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.

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. 

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 world are definitely mixing in this very brackish way right now.”

Every square foot matters

The crisis, especially in California, results from a number of factors: What was once a promised, no-cost, or low-cost college education has become another rapidly rising consumer good, according to an analysis by CalMatters. In addition, many campuses tend to be in expensive urban areas of California, where rent will run $2,000 or more a month. 

Two national news stories in recent years highlighted the stakes and scope of the issue, in terms of dorm building and design. In Berkeley, a now-defeated lawsuit stalled new student housing, arguing that under the state’s environmental review laws, coeds represent some form of noise pollution. The suit highlights the power antidevelopment forces have in neighborhoods surrounding schools, where many colleges and universities need to build new housing. In Santa Barbara, news of the proposed and now killed Munger dorm, a massive windowless cube lacking natural light in its living quarters, spoke to the blunt and uncomfortable value-engineered solutions to the issue some had proposed. 

The bottom line will always be key in discussions of college living, says Lorcan O’Herlihy, founder of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (LOHA). The firm currently has six such close-to-campus projects in the works, and has already completed student-focused apartments, such as Granville1500 in West Los Angeles. But that just means universities and colleges should tap designers and architects with the ability to make more functional, cost-effective, and comfortable buildings. O’Herlihy says his firm’s affordable housing history made it a great choice for student work. 

“When you are in a way in the trenches, developing projects where you have pared-down budgets, that kind of lends itself towards how do you make something ordinary extraordinary?” he says.

Amid the rapid ramp-up of new dorms in the Golden State, many different strategies are being deployed to design more efficient, affordable dorms. In many cases, the campus itself has been fully built out, leading to more development and experimentation in nearby neighborhoods and cities. The projects tend to borrow from affordable housing design. In addition, colleges plan to own, run, and operate this housing, in many cases for decades, allowing more long-term thinking and sustainability in the design process, since longtime owners can afford a longer payback period for energy-efficient dorms. 

The big focus remains getting the most beds into the least amount of space, but doing so without cramming students into dark, featureless rooms. It’s akin to the evolution of workspace design in an era of hybrid work: fewer and smaller individual spaces but more expansive, better-designed areas for collaboration and community. 

“We’re seeing a lot of downward pressure on square feet per room, tight living spaces, almost like little sailboats in that they need to optimize flexibility,” Connolly says. “So we’re focused on putting more space in the community spaces. Every square foot matters.”

Design solutions

One Mithun project, on the campus of Ventura College, seeks to create prefabricated, cross-laminated timber housing, part of a larger movement to build out modular student housing that can easily and cheaply be replicated and repeated. The warmth of wood, and the biophilic benefits of showcasing the material, mean less need for cladding. For example, showing a “naked”  interior wood joint or support that looks good, as opposed to exposing a steel I beam in the middle of a dorm bedroom, and also lower floor heights. It’s also the first housing project on the community college campus, about 80 miles up the coast from Los Angeles.  

“There’s a huge fascination in the UC system around prefabrication, and not just for structural work but for bathroom pods and cladding systems,” Connolly says. “It makes a lot of sense, since college housing is such a repetitive project.”

Lynn McBride, another architect and partner at Mithun, adds, “There’s also a lot of conversation at colleges about equity. Universities like to have similar living systems across campus.”

For O’Herlihy, it’s important for design to prioritize livability. Granville1500, a 153-unit UCLA housing project on the site of a former car dealership, does so with a focus on the exterior space. A series of wedged-shaped buildings wrap around a courtyard, creating an interior and outer edge lined with windows and gathering spaces to give students exposure to natural light. The firm also utilized metal for the facade to avoid the maintenance costs of cracking stucco and to utilize a recyclable exterior. 

There are also subtle ways to give spaces multiple uses, says McBride. This means setting up gathering areas and seating in dorm hallways for meeting and collaboration, slightly taller ceilings to make bunking easier and more spacious, and clever use of cohousing tropes, such as shared kitchen spaces. Many projects seek to provide individual accommodation for different types of students such as transfers or graduate students; this requires even more focus on tight, microunits with added flexibility. 

It’s important that amid these larger projects, especially off campus, the community remains a focus, notes Connolly. It’s vital for these larger dorms that remain a distance from the campus quad that the college experience isn’t similarly distant. That means building in social spaces, academic and health support spaces, outdoor community and gathering areas. McBride adds that California’s climate allows for the advantageous strategy of optimizing the outdoors for social gathering areas, whether it’s rooftops, atriums, or space for barbecue grills and dining.  

Many buildings, like the Gayley project, include new types of community spaces to meet a diversifying student body. Instead of simply a study lounge, these dorms have private study spaces, Zoom rooms, counseling spaces for mental health services, and prayer rooms.

Demographically, the college enrollment population peaked a few years ago. But because of the need for more affordable accommodations, the aging of existing facilities, and the undersupply of housing, firms like LOHA and Mithun will likely remain busy for many years to come. 

“You want a healthy environment, and we pitch that to clients,” O’Herlihy says. “They recognize that design does make a difference and it’s valuable. These are young, vibrant kids who are really pushing themselves [and] elevating their abilities in terms of thinking and [learning] how to learn. What’s the best environment to learn?”