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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

Billionaires gonna... billionaire, or something.

> Obviously, it would be better if every student could have a penthouse with perfect views in all four directions. But we don't do that because we can't get enough students to live conveniently close together.

This is a logic fallacy, but I don't know the name of it. "We all agree that all students can't have a penthouse. So why do you care if we stuff them in windowless rooms?"

He wants to compare windowless rooms to a cruise ship. You spend a WEEK on a cruise ship. I had an openable window in my dorm room (in the days before every room in a university was a hotel suite). I cannot imagine living 9 months of my life in a room with no actual window.

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> This is a logic fallacy, but I don't know the name of it. "We all agree that all students can't have a penthouse. So why do you care if we stuff them in windowless rooms?"

False dichotomy

Also mixed in with strawman.

> Exaggerating (sometimes grossly exaggerating) an opponent's argument, then attacking this exaggerated version.

The claim in this case being, "residents should have reasonable access to sunlight in their rooms." And the exaggeration being penthouses.

Not sure about a fallacy but he's essentially saying: because it can't be the best option, the worst is acceptable.

It's as if there aren't options in between and this isn't just optimization and greed run amuck against the human condition. It reminds me of one of the newer plane seating layouts I saw with alternating seats.

You know, it would be even more optimal if they didn't actually live in the building at all and just sent him money every week, wouldn't he like that even more?

The worst option is sleeping on the streets. Quite common in California.

This building is a huge improvement over that baseline.

I think this line of reasoning is completely unsubstantiated. I sleep in a room with a window covered up, which I never open, and it’s just fine. Because I don’t spend my whole day in that room. Asserting that it’s some kind of a giant problem for undergrads to sleep in a windowless room, when that building has plenty of well lit common space with windows, is just absurd.

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.

> 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.

Okay, 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.

The 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.

So where are the poor students going to live? Are you suggesting they just rack up more debt or not attend college?

>I cannot imagine living 9 months of my life in a room with no actual window.

Why would you be spending a literal nine months of year in your little windowless dorm bedroom, though? Were you a shut-in in college? The whole point is you sleep there, maybe occasionally get a little privacy there, and otherwise live your life in the rooms that do have windows. Or alternately, venture outside occasionally.

I understand why people want a window, but people make this out to be hell on earth or something.

Well yes, but no.

People are different. Some students I lived with only showed up to sleep in the dorm, you could hardly see them around. Some like me preferred to study at my own desk.

I would go crazy if I had to stay there, others would not notice lack of a window.

I am not 100% critical of the windowless room, however this should be an option and not the only option (I strongly believe that once adopted this would quickly become the de-facto only accommodation option for average student)

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.

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.

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.

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