Why College Housing Answers May be Under our Noses

February turns out to have been a good month to muse about housing. For instance, this opinion article by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic got me going on the question of whether lack of housing might truly, as Lowrey proposes, be the root cause behind the decisions of San Francisco bagel shop owners to open their shops at what she describes as “brunch-ish” hours, like 9am. 

We’ll probably never know for sure, but Lowrey’s take fits with a broader theory cited in her article. The theory is so broad, in fact, as to be dubbed “The Housing Theory of Everything.” As explained by authors John Myers, Ben Southwood, and Sam Bowman for the online magazine Works in Progress (Bowman and Southwood are founding editors), lack of housing is a core root cause behind social ills as diverse as inequality, obesity, declining fertility, and even climate change. It’s not just bagels we’re talking about here, folks.

Regular readers of this newsletter may guess that I think there may be real merit to The Housing Theory of Everything. But “everything” seems a tad ambitious as a topic for this post. Instead, I want to focus on the particular issue of housing for college students in California. You might even say, without too much hyperbole, that I speak from a position of personal expertise in this aspect of housing policy. After all, my wife and I forward money to our older son every month so that he can pay his landlord near a University of California campus, and we receive money every month from the lovely graduate student tenant living in our backyard accessory dwelling unit near a California State University campus. In other words, I am a participant in both the supply and demand sides of the very broken California college student housing market.

A broken market

Just how broken is the college housing market in California? A series of articles over the past year point to vast challenges for young people in our state. Take, for example, this piece by journalist Lois Beckett in The Guardian, with excellent black and white photographs by Pablo Unzueta. The piece cites 2019 research showing that some 19 percent of community college students in California experienced homelessness that year. The piece also features a heart-wrenching interview with former Long Beach Community College student Majeedah Wesley, who lived in a shelter while serving as student body vice president. Beckett’s piece describes the hurt this up and coming young person experienced on encountering people’s unfounded opinion that homelessness was something experienced only by “people who didn’t have potential.” Wesley’s own story shows that this is definitely not the case.

Numerous other articles, podcasts, and studies make reference to the California college housing crisis. For instance, this LA Times article reiterates the finding that some one in five of our state’s community college students experience homelessness, and adds that the same is true for one in ten CSU students, and one in twenty UC students. It also contains a link to the “Gimme Shelter” podcast with journalists Liam Dillon and Manuela Tobìas, who share the story of Matthew Chen, a UC Santa Cruz student paying $750 a month to rent a driveway to park a trailer.

The University of California’s special responsibility for the housing crisis

As the state’s leading educational institution, the University of California bears an uncomfortable amount of moral responsibility for the student housing crisis. Part of this is historical. UC campus and system leaders have failed over decades to make adequate student housing a priority. For instance, see this article in the San Francisco Chronicle detailing the particular failures around UC Berkeley. The article also describes how NIMBY groups in Berkeley have used the California Environmental Policy Act to block desperately needed urban growth and change, to the point where the university has been pushed to the verge of reducing the number of admitted freshmen. The situation around other UC campuses is equally bad, and the eagerness of putatively social justice minded community residents to block needed construction equally hypocritical. 

But the moral responsibility UC bears isn’t just passive, and the problem doesn’t merely boil down to a situation where packs of difficult NIMBY’s have somehow nipped at UC leaders’ heels so hard as to cause them to yield their agency. According to this piece in the San Francisco Examiner by UC Berkeley economics PhD candidate Matthew Tauzer, the UC is itself the state’s largest landlord. This fact truly surprised me. Apparently, UC controls some $5 billion in private real estate investment beyond the dorms and other properties it directly manages on its campuses. As Tauzer puts it, “While no one institution is responsible for the state’s housing woes, the acute housing crisis near UC campuses is more of the university’s making than not.”

The Isla Vista answer

In early November I had the privilege to hang out for a weekend with my older son at UC Santa Barbara. I love UCSB, feel delighted with my son’s educational experience there, and despite the criticism I just leveled at the University of California feel deeply proud to have a child who is a UC student. I am passionate about expanding the size and scope of all UC campuses, and about solving the student housing crisis, in large part because I want many more young people in California to have an experience similar to my son’s. 

