The UC Board of Regents’s Finance and Capital Strategies Committee recommended a budget of $351 million to build new UCLA student housing on Levering Ave. at its Wednesday meeting. 

The project includes demolishing five residential buildings the university purchased in 2024 and replacing them with a 19-story apartment complex. The complex will be composed of four-bedroom apartments for eight people, and will house about 1,130 students.

The expected monthly rate for the proposed apartments is $1,489.

The UC Regents recommended an allocation of more than $8.7 million to fund the project’s planning in July 2025, including documentation for the California Environmental Quality Act and a review by the Office of the State Fire Marshall. 

Around $281 million of the $351 million will be funded through external financing, and the remaining amount of about $70 million will come from the UC’s housing reserves. Both the principal amount and interest on the external financing will be paid through housing revenues, according to the agenda item. The University, however, will only pay interest – not principal payments – for the first three years of the 32-year term.

Although building the complex on Levering Ave. will be challenging, the benefits of having undergraduate students living near campus will outweigh the added costs, UCLA’s Administrative Vice Chancellor Michael Beck said at the meeting. 

“UCLA continues to experience extraordinary demand for student housing,” Beck said. “We must continue to grow our capacity.” 

Isha Khirwadkar, a student observer for the committee, said during the meeting that she supports the project but believes rent prices should be based on what’s affordable for students specifically, rather than overall market rates. She added that student rents should remain unaffected by the UC’s need for capital growth.

“I would still encourage the regents to consider how we define ‘affordable’ in practice,” Khirwadkar, a fourth-year cognitive science student at UC San Diego, said in the meeting. “Even at below-market rates, this price point remains a significant financial burden for many students.” 

Beck said during the meeting that UCLA believes the expansion of the university’s housing program will be beneficial to the student body and could help drive down rent prices of private Westwood apartments.

The planned complex will also include a communal study space, bicycle parking and a fitness area, according to the agenda item. 

The Wednesday recommendation included adopting a Mitigated Negative Declaration for the project – a document used by the state government to acknowledge the potential environmental impacts of a project and make plans to reduce them.

Regent Hadi Makarechian voted to support the recommendation, but said during the meeting he believed new student housing could be obtained for lower costs. He added that he thinks the ratio of residents to available bathrooms could be inconvenient for students. 

Regent Jose Hernandez said in the meeting he believes it’s important for the university to take community and neighborhood input into account throughout the project.  

UCLA became the first UC to offer four years of guaranteed housing to first-year undergraduates – and two years of housing to transfer students – in 2022. 

The university also announced in January that it planned to convert Weyburn Terrace – which has historically housed graduate students – into undergraduate housing to meet increased demand. 

“This project represents an extremely important and necessary investment in expanding undergraduate housing capacity, especially when it adds more than 1,100 beds at a time in a high demand area,” Khirwadkar said. “This is extremely critical – especially when all of our campuses are facing increased enrollment pressures and constrained housing supply.