New San Francisco State Complex Includes Affordable Housing for More Than 700 Students

San Francisco State University has completed a new campus project featuring affordable housing for more than 700 students. It’s the first to be completed through a state grant program aimed at tackling the housing crunch for California college students.

The West Grove Commons, located on the west side of campus, also includes a health center and dining hall. California’s Higher Education Student Housing Grant program funded about 65% of the $170 million project.

“We couldn’t have done it otherwise,” said Lynn Mahoney, president of the university. “The state has not traditionally funded student housing, so this is a really historic first step to what California needs to do to make sure that its public higher education remains affordable.”

Last year, almost 4,000 people in the California State University system were on a waiting list for student housing. A 2020 UCLA report found that 1 out of 10 CSU students experience homelessness.

In 2021, lawmakers introduced a bill that established grants to fund affordable housing for students. Apart from the 750 beds at San Francisco State, almost 3,000 more are being added to the California State University system, according to a 2024 report.

At the state’s community colleges, almost 5,000 beds for low-income students are set to become available in the coming years.

At the West Grove Commons, students have access to reduced-rate housing, meaning they can pay 25% less than the traditional rate.

Rylissa Aquino Javier, a senior at the university, served as a resident assistant in the new dorm this year. When she started at San Francisco State four years ago, she commuted almost two hours from Fairfield twice a week because she couldn’t afford to live on campus.

“Even on campus, the housing is just really expensive and we do have to take out a good amount of loans to be able to afford to live here,” she said. “It’s kind of rare to find a good housing situation for an affordable price as a college student here.”

In her year living at the West Grove commons, she found it welcoming and filled with spaces for students to gather.

“We have a big living room downstairs with a communal kitchen and I’ve seen a lot of residents cooking with each other, cooking for each other,” she said. “There’s a lot of opportunities for them to study, relax and just hang out with one another.”

Lynne Riesselman, principal architect with EHDD Architecture, which designed the new buildings, said she wanted students to have easy access to the health center, a need that became clear after the pandemic.

“There’s sort of a raised awareness around the importance of mental and physical health,” she said. “And so combining those pieces into a prominent building where students are used to coming on a day-to-day basis where they’re really familiar with it, I think really elevates those services and increases student comfort with using them.”

The project was completed just 25 months after the state provided the grant, far less than the four years that housing projects often take to be permitted and completed in California.

“When the state allocated that funding, they didn’t want it to take 10 years — you had to have a shovel-ready project and commit to getting it done,” she said. “The state funding was there, our team in capital planning was ready. They literally had a project ready, if ever we could get the funding. And the architects and the construction company — everybody rode in the same direction as fast as they could.”