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Well it isn’t the only option. In fact currently nobody there has this option at all, it’s still being discussed. If this is built, people just get more options

Well it isn’t the only option. In fact currently nobody there has this option at all, it’s still being discussed. If this is built, people just get more options. I live in Tokyo, where they solve housing crises by just building more stuff. Zoning restrictions are minimal. I pay 1300 for a 700 square foot 2 bedroom 15 minutes from a major shopping area by subway, no parking. You can also live right downtown in a 200sqft 1room for as little as 600 if you look around. There are even 100-150 sqft apartments in the trendiest areas. Maybe the idea of a room that small doesn’t appeal to you. But by letting the option exist, Tokyo keeps rents low. All the people that do take those places stop bidding on the bigger ones, which helps prevent your rent from raising too. More apartments and more Choice is good. 11,000 new units should have a big impact on supply there.

rsj_hn 5y ago
What you are saying makes sense for Tokyo, a huge real estate market, but not for a campus. Let's suppose dorm A costs 60% to build as dorm B so that students can choose to live in dorm A for $600 and dorm B for $1000. But one year more students want to pay the $1000. Do you have an auction? Highest bidder? No, you are stuck -- you will make some live in dorm A. Real estate is not like choosing between flavors of ice cream and having manufacturers adjust quantities - it's fixed on the small scale. A big market has hundreds of thousands if not millions of housing units of all different stripes that are more or less on a continuum. Individual units are added or removed all the time. Colleges can't tear down dorms or build new ones as quickly, they are stuck with four big dorms and the next one ain't gonna be built for another 30 years. So it just makes a lot more sense to build dorms that 95% of your freshman class is fine inhabiting, so that no one is stuck in a dorm they really don't like, because you do not have the variety of housing options on a college campus as you do in the city of Tokyo. With these smaller scales, fixed investment requires more of a one size fits all approach, or at least a minimum bar approach.
- kmlevitt 5y ago
  We’ll what you’re ignoring there is: 1. People can and do get places off campus. 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.

rsj_hn 5y ago

What you are saying makes sense for Tokyo, a huge real estate market, but not for a campus. Let's suppose dorm A costs 60% to build as dorm B so that students can choose to live in dorm A for $600 and dorm B for $1000. But one year more students want to pay the $1000. Do you have an auction? Highest bidder? No, you are stuck -- you will make some live in dorm A. Real estate is not like choosing between flavors of ice cream and having manufacturers adjust quantities - it's fixed on the small scale. A big market has hundreds of thousands if not millions of housing units of all different stripes that are more or less on a continuum. Individual units are added or removed all the time. Colleges can't tear down dorms or build new ones as quickly, they are stuck with four big dorms and the next one ain't gonna be built for another 30 years. So it just makes a lot more sense to build dorms that 95% of your freshman class is fine inhabiting, so that no one is stuck in a dorm they really don't like, because you do not have the variety of housing options on a college campus as you do in the city of Tokyo. With these smaller scales, fixed investment requires more of a one size fits all approach, or at least a minimum bar approach.

kmlevitt 5y ago
We’ll what you’re ignoring there is: 1. People can and do get places off campus. 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.