7 other UCs and all the CSUs for you to choose from. Sounds like you’ll find a better fit at one of them.
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These are forums for discussion, no reason to get personal… obviously I will make a well informed decision.
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The Munger Hall project has now been abandoned:
Seems like it will now take years longer for new dorms to be built, likely at higher cost and needing a new donor now Munger has withdrawn his offer of funding.
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“You don’t recognize the brilliance of my idea that we should create dorms for the commoners that look and feel like prisons, I not going to play with you!!!”
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“We’d much rather have students who are homeless and living in their cars than build new dorms cost effectively”
I look forward to the objections and lawsuits about whatever is proposed next: “those towers are too tall and ruin the view”, “we can’t afford that building”, “sorry we can’t admit more students because there’s nowhere for them to live”.
The only people for whom this is unmistakably good news is Isla Vista landlords, who will be able to keep increasing rental prices.
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A false choice. The proposed building was ridiculous.
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You don’t believe that UC students are living in their cars because they can’t find affordable housing?
It’s purely coincidence that Santa Barbara was the first place in the state to implement a “safe parking” program?
UCSB is woefully behind on building new housing, leaving students homeless:
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Of course I said no such thing. I don’t believe that the preposterous monstrosity is or was a sensible solution. It is unfortunate that UC wasted so much time and money on such a ridiculous proposal.
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This is the logical fallacy of false dichotomy. There aren’t just two choices:
A. Live in a monstrosity where the majority of the students cannot see natural light through their windows, or
2. Be homeless.
This is not a building which merely has aesthetic issues. This is a building which has so many safety and mental health issues that it’s unbelievable.
There are absolutely zero ways to air out the deepest inner rooms naturally if there are CO leaks, smoke, or any other release of toxic gasses, and no way to easily access any student trapped in the deep recesses of the prison, sorry, dorms. Since any such a leak has a good chance of being connected to loss of power, putting in artificial ventilation will not help. Lack of exposure to natural light has been linked to numerous mental health issues, as has lack of access to natural day and night cycles.
So no, risking the health and lives of students is not an acceptable way to solve a housing crises.
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Was it their money or Munger’s? Sincere question as I don’t know, though I suspect he financed the designs.
A choice implies more than one viable option. If UCSB doesn’t have the money to pay for 4,000 units of housing on their own, is prohibited from in-state increases or admitting more OOS and International students to raise it internally, and has no one in the wings currently offering to pay for alternatives, it seems like their choices were this or continue the status quo noted by @Twoin18. Perhaps this incident will shame the State or Regents or others donors into providing other options, but that seems uncertain and possibly a long way off.
I don’t envy the situation many UCs are in with housing. They have never had adequate housing but it wasn’t as big a crisis when private housing was not quite as unaffordable. Despite this they were forced by the state and Regent to expand enrollment, they are forced to limit the quota of out of state and international full pay tuition students, the state didn’t fund the housing needs they created (thus an “unfunded mandate”) and most of them have limited building options that won’t face years of litigation and massive resistance from local authorities. Just witnesses Berkeley’s no-win situation where the city objects to anything the do even when its a reaction to the other things they objected to.
It’s easy to say no to something but it’s not that helpful if it doesn’t come with viable alternative solutions. I’m not defending Munger’s monstrosity. But I would be ashamed to be a state ot Regent official against it and not be providing an alternative. We can all sit here and say both this housing and being homeless are unacceptable options, but unless one of us is cutting a really big check we’re not actually preventing those from being the only options.
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I don’t buy the notion that the UCs should have rubber stamped this because some rich guy wants his ego stroked.
As for viable alternatives, I’m no architect, but how about rooms with actual windows?
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Which will cost more per room and accommodate fewer students on the designated site. Where’s the money coming from for that? Demonizing rich donors who sincerely want to help UCSB is not going to help. Or do you think Munger hates UCSB and wants to “imprison” students?
And if the site now only accommodates (say) 2000 students instead of 4500, then you are condemning 2500 students to homelessness, not attending at all, commuting for miles, or paying more for private accommodation.
