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. Th

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.