examples of current rental prices in the local housing market. Together, these sources help illustrate the cost of renting housing in the region where many UCSB employees seek to live.

These housing data show that rental prices in Santa Barbara and Goleta are consistently high, particularly for one-bedroom and two-bedroom units. Housing affordability is commonly evaluated using the standard that housing costs should not exceed 30 percent of a household’s income. By using median rent values from census data and rental listings, it is possible to estimate the annual income required to afford housing in these cities without being considered rent-burdened. When the income required to afford median rent exceeds the average salary of lecturers and adjunct faculty reported in university payroll data, it suggests that structural housing affordability pressures exist within this group.

Like the payroll data, however, these housing data also have limitations. Rental listings reflect advertised prices, which may change over time or differ from the final rent paid by tenants. Census data also represent averages across all renters in Santa Barbara and Goleta rather than focusing specifically on lecturers and adjunct instructors. As a result, these data sources help establish the broader housing market conditions in the region but cannot directly measure the housing experiences of UCSB contingent faculty.

Major Findings

These findings include: housing, health, and food insecurities, revealing how economic precarity affects lecturers/adjunct faculty both professionally and personally.

Faculty-in-Debt and Redlining Higher Education by Jeanne Schepar

Jeanne Schepar’s Mortgaged Minds: Faculty-in-Debt and Redlining Higher Education argues that the student debt crisis has extended beyond students and into the lives of graduates and professors. She explains that “faculty-in-debt needs to be included as part of the conversation about how academic labor is structured” (Schepar 2017:39). This idea is especially relevant to lecturers at UC Santa Barbara, many of whom carry graduate school debt while working in relatively low-paid and temporary positions. Schepar’s argument highlights how debt shapes who is able to enter and stay in academic careers, particularly in disciplines that tend to pay less. For adjunct and temporary faculty living in a high-cost area like Santa Barbara, the combination of student debt and unstable income can intensify financial stress. As a result, many instructors may face significant housing burdens and a greater risk of displacement in the local rental market.

UC Santa Barbara Housing Mysteries by Dick Flacks

In UC Santa Barbara Housing Mysteries, Dick Flacks analyzes the university’s housing policies and their impact on faculty and staff. He argues that UCSB promised significant housing for employees but ultimately failed to follow through on those commitments. Flacks notes that “Ocean Road represents less than a third of the promise UCSB made more than a decade ago to sponsor 1,840 units of faculty housing” (Flacks 2022). This shortfall is important because the university continued to increase enrollment while relying heavily on the private rental market to absorb the growing housing demand. As a result, the local housing market has become increasingly competitive and expensive. Flacks also explains that newly recruited faculty often cannot afford to live in Santa Barbara, even as renters. If tenure-track faculty struggle to find affordable housing, adjunct instructors—who typically earn lower salaries and have less job security—face even greater housing instability.

Basic Needs Crisis in Higher Education by Sarita Cargas

The First article I chose was “Basic Needs Crisis in Higher Education” by Sarita Cargas. This article focuses on Students, staff, and faculty, measuring food and housing insecurity within universities across Universities in the southwest region of the United States. Few studies before this one actually included faculty and staff, which seem to be an understudied area of housing and food insecurity. Despite its geographical location, the southwest is within proximity to California, and knowing California’s demand for housing and unhoused populations, This article is relevant to the study of lecturers and adjunct faculty. The study found that faculty and staff all experience housing and food insecurity, across some level, and that the most commonly experienced housing insecurity for staff and faculty was at four-year universities. Cargas specifically outlines, “Faculty/staff across institution types had an even higher SNAP gap than students; 80% or more of food insecure faculty/staff across institution types did not receive SNAP” (Cargas, 26). More than one third of faculty/staff also reported an inability to afford health services across all institution types. For housing insecurity, Cargas reported that, “At least one BNI was reported by 61.6% of all faculty/staff and the median number of BNI reported was 1.0” (Cargas, 26). BNI stands for Basic Needs Insecurity, and this can range from housing, to food, or health insecurity. This illustrates how housing and food insecurity for lecturers and adjuncts is clearly a nationwide issue. This article supports Patillo’s argument of housing as a commodity rather than a right, as well as Faber’s Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention and Junia Howell’s argument that the Housing Appraisal Industry has shaped racial inequality to today. Historically the appraisal system has commodified housing by race, and continues to do so using older HOLC systems of appraisal.

