Amid a local housing crisis and facing a shortage of on-campus beds as the fall quarter looms, UC Santa Cruz sent an email this week to faculty and staff asking them to open their homes to students.

“The need is real and it is urgent, so I am reaching out to the faculty and staff community for help,” the executive director of housing services, Dave Keller, wrote. “Offering a room in your home to a student who has not been able to find housing for the school year would be a tremendous support to their success at UCSC.”

The fall quarter at UCSC begins Sept. 22, according to the college’s website.

The university offers on-campus housing to a higher percentage of its students than most any other public college in the state, said spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason, about 9,300 students or 50 percent of the student body. The school guarantees two years of housing to incoming freshmen and one year of housing to incoming transfer students.

Yet while Hernandez-Jason said the school has accommodated all students with guarantees and some without this year, several hundred students remain on its waitlist for housing, and there are not enough off-campus rental options on its Community Rentals page to accommodate them.

Several years ago, when listings on the community page dipped, a reminder to faculty and staff that they can list rooms on the portal proved effective, Hernandez-Jason said. It’s too soon to tell whether this year’s note will generate more listings, he said, but the university is hopeful.

The school offered admission to 35,000 students this year, and expects to enroll about 5,600 new undergraduates. After facing criticism for failing to admit enough transfer students, Santa Cruz admitted more than 7,000 this year, up from around 5,300 the previous year.

All of those students will need someplace to live. And while living on campus at UCSC is relatively expensive compared to housing costs at many other UC and CSU schools, living off campus isn’t cheap, either.

“The local market rental rates have continued to increase with Silicon Valley influence,” Hernandez-Jason said.

In March, the average price for a single-family home in Santa Cruz County spiked to more than $935,000, up from $880,000 in October. And average rents have soared beyond $2,000, with even individual rooms in homes running students around $1,000.

The university is in the process of trying to build thousands of new housing units specifically for upper-division students who would otherwise have to find off-campus accommodations. But the plan has generated some pushback from community members concerned about environmental impacts.

The university is not alone in struggling to find space for its students. Last year, San Jose State faced criticism for failing to find housing for all of the freshmen it supposedly required to live on campus. (The school requires freshmen living more than 30 miles away to live on campus, but some students still ended up on a waitlist last year.) And back in 2011, the school temporarily housed students in a hotel three miles from campus. Recently, BuzzFeed News reported that Indiana officials are looking into housing conditions at Purdue University after photos of freshmen crammed into large, windowless dorms emerged.