Colleges have a housing crisis. These designers have a plan to solve it

A few hundred feet from the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, a new kind of student housing is taking shape. Designed by architects at Mithun, the Gayley Towers project envisions transforming old apartments into collegiate cohousing where freshman through senior students would have private bedrooms with private food storage and share kitchen and living room areas. The idea is bonding and building community through food, says Brendan Connolly, a partner at Mithun, and creating a vertically integrated community.  It’s also a design that solves a vexing challenge on campuses today: affordability. The majority of the project’s 545 beds will rent for $600 per month, a steep discount from the standard found in this upscale pocket of northwest L.A. “Students will be more successful if they don’t have to worry about rent . . . as intensely as I think a lot of them do,” Paavo Monkkonen, a professor of urban planning and public policy, told the student paper. As new college students acclimate to campuses across the country this fall, they’re also adjusting to the burden of student dorms and apartments that have become substantially more expensive than in years past. In California, in particular, students are feeling the pinch. Coeds attending the University of California, Berkeley—in a town where exclusionary zoning was pioneered—have found options severely limited. With the school housing only one in four undergrads, many have scrambled to find something off campus, with potential apartments falling through right before the school year starts. It’s reflective of a national trend that’s making housing as costly as tuition (in some cases, even more so). Student housing costs shot up 14% more than inflation between 2010 and 2020, according to the College Board, with many in-state students spending more on a place to live than the institute of higher learning that brought them there in the first place.  California has become emblematic of the dual challenge of keeping college students housed and the experimentation happening as teams of architects, school administrators, and developers attempt to solve a crisis of access and affordability.  This has created an opportunity for architects to impact college dorm and student housing design in ways that can reduce the cost barriers of education, and also meet the myriad needs of an increasingly diverse student population. Design can’t solve budget problems, city zoning laws, or NIMBYism near campus. But an increasing fusion of student, cohousing, and affordable housing strategies are coalescing in creative ways, especially as more housing is built, and larger projects are greenlit, with a goal of maximizing beds per unit. Granville 1500 is a student-focused apartment complex in West Los Angeles. [Photo: Paul Vu for LOHA] The Campus Housing Challenge Tuition costs have quadrupled for the 10 University of California schools, and grown sixfold for the California State system. In recent years, the state has been rife with stories of students sleeping in cars or couch surfing. Nearly 20% of community college students in the state have experienced homelessness, and many schools have opened food pantries to help students make ends meet.  This affordability crisis in on-campus and adjacent housing—what’s sometimes called “campus edge” housing—is far from just a California, or West Coast, concern. It’s a nationwide problem, especially in the pandemic era, when the separation of students due to COVID-19 revealed striking mental and psychological strain. Roughly 8.6 million students struggle to find housing near school, with rent for student housing shooting up 6.7% last year alone. At the University of Texas, the school started offering housing scholarships last year. This kind of real estate is also big business in the $10 billion student housing investment market. But California, by dint of its meteoric housing costs, may be where both the problem, and some of the solutions, are most advanced. UCLA just announced a housing mandate in 2022, declaring it would guarantee four years of campus housing for every new student. And State Senate Bill 169, passed in 2022, provides hundreds of millions of dollars for conversions and building new student housing. The efforts are spurring a building boom.  Gayley Towers at UCLA will feature vertical integration of freshman through senior students. [Photo: Courtesy of Mithun] Mithun, a national architecture practice with a large student housing focus, is currently working on projects in California totaling 10,000 beds. Firm partner Brendan Connolly estimates there might be 150,000 in the works statewide, where an estimated 417,000 students lack stable housing.  “The numbers are enormous because they realize this magnitude problem is so much bigger,” Connolly says. “Buildings used to be 300 or 400 beds, and now they’re 2,000 or 3,000. The affordable housing world and the student housing w