Just down the peninsula from Stanford’s enormous real estate empire, another university is quietly expanding its own footprint.
Recognizing both the value in owning Silicon Valley real estate and the need for affordable housing for faculty and students, Santa Clara University has scooped up dozens of houses around campus. The university has amassed a portfolio that lands it among Santa Clara County’s top-10 owners of single-family homes — a distinction it shares with Stanford University, SummerHill Homes and PulteGroup.
SCU owned $1.51 billion in taxable property as of the 2018 fiscal year, including nearly $30 million in single-family homes — or 44 homes, according to an analysis by a collaboration of local and national media, including this news organization, of half a million property records from the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office.
“It’s been expanding every year,” said Santa Clara real estate agent Vinicius Brasil. “It just seems like it just gets larger and larger.”
SCU ranks as the 10th-largest owner of single-family homes in the county. The university’s landholdings also include $36 million in multi-family dwellings, $1.08 billion in academic, commercial and other non-residential real estate, and $371 million in equipment, machinery and other taxable property.
As do many universities around the Bay Area, Santa Clara University — which had 5,520 undergraduate students as of the fall of 2018 — struggles to house its faculty and staff in a region where the cost to rent or buy a home has soared out of reach of many.
“From considering building housing projects near transit to offering assistance through our home ownership programs, we are continuously focused on this issue as one of the main concerns of the University,” Chris Shay, assistant vice president for university operations, wrote in an email.
The single-family homes SCU owns are used for faculty, staff and student housing, as well as university program space, Shay wrote. The university offers 48 apartments and 41 single-family homes for faculty members moving to the Bay Area to rent as temporary housing, according to the SCU website.
SCU pumped up its real estate portfolio in a big way recently with its purchase of several properties along Campbell Avenue in San Jose, next door to the school’s campus. SCU has proposed turning part of that land into as many as 290 affordable rental units, most of which would be for the school’s faculty and staff. SCU staff are working on their final project proposal now, which San Jose officials are set to consider in November and December.
SCU also bought a $25 million manufacturing building on Campbell Avenue in 2015, which was leased by online retailer Zazzle until the company moved its manufacturing efforts to Nevada. Warehouse, storage and office space provider CustomSpace now leases the building. SCU purchased the space as an income-producing investment, rather than with immediate intentions to redevelop it for university uses, the school’s vice president of finance and administration, Michael Hindery, told the SCU newsletter in 2016.
Like Stanford University, which owns $19.7 billion in property in Santa Clara County and has caused a stir in recent years by buying up dozens of single-family homes in one Palo Alto neighborhood, Santa Clara University likewise has an outsized impact on its community — only on a smaller scale.
Santa Clara real estate agent Myron Von Raesfeld has sold more than a dozen homes to the university since 1999. Every one was an all-cash deal, and SCU was never outbid, he said.
Von Raesfeld expects that over the next several decades, Santa Clara University will scoop up more and more properties around campus.
“If it’s something they really want,” he said, “they’ll eventually get it.”
This series was produced by The Mercury News, East Bay Times, NBC Bay Area, KQED, Renaissance Journalism, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, and Telemundo 48 Área de la Bahía.
