For decades, Isla Vista’s been branded a “youth ghetto,” and in some ways, the label fits. Of 15,000 residents, nearly 13,000 are students who endure urban blight, overcrowding, and a high crime rate amid a jumble of old apartment buildings and tract homes.
But the students here are not the marginalized poor. With jobs, loans, and parental support, they manage to pay Isla Vista’s high rents — $2,520 per two-bedroom apartment, on average, rooming two or more to a bedroom. In Santa Barbara, a two-bedroom apartment rents for $2,000, on average, but it’s a tight market, and the students in Isla Vista may have nowhere else to go. Investors call this “captive demand.”
Forty percent of UCSB students, some 9,300 people, live in Isla Vista, but the university owns or manages only three apartment buildings there with a total of 187 bedrooms. Santa Barbara City College, with as many as 3,500 students in Isla Vista, doesn’t own any.