What's your estimate for the percent of the university population for whom it would have been impossible to live at home and commute to a local college?
I don't imagine it's more than 20% and I expect it is substantially less. If so, what is the point of your objection?
The bast majority of people could do what OP did, but don't. That's interesting.
It's not a US vs. Europe thing. I went to a school in the US where the vast majority of students commute. I think at the time, it was something like 700 people living on-campus vs. 30,000 living off-campus.
I lived at home because it was cheaper (free other than yard work, housework, and doing my own laundry), campus was 3 or 4 miles away depending on which end I needed (and roads were just dangerous enough I wasn't going to cycle, tried it, didn't like the assholes throwing shit at me). Most students lived on campus, but many (including locals like me) lived off campus.
But even those who lived on campus, the furthest dorms were where I'd have had to park on those mentioned days. I did that sometimes, but it really was a 20- to 30-minute walk depending on where I was going on campus because they decided a mile long parking lot made more sense than a parking deck (later built, after I graduated).
Also it had a bus service, but it really only covered connecting the business school, psychology school, and main campus. The massive parking lot was not covered by the bus service, which didn't make sense.
> And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare.
Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.
I went to Purdue, a land-grant University in Indiana. When I was there the school had over 30,000 students and housing for about 1/3 of that. They can most certainly afford the land to build more housing, but the demand is not there[1].
Other schools have to require underclassmen to live on campus to fill their housing -- which is often more expensive than living off campus.
1: Housing was provided based on seniority; older students got first pick, yet the housing was overwhelmingly occupied by freshmen.
I feel like when people write this they completely forget what life was like in college.
It's true that ever since the newspaper we've had trouble interacting with each other in certain contexts. Why does that difficulty seem to dramatically increase post-college?
Sure, when I was in college tons of people including myself used their phone in public. But there was a corresponding amount of more or less random and constant public interaction.
To me, this suggests that the problem has little to do with phones or newspapers or watches and everything to do with the design of a city. College campuses are human-scale; modern cities are not. College students are encouraged to room together and give up materialistic wealth; college graduates and working professionals are encouraged to spend as much of their net worth as they can on procuring their own private abode. College students can walk mostly anywhere they need to go; working professionals usually drive in armored vehicles for a significant portion of the day and often find that virtually nothing useful is in walking distance of their residence except other residences that they aren't allowed to approach without good reason.
Why are college kids driving in the first place? Are there not enough apartments nearby to rent a room in walking/cycling/shuttle range? Isn't that a pretty foreseeable need when choosing a site for a university?
I can understand this problem if you're serving a lot of nontraditional students who already have households, but not with 18-22 year old full time students.
Is your claim based on the assumption that it has to be within walking distance of campus? It's been awhile since I lived in the area, but I never had issues finding a reasonable student apartment if you were willing to bus/bike/commute in
My knee-jerk reaction: So a place that benefits from government guaranteed student loans and ever-higher tuition rates is asking the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) to take on the burden of not only providing the education that the university profits from but also the room and board?
The article is short on details but I can't see this as anything other than a sad joke. If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. After all, the University will have far more access to funds or loans.
However, that would come at a cost of the profits.
How myopic for them to even consider professors housing students to be an option.
I enjoyed my time living on campus and I understand the authors point, but a college campus is the ulitmate elitist gated community.
Imagine a city that required you pass an IQ test, submit your high school grades and an essay, ask for the last 2 years of tax returns and credit history, scanned your social media posts and reviewed all your hobbies and extra-ciricular activities before they would consider letting you become a resident. Then, once you moved in, they would monitor your speech and other activites to make sure they were up to community codes and standards. College campuses make suburbia look like Burning Man.
2. The University already has lots of conventional dorms with windows.
3. This building costs the school nothing to build and adds massively more units than a conventional design would.
The dorm has 11,000 beds. It’s hard to overstate just how cost-effective that is.
From what I’ve heard, the plan is to rent these out for $1000 a month, which unfortunately still counts as a bargain these days in that area. But they could likely rent them out for a lot less. 11,000 dorms at 1000 a month is $11 million a month and $132 million a year. Even if the university was paying for the cost of the building themselves, which they are not, they could still get a return over the initial 200 million in less than two years anyway! They could likely rent these out for $500, cover all their maintenance costs and utilities and still manage to make a solid profit each year.
That’s how you solve a housing crisis: you just build lots of apartments. But no matter how bad the housing crisis gets in California, nobody ever seems to consider that. All anybody ever looks at is the downside of an unconventional building design, without stopping to consider the massive opportunity cost of not building all of these places.
I'm not sure what alternative you're proposing given that she did in fact live in a college town? Some kind of "no students allowed" subdivision? Keep in mind the FHA requirements.
Any idea what % of the rental market is students vs UCSC staff vs non-UCSC?
It seems like the college shouldn't be allowed to enroll more students than the city has capacity to house. At minimum, it should be building more dorms on campus (I have no idea if that's feasible based on town layout).
I don't imagine it's more than 20% and I expect it is substantially less. If so, what is the point of your objection?
The bast majority of people could do what OP did, but don't. That's interesting.
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