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.
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.
Hijacking the thread a bit, but I'm not sure people understand how predatory student housing is in aggregate.
At many colleges you don't even have a choice to live in the dorms or not as an undergrad, living on campus for 1-2 years is tied to enrollment.
On top of this lots of financing for college housing is wonky, because some colleges do not pay property tax. (So you can have the college hold the land and some third party company finance/build the building students are forced to live in.) This is a significant part of ACC's business model.[0] Student loan money is used to pay rent on these buildings, so it's indirectly funded by taxpayers.
The power colleges have over students lives is concerning regardless of if this dorm design is good or bad. If UCSB put in one of these requirements students could be forced to take part in a social experiment designed by a billionaire. UCSB, or another campus w/ a Munger dorm, doesn't have this requirement today but could have it tomorrow.
I know someone who once bought a house built by students, but I'm not sure whether they were high school students or community college students. They didn't do any excavation work though, and it ended up being moved to the final site rather than any excavation work being involved. This was in southern Maine.
The concern is especially strong here because of the nature of the building.
In an ordinary apartment building, if you build it stupid, people won't want to live there. Then the landlord won't want to build it that way to begin with and if some fool does it anyway there will be a profit incentive to knock down the building and do it again.
This is a dorm. At at state school. The normal market forces aren't there. The landlord isn't going to be motivated by losing money. The tenants aren't in an ordinary market because dorms are often subsidized or have unique zoning that allows for lower cost than is legally permissible in other available housing and are likely to be closer to the school than other available housing. So you have to exceed a higher threshold of terrible before people will abandon them.
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.
The challenge is that not just anyone can live in it... only faculty and staff. There's a 50 year max term and even widows get booted out after their spouses pass. You really don't own the house/land... just the right to live there and re-sell it.
I just googled. College towns are often seem as insulated from larger market conditions because of the constant supply of student loan support students.
I’m sorry - this is pretty bizarre; especially considering this is a public school like Berkeley.
Wouldn’t the school just expand their housing and own the homes - like many other schools globally? One could even argue your presence is a net negative for students. Had the housing near Berkeley not become a speculative asset, the school would likely own it and rent it at a much cheaper rate.
I agree that housing density is an issue. However, universities are likely to be subject to lawsuits in situations where they keep dorms open or shut them down. There must be something that can be done here that's better than those two extremes, event if it isn't perfect.
We could:
1. Find alternative housing for some fraction of the students to lower the population density within the dorms--sending 1/3 of students elsewhere reduces population density to ~65% of what it would have been before
2. Retrofit current housing to help minimize spread of disease
3. Allow students to opt-in to remaining at the dorms with agreement to adhere to much stricter health and sanitation standards
4. Allow students to remain with the understanding that they will be quarantined until such a time that they can call be tested
None of these are great ideas, I'm sure, but I can't imagine any of them being worse than the current situation we see these students in.
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