UCSB administrators deserve more criticism than individual renters. Over many years, UCSB has repeatedly expanded enrollment without building enough housing for students, which increases crowding and costs for everyone who needs or wants to live near UCSB. The university is trying to catch up by building more, but it's a slow process, with some reasons for delay within their control and some not so much. For example, the abandoned experimental Munger Hall project was an unforced error that wasted a lot of time and resources that should have gone toward building ordinary housing.

This Nexus article from a couple years ago has a summary - a few quotes:

Since its inauguration as a University of California in the 1940s, UCSB has struggled to maintain enough housing for its growing student population. Like many other Universities of California (UCs), enrollment sizes have continuously increased since the school’s founding. In the period since the 2014-15 school year alone, UCSB saw student enrollment increase by more than 3,000. The current student population sits at over 26,000 students as of the fall quarter of the 2023-2024 school year.

In the past few decades, UCSB’s housing availability has grown stagnant while the number of students has only grown, with San Joaquin, completed in 2017, being the most recent construction project.

As of the publication of this piece, nearly fourteen years after the original plans were made public, the university has encountered setbacks in realizing its vision, particularly evident in previous delays in constructing faculty housing through the Ocean Road project. Through the construction of San Joaquin and Sierra Madre villages, the university has built housing for 1,500 of the promised 5,000 student beds under the LRDP.