The way munger is going about it is a ridiculous amount of money, and I heavily doubt it will be built right. But the concept itself, to me, is a worthy tradeoff if it means reduced costs and better benefits. A window is not a benefit I care about.
Have you experienced being in a windowless room for a long period of time?
It’s not a luxury.
They will be living in a vibrant college community, with common areas, beaches, parks, libraries etc...
I've lived in a room with a Window against a brick wall in NYC.
I’ve been in a windowless prison cell, it sucks.
That doesn't sound pleasant but college students aren't prisoners locked in their dorm rooms.
I recall being stuck in a room for days working in winter
And FWIW I went to school in a similar climate to yours and was never "stuck in a room for days". How did you get to class? How did you get food?
I don't care for Munger. With that said, there's a huge disconnect here with your argument unless you can show a reasonable solution. There are poor people now who need housing. We can just build something subpar and help lift people out of homelessness.
The powerful land-speculation lobby (Monoplex owners) block every attempt at this. Munger Hall is the result. If you don't like that this is being built, your quarrel is with the suburban climate arsonists who hold up every development for extensive review until it dies.
I dont know how to solve for rising costs. I do know that if I cannot afford something nice, I have to settle for something subpar. I'm not sure how else to deal with the issue.
I would understand if someone crunched the numbers and after a long and detailed reasoning they would have come up with this solution as the only one which can potentially work. But as far as I understand that is not what happened here. The donor has aspirations to be an architecture too and stipulated that this is the only way his money can be spent. No deviations from the plan are acceptable.
For that price you can build a three bedroom condo with amenities.
This is a false dilemma. Little money is being saved here.
"Given the high construction cost everywhere, this is not surprising. I had a friend with a backyard slopping down a hill. He got some quotes to put in a deck and redo his yard. No one quoted anything less than 200k."
Both of these situations are in California. Construction costs are extremely high right now.
It's not because it would actually cost them 200 000$ in labour and material to build a deck and redo a yard.
Besides, for a billion dollar you're not dealing with local contractors, at that price you can even contract international companies, let alone bring in labour from the rest of the country.
Including the cost of land, for a full condo. It would correspond to a construction price of a condo of ~300 000$.
A dormitory room is going to cost less than a condo.
"When Los Angeles voters approved Prop. HHH in 2016, city officials predicted units would cost $350,000 to $414,000. In reality, prices have jumped to as much as $701,000 per unit, with 60 percent of the living spaces expected to exceed half a million dollars each."
You'll notice even the low end that was promoted to voters is higher than $330,000.
https://www.dailynews.com/2020/02/21/prop-hhh-projects-in-la...
This construction has to deal with NIMBYs and related delays, again UCSB doesn't have to bother with that.
And most of all these aren't single occupancy units. They are units for 2-3 people.
So yes, construction costs would be around the 350k mark when you take into account the land, for multi bedroom units, versus a single bedroom.
For a billion $ he could have built a lovely ‘academical village’ with every kind of amenity and a wide variety of rooms for every preference. This is a tenement, a warehouse for living people, in the worst 1900 Lower East Side sense, minus some of the fire and sanitation risk. Suitable for vermin, not scholars.
See also Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890.
A citizens’ movement resulted in the organization of a Board of Health and the adoption of the “Tenement-House Act” of 1867, the first step toward remedial legislation. ... The dark bedroom fell under the ban first. In that year the Board ordered the cutting of more than forty-six thousand windows in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilation—for little or no light was to be had from the dark hallways. Air-shafts were unknown. The saw had a job all that summer; by early fall nearly all the orders had been carried out. Not without opposition; obstacles were thrown in the way of the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements, who saw in every order to repair or clean up only an item of added expense to diminish their income from the rent; on the other side by the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing protest, to the level of their surroundings, and were at last content to remain there.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45502/45502-h/45502-h.htm