This post was updated Oct. 6 at 9:31 p.m.

In recent months, thousands of University of California employees and their allies have repeatedly taken to the streets to protest for higher wages and housing assistance. It’s important for the public to understand what has brought them to the point of such activism.

UC keeps expanding. It is taking on more students than ever before. It is buying hospitals and satellite campuses while building athletic complexes, research facilities and more.

In every case, university expansion creates more demand for employees and for more housing. This, in turn, has driven up rents and housing prices that were already rising even faster than inflation. While this is hardly a prohibitive phenomenon for high-paid UC Executives and Administrators, it is a major problem for the frontline service and patient care professionals who make the institution run.

Early last year, UC’s Chief Financial Officer Nathan Brostrom told the UC Board of Regents that the university had recently seen its staff vacancy rate triple relative to the pre-pandemic rate. This remains a direct threat to the quality of services and care that UC students and patients have come to rely on.

Subsequent media reports have detailed the experiences of frontline workers lauded as heroes during the pandemic, who are now forced to sleep in their cars or commute multiple hours each way to work locations after being priced out of housing markets near their jobs.

Most recently, researchers have found that the number of frontline UC service and patient care workers who are income-eligible for federal housing assistance has tripled since 2017, while their real wages – purchasing power – have declined by as much as 8% over the same period.

Unfortunately, even among the growing numbers who now qualify, there isn’t nearly enough federal housing assistance available to meet demand. So while researchers found the theoretical cost of paying out public housing subsidies to UC’s frontline workers could cost taxpayers up to $164 million per year, the reality is that most are stuck on waiting lists thousands of families long, with little to no hope of getting the help they need.

UC could do something about the problem if it chose to act.

The university system is one of California’s largest employers and the state’s single-largest landlord. A recent state audit confirmed it has a copious portfolio of unused land that could be purposed for housing that workers can afford. It also holds billions of dollars in unrestricted reserves that could be spent to create new affordable housing units.

Except that it isn’t. Not for frontline workers, and not for students – 62% of whom don’t have access to university housing already. Worse, the university’s investment office has been shelling out billions of dollars to controversial private equity funds that rely on raising rents in order to deliver returns for shareholders.

The university does offer generous housing assistance to many of its highest-paid employees. These programs total hundreds of millions of dollars each year in subsidies, low interest loans and mortgage assistance programs that can even be used to purchase second homes. Unfortunately, none of the workers getting these benefits sweep floors, maintain grounds, serve food or answer the call button when your loved one is in a UC hospital.

One university campus – UC Davis Medical Center – recently recognized the gravity of the problem. In securing approvals for its recent expansion known as the Aggie Square Project, it partnered with the City of Sacramento to create a $10 million fund to help frontline staff get into – or stay in – housing near work. The program is already working and transforming lives.

Yet when it comes to the rest of the University system – in places such as San Francisco, Berkeley, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara – the university has been unwilling to consider similar programs, even though it could easily afford them. This is causing more of the frontline workers UC desperately needs to pursue careers elsewhere, leaving departments dangerously understaffed and the workers left behind strained to the breaking point.

UC can do better. And for the sake of its students, patients and the frontline workers who make it run, it must.

Liz Perlman is the Executive Director of AFSCME Local 3299, which represents over 33,000 University of California Service and Patient Care Technical Workers across the state.