UCLA’s Housing & Hospitality Services office and the Office of Residential Life have announced yet another monumental construction project to take place on the Hill.
Good grief.
While this board supports efforts on the part of UCLA to keep students warm, fed and out of triples, we can’t help but be skeptical about the project’s execution.
Experience shows that construction projects at UCLA seldom finish on time or on budget, and with plans to block foot and car traffic in a number of places, these problems will likely be amplified.
Although we applaud the project’s proposed locations for utilizing open spaces on the Hill that currently serve no purpose, we are not pleased to see Charles E. Young Drive restricted to a single lane of traffic.
We as a board would like to urge the project’s organizers and campus administrators to reconsider the impact this will have on the already congested campus roads.
The sounds of construction on campus will also be a problem, continuing UCLA’s proud tradition of never letting a student graduate without having been largely inconvenienced by at least one major construction project.
In the past, this board has criticized UCLA’s housing offices for pumping out unreal promises, including a guarantee of four years of housing for all undergraduates.
We’re still opposed to this particular promise, mostly because in the process, we’re cramming people into tiny rooms and charging them an arm and a leg to stay there. There is no reason to offer four years of on-campus housing, and we’re tired of hearing that it’s “affordable.”
We are also concerned about the way priorities have been set up to this point. We would like to see a commitment from ORL and Housing & Hospitality Services to restrict the number of triple rooms on the Hill ““ in both the short and long runs.
But this is not to say that we do not support the construction plan. In addition to providing more space for students, new dorms are an effective marketing tactic for competitively attracting new students and appeasing worried parents.
And as is their responsibility, UCLA planners have designed the facilities to be state-of-the-art in terms of environmental standards, with each of the new buildings expected to be certified LEED Silver by the U.S. Green Building Council.
We approve, but would like to see some sort of trickle-down savings for students for the energy savings that will come from these more efficient, yet certainly more expensive, new facilities.
We’re not asking UCLA’s housing offices to solve every problem, and the new buildings, aside from their short-term inconveniences, should be functional, beautiful and by all other counts mutually appreciable.
But, we would like to see improvements made in the areas criticized herein.
Students should not have to live in triples on a campus where a couple of new dorms sprout up every couple of years, and more should be done to fulfill the empty promises of affordability.
We appreciate that UCLA has some of the finest student residential facilities anywhere, and we applaud the university’s efforts to expand capacity to adjust for demand, but we are concerned about the way current residents are being treated for the benefit of future students.
Unsigned editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily Bruin Editorial Board.