Faculty Perspective

One important assumption is that not all adjuncts or lecturers are able to find affordable housing within Santa Barbara county. Because these positions often provide an inconsistent income, many faculty members may not have an estimate of the income they will earn each month. This uncertainty can make it difficult to purchase a home or commit to regular housing payments.

This issue also reflects poorly on the university, as many faculty members are left to find housing on their own in an expensive area. Covering the cost of living in Santa Barbara can be challenging, particularly for adjuncts and lecturers with limited financial security. Although the university may offer housing options, the demand is high and these opportunities are limited. meaning not all faculty members can access or afford them.

If housing becomes available, faculty could be offered a living space in either the Sierra Madre Villages, Ocean Walk at North Campus, or West Campus Point. However, purchasing a home through UCSB is not cheap, and individuals will need to have a stable income in order to be approved for a home loan.

As a group, we decided to look deeper into the housing crisis that has affected faculty members at UC Santa Barbara. We gained a deeper insight by interviewing one staff that lives in one of UCSB’s faculty home.

Do you feel that you were affected by the UCSB housing crisis as a faculty member? 
The individual that we interviewed claims they were affected by the housing crisis as a professor, and have continued to be affected.

“While I enjoy living in a faculty home, I would have not been able to accept the position as a professor if it were not for the fact that my department offered an allowance that provided me with a significant down-payment towards a faculty home”.

“However, even with the allowance, I may have not been able to purchase the home if it were not for the subsidized housing, and the low interest rate the home came with. While living in faculty housing, the estimate for the home is around 1.3 million dollars, and it is a 2 bedroom home, making it difficult to cater towards a larger family. The home is small, so I can hear my neighbors, and they can hear us. While I enjoy living in their home, I am aware that my children are coming of age, and are going to need their own rooms soon. Even by making six-figures, and combining an income with my partner, I am unable to readily purchase a new home that has the capacity to accommodate my children. I plan to work additional hours and publish papers so that I can report back to my dean, and ask to be added back to the faculty home waitlist, because there is no way I would want to spend 2 million dollars on a home, and likely won’t be able to do so”.

What are your experiences living in faculty housing?

“There are 3 other families that share a courtyard with us, and they are all wonderful. We all have young children, and it feels nice to live with other people that are like-minded. For example, it feels great knowing that we share similar political beliefs, want to raise our children in similar ways and that we can share resources. Everyone who lives within the faculty community seems to be really nice, and it feels great knowing that we are a community that can lean on each other for support”.

“I have mixed feelings about this, but I feel that when faculty housing was built, folks expressed that they were not happy because the land that we are living in was on Ellwood, which is a nature preserve that has come at the cost of the community. It is nice to live on acres of open space, especially as a family who enjoys being outdoors”.

“Some negatives include the HOA (they all suck, because you lose freedom). Our HOA cost is a lot of money in comparison to my other HOA cost on my owned apartment in Georgia. The HOA cost for my current home is around 700, which is cheaper than other homes in the community because my home is smaller”.

“Parking spots within the community are limited, and they are technically assigned. This has led to issues amongst people living within the community because at times, parking spaces can be taken up. People have called tow-trucks for people who have parked in their parking spaces for just 1 hour. There is a large protection of property, when we all share the same space”.

“You also technically don’t fully own your home, because if you do not work for the university, you must sell your home back to UCSB. The loans for the home are loaned from UCSB, so you cannot pass it on to the next generation. The benefits of home ownership for faculty housing are not primary wealth so you are paying the university but you do not have full ownership of the home. However, it would be easy to sell your home if you are looking to move into a new space”.

“Another negative aspect is that many people are on a waitlist for a home space to open up, and some homes are outdated. UCSB takes up a lot of space, and there does not seem to be an investment for nice and affordable housing for faculty members who will not make the university as much money as they are paying them for a home”.

Do you feel that the university does an adequate job at providing affordable housing options to all faculty members?
“I am unsure if the faculty allowance that allowed me to deposit a large down payment is available to every faculty member in every other department. I know that this opportunity is unavailable to staff and I feel that is unfair, and this is not a systemwide concern, but I wish that there could be an opportunity to buy twice in faculty housing without having to bargain to be put back on a waiting list. It used to be the case that getting into any Santa Barbara housing one time was enough to secure ownership in the future, but with the way that prices are looking, homes have increased alongside interest rates and salaries have not increased”.

