SANTA CRUZ — Two days, two lawsuits.

UC Santa Cruz’s Student Housing West project was hit with a second legal challenge Thursday on the heels of separate litigation filed a day earlier.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the East Meadow Action Committee, names the University of California Board of Regents and UCSC. It alleges the student-housing project’s approval violated state environmental law by failing to properly vet project alternatives and analyze all potential impacts.

“We are taking this stand now, and forcefully, not only to protect the East Meadow, but to serve notice to the university administration, as it contemplates further development, that it must do so in an environmentally sound, socially responsible way,” the committee said in a statement.

Similar claims were made in litigation filed Wednesday by a group of Santa Cruz County conservationists, Habitat and Watershed Caretakers, who successfully sued UCSC and the city of Santa Cruz in 2011 to halt the expansion of water and sewage services to the northern campus.

Approved by UC regents in March, Student Housing West would build more than 3,000 beds of student housing on the Santa Cruz Campus, spread across two sites. Most of the housing is planned on the western campus, but opposition has centered on a second site on the East Meadow that would include 147 units of student-family housing and a child care center for students, faculty and staff.

Formed in opposition to the East Meadow development, the East Meadow Action Committee is made up of faculty, alumni, students, staff and community members.

The group has been among the most vocal opponents to the plans to develop the East Meadow, which was added to Student Housing West as a second site late in 2017. But opposition to the project has been widespread, as referenced in the committee’s statement.

“We are gratified and encouraged by all the support we have had from the University’s own Design Advisory Board, faculty, alumni, members of the UCSC Alumni Council, Trustees of the UCSC Foundation, former Trustees, former Regents, the Student Union Assembly, past Campus Architects, the community, and over 80,000 petition signers,” the East Meadow Action Committee said in the statement. “We look forward to getting this needed housing built in a way that is consistent with the long-standing values of UCSC.”

Project supporters have painted opposition as fueled by misplaced nostalgia that fails to account for the harsh realities of housing in Santa Cruz, a pricey and competitive rental market that has been hit especially hard by the statewide housing crisis.

UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal has maintained the East Meadow remains the only viable site to build family-student housing and child care center due to the higher cost of alternative sites. Project opponents are challenging the cost analysis, claiming it omitted peripheral costs — such as a need to expand nearby dining services — from the preferred project, while including those costs in the analysis of other sites.

In a statement Wednesday, UC Santa Cruz spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason emphasized the need for more on-campus housing and called the initial legal challenge “frustrating” for the campus.

“This move will only hurt our students by resulting in unnecessary delays and increasing project costs, forestalling what we all agree we need: more housing,” he said. Hernandez-Jason said Thursday that he hadn’t seen the new litigation, but added that his prior statement stands.

Paul Schoellhamer, an East Meadow Action Committee representative and UCSC alumnus, said he views the dual legal challenges as a sign of the “astonishingly broad” opposition to developing the East Meadow. “It’s all kinds of people with all kinds of concerns, and that is unusual,” he said. “So in that sense, it doesn’t surprise me that there would be a second suit, or even a third suit — who knows.”

The East Meadow Action Committee lawsuit was filed Thursday in Santa Cruz County Superior Court by Aptos-based environmental law firm Wittwer Parkin.

The University of California Office of the President did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.