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It’s nice that you are fighting for the dignity and right to light of students.
So what should we tell those homeless students now? We’ve established what isn’t an option. So list something within UCSB’s control than they can pursue now for 4,000 rooms.
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Another false choice.
I don’t care his intentions. His proposed building is ridiculous, especially in SB. Disagree if you’d like, but please stop suggesting I believe/think things I never said.
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Note, however, that many newer buildings with windows (hotels, office buildings, etc.) do not allow the windows to open, so airing out without artificial ventilation is not possible.
Yes, this is the real issue with windowless rooms, at least for a non-trivial number of students. Some students may not care (think of the hotels with very opaque curtains and people who close them all the way to shut out the morning sunlight), but they are not all or nearly all students.
However, the lack of windows does enable greater density on a mostly squarish footprint. An alternative design with windows for each bedroom will have lower capacity per floor.
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Thanks for the link. The video of the session was fascinating. It was awesome they devoted a class to the study of this and had the students break into groups and attack different parts of the issue and they gave a great presentation. I’m not an expert on the campus or local zoning but most of the ideas do seem viable and preferable, with a couple caveats.
The main caveat is they didn’t try to explain how it would be paid for. I’ve seen many amazing ideas die from lack of funding or because they are too expensive.
The second caveat is what they propose would definitely be far more expensive and take many more years, almost certainly a decade or more to complete. This is because some of there projects require either taking existing housing offline to expand it or in some cases completely gutting existing house and starting over with higher density new housing. So by their own acknowledgment, it would have to be done in phases, allowing students to move to new housing as they take other housing offline, collectively leaving the housing capacity below demand until the last phase is online. It would also cost more as it involves half a dozen sites, each with their own infrastructure instead of shared in one site, substantial demolition and regrading and more site protections as it would be occurring in more central areas while classes continue, and occurring over a longer period. Time and duration is the enemy of construction costs – you are paying crews and for equipment over a longer time and you face more escalation costs.
Caveat three is some of there plan requires the cooperation of agencies beyond the college’s control and in some cases the market effect of third parties independent actions over time. For example, their proposal includes getting Santa Barbara to rezone Isla Vista and anticipating the the resulting zoning changes would incentivize individual landlords to redevelop their properties with higher density housing over time. Though, they could exceed Munger Hall beds even if this piece didn’t happen if all the rest did. Their plan also anticipates getting the Regents/State to allow UCSB to moderate its enrollment targets until all this can be built, which is something beyond the college’s unilateral control.
All that being said, it may be a better plan in the long run, if a funding source were found and if they could additionally get money to provide short term options for those currently displaced, which was not addressed in the plan (it’s also not clear logistically what this solution would be), especially since this plan will take far longer. Even if the University got behind this tomorrow, it’s probably a several years until it could even be at the same development stage as Munger had been, just for the first phase of the multi-phase plan.
Again, the students did an awesome job.
In the meantime, what is the plan now for those currently displaced?
Yes, essentially what would happen is delaying the project by a couple of years, replacing the planned 4500 beds with a smaller number on that site (maybe half as many - did they give a number?), and then hoping to undertake a bunch of other stuff that is unfunded and could have been done anyway in addition to building the new dorm if money was available.
So a couple of thousand students (many hundreds each year) will be SOL, either not being able to attend at all (which is explicitly stated as part of the plan to “moderate” enrollment) or being left without anywhere to live.
Let’s continue this next April when people are wondering why there isn’t enough room for their kid to attend a “good” UC…
They had two hypothetical options for the area that included where Munger Hall would have been and the higher density version got to about half as you guessed – 2,200 I believe (but going from memory). Their site plan for that portion was more spread out than the Munger footprint so it would be TBD if all of it worked after the site study, but let’s assume it could. That version involves multiple 5 story buildings.
It’s always ironic when environmental studies students are unable to recognize that higher building density is an essential component of environmentally friendly development (including addressing climate change).
One person’s environmentalist is another person’s NIMBY.