4 ms·
Worst? There are multiple axes and this clearly won’t be bad on all of them: - proximity to campus - private bedroom - land used / density - windows - furnishin
by merrywhether 5y ago
Worst? There are multiple axes and this clearly won’t be bad on all of them:
- proximity to campus
- private bedroom
- land used / density
- windows
- furnishing
- common areas
- price
- etc
Worst would be an expensive windowless gymnasium with 200 people sleeping on cots in the same room 10 miles from campus or anything else.
Why can’t we try different combinations of that and let people self-optimize? One of the big trade-offs here is that putting every room on the exterior means making a long narrow building, which means “dead” space between builds (less density) and more exterior walls (construction cost). Light wells could maybe give you “windows” in that you could have some real sunlight, but they have zero view, privacy concerns, aren’t exits, and are much dimmer than true exterior windows. Courtyards have to be big enough to not be glorified lightwells, and they basically have the same problem as narrow buildings. We could try to build up for more density, but that comes with several more axes of trade-offs.
If everyone is saying no other building does this, maybe we should stop relying on emotion and get some actual data. It’s definitely possible that a sun-lamp window (and good ventilation, which he mentions) are fine for people. UCSB should just get a clause saying he’ll pay to tear it down after 10 years if psych studies of residents are damning, and then we have a billionaire really betting on his vision and funding an honest attempt at proving a viable alternative.
- danaris 5y ago> Why can’t we try different combinations of that and let people self-optimize? In an ideal free market, this would work fine. This is not an ideal free market. Many of the students coming to UCSB will be relatively poor—as in, can't realistically afford to pay any extra for a better living situation. So rather than being able to choose whether they value a better living situation or a cheaper one more highly, they will simply be forced into the worst—ie, cheapest—living situation available to them short of a cardboard box. Stop trying to apply idealized free-market logic to real-world problems with much, much stricter constraints on the real, living people involved.
- merrywhether 5y agoOkay, so we make a windowed building that houses 1000+ fewer students and those 1000 are just left to the wolves, paying more elsewhere or joining the depressing ranks of the UC homeless? I’m not thinking ideally, I’m recognizing that the real world has real opportunity costs to every decision and nothing happens in a vacuum. I hate the CA real estate situation as much as anyone but short-term solutions have to be realistic and long-term ones… may never happen.
- danaris 5y agoThe lack of windows is not a required monetary tradeoff here. It is a deliberate ideological choice on the part of the donor. While I can't say for certain that every student's sleeping space could be given windows while keeping the same occupancy, your argument makes a false dichotomy.
- nouveaux 5y agoSo where are the poor students going to live? Are you suggesting they just rack up more debt or not attend college?