“Particularly because faculty homes are not listed like they are in the open market, they are not able to be listed in a similar sense. Faculty homes are not a money making engine, and so if someone purchased a home in the open market in the area, they are able to sell the homes in 3 years and it would not have been unreasonable for them to have made 100,000 in profit, giving them an opportunity to move into a bigger home in the future if needed”.

Solutions

Short-term: Financial aid/University resources

For a short-term solution, UCSB would need to implement financial aid, food currency, and university resources for rent burden designed specifically for staff like lecturers and adjuncts. The university should work to provide aid for lecturers and adjuncts undergoing rent burden, food insecurity, and are having a hard time finding affordable housing. Community groups should partner with the university to help the university aid the staff. In order to gain funding, the university should lobby the City of Goleta to use taxpayers money for aid. Fundraisers should be used as well as spreading awareness of housing issues (through strikes, marches, and community town halls) to the general public so that public policy can be changed. 

Mid-term solution: Interim Housing projects

For a mid-term solution, nonprofits should create specific housing projects modeled after Finland’s housing solutions. Housing projects and policies surrounding the unhoused, such as Section 8 housing, helps support lecturers and adjuncts at risk of being unhoused. Because this population of the staff’s salaries do not match the minimum standard for rent, they are at risk for housing insecurity and may find themselves easily unhoused in the wake of any kind of disaster. This includes: housing damages, family related financial issues, transportation issues, food insecurity, health insecurity, and more. Housing projects would give this population the time and resources they need in order to get back on their feet. Nonprofit organizations, such as Dignity Moves, are best positioned to implement these projects since they already have an outline and multiple projects set up. In order to see enough housing for this population (which is only 11 of the 1,241 teaching staff at UCSB), the nonprofits would need to work together with the City of Goleta and UCSB to create enough private interim housing.

Long-term: Communal Housing

Communal Housing is the long-term solution for lecturers and adjuncts. Part of this solution means facing the issue of housing as a commodity. In order to treat housing as a right, the end goal should be Communal Housing, or Co-housing. This is where residents reside in a large suite-style house (up to 60 residents). This is modeled after Denmark, where multiple families share a house, kitchen, and common room. This allows for denser living situations compared to apartments or single homes. In Denmark, 7% of the population lives in co-housing, this means it is being implemented on a large scale (197,750 dwellings in the country are co-housings). UCSB should fund most of these co-housing projects, as they are responsible as a state institution for making sure housing becomes a right. The institutions that employ its people should be responsible for supplying housing. Because of how privatized the market has become for building new housing, trying to lobby for state support of co-housing would take a lot of legislative change. The city of Goleta would need to implement several policies or a policy package that guaranteed housing for this population of lecturers and adjuncts. These co-houses could be placed next to Oceanwalk housing, allowing for lecturers and adjuncts to enjoy similar housing at a much lower rate. The houses themselves would be larger in size compared to current ones. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, the lack of affordable housing throughout Santa Barbara has made it difficult for contracted faculty to obtain. Due to the unstable income provided to lecturers and adjuncts through UCSB, it is difficult for faculty to obtain housing through the county, or even the university due to a lack of affordability. Our research findings suggest that by implementing community group housing for faculty, this method could be a useful in providing some sort of housing for our demographic. The lack of housing for faculty speaks volume as it highlights the unlivable wages provided to faculty, and how the university has avoided this issue affecting all demographics, including university lecturers.

Ultimately, by addressing the housing insecurity amongst members of the university, it brings awareness to both accountability and creative ideas that could be useful in solving this on-going issue. By acknowledging the struggles faculty members face through their occupation, UCSB can begin to take careful steps towards creating an affordable and livable environment for university members and their families to reside in.

Work Cited

Flacks, Dick. 2022. “UC Santa Barbara Housing Mysteries.” Santa Barbara Independent, April 5.

Scheper, Jeanne. 2017. “Mortgaged Minds: Faculty-in-Debt and Redlining Higher Education.” Radical Teacher 107:32–44.

Crutchfield, Robert M., and Gregory S. Martin. 2018. Basic Needs Crisis in Higher Education: Results of a Statewide Study of Students, Faculty, and Staff. Long Beach, NM: University of New Mexico.

Faber, Jacob W. “We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America’s Racial Geography.” American Sociological Review 85.5 (2020): 739-775. Thousand Oaks, CA: American Sociological Association.

Tampa Bay 28. (2022, April 15). In-depth: How adjunct professors became part of the gig economy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/

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