What I want to argue here is that the answers I mentioned in the title to this post might be found in an unlikely party town adjacent to UCSB. The town is called Isla Vista, and my son lives there near the shores of the Pacific with roughly 15,500 other people, almost all young. This 2020 Census number is down substantially from the 2010 Census count of roughly 23,000, presumably due to in part the fact that  COVID pandemic was raging in 2020, but also due in part to local density restrictions. According to Wikipedia, in its 2010 halcyon days IV, as my son and his friends like to call it, had a remarkable population density of 12,376 people per square mile, mostly within low-slung one to three story apartment buildings and duplexes. 

As one might expect for a community composed almost entirely of 18 to 25 year-olds, Isla Vista has a bit of a reputation. The accommodations can sometimes be a bit ratty. The party scene is legendary, or notorious, depending on your perspective. A teaching colleague of mine told me that back in high school a group of her friends once drove all the way from Reno, NV to Isla Vista, a voyage of some 9 hours, just to experience the wild Halloween bacchanalia. Lately, the administration has cracked down. Halloween, they say, is much tamer than it once was. UCSB has over the past couple of decades transformed from a mid-tier to a decidedly high-tier university. Maybe the current crop of try-hards is less prone to experience UCSB as the “University of California for Sex and Beer” than was once the case. But the flower of youth cannot be repressed. The Isla Vista party lives on. The place has life.

So, if Isla Vista works, why not allow an even greater density of unremarkable small apartment buildings there, and in the many neighborhoods near colleges and universities that might over time become just a little bit more like Isla Vista? Wouldn’t this go a long way toward solving the problem of the aforementioned Matthew Chen, living in a Santa Cruz trailer near a UC campus that lacks a similar, wonderfully problematic student ghetto?

Why not petition the legislature to suspend the California Environmental Quality Act for any reasonably scaled project related to multi-unit housing within, say, a three mile radius of any UC and CSU campuses? Single family zoning in California was already effectively abolished in 2021 through Senate Bill 9, but why not affirmatively create a funding stream for small time developers to finance construction of apartment buildings, duplexes, ADUs, and the like in former single family zoned areas near college campuses?

Yes, California friends, I recognize that this means my neighborhood too, and likely yours. Yes, this would mean more party noise. Yes, this would mean students living in sometimes ratty and overcrowded conditions. Yes, this would mean more traffic snarls and inconvenience. Yes, this would mean letting market logic actually work, and involve the risk of older residents in these areas losing some of their housing wealth (though the more entrepreneurial among us might stand to gain). Yes, this would ultimately be good for the environment despite the traffic snarls, because urban density is a profound environmental good. And yes, and most importantly, this would be good for young people looking for a spot to live in a society where everyone needs more hope, but young people especially.

The IV solution contrasted to the “Dormzilla” dystopia

As a brief contrast to the unglamorous but hopeful vision of Isla Vista, I present a dystopian nightmare also floating about like a specter in the morning fogs around UC Santa Barbara. This nightmare is named “Munger Hall,” a place that, if it were it to come into existence, would according to this article in the Santa Barbara Independent qualify as the largest dormitory in the world. As suggested in this LA Times piece, students know far better than to support a single hugely massed building in the shape of a rectangular prism, all in cold beige and white, complete with acres of windowless dorm rooms, the odd vision of a nonagenarian billionaire.  

People need windows! Successful architects like Juan Mirò, the author of this article in ArchDaily know this, but you don’t need to be an architect to figure it out. If you are interested in architect activism though, check out this letter from another successful architect, Dennis McFadden, in which he resigns from the UCSB design review committee in protest over Munger Hall. 

More broadly, we do not need projects massed at this kind of scale to solve the student housing crisis. All we need, really, is to get over ourselves and allow a lot more in the way of the non-exceptional, human scaled housing forms already present in a place like Isla Vista.

Finally, to return to the opening to this blog post, Isla Vista, apparently unlike San Francisco, has a thriving early morning bagel scene. You can get a visual flavor in the photograph of the Bagel Cafe, below. While I took the picture at around 10:00 am, the business, according to its website, opens promptly at 6:30, every day.