They came prepared. As University officials and local residents crowded into Annenberg Auditorium in November for a public meeting about campus housing, graduate students handed them packets of instant noodles. Attached to each was a leaflet with a stark message: If you earn a graduate student stipend, and you pay Palo Alto rent, this is all you can afford for dinner tonight. To underscore the point, they waved placards in the packed hall. MORE GRAD HOUSING NOW. I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN MY CAR. WILL SOLVE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS FOR A PLACE TO LIVE.
The props drew chuckles but told a dire story. Graduate students at Stanford are desperate for accommodations. Their plight is a matter of simple arithmetic. Stanford has room to house 45 percent of its graduate students. The rest are foundering in a brutal market. Median rents rose 25 percent from 1995 to 1998 in Santa Clara County and 33 percent in Palo Alto. In dollar terms, an average room in a nearby shared house or apartment runs $800 a month, utilities and insurance another $200. With graduate student stipends averaging $1,200 after taxes, that leaves only $6.70 a day for everything else.
"The crisis is dramatic," President Gerhard Casper told Stanford a few days after the meeting. "It clearly endangers our recruitment of graduate students because our competitors are making intensive use of the housing issues here in order to attract the best students."
In fact, both graduate student and faculty recruitment are already suffering -- and housing is to blame, University officials say. According to Tom Wasow, associate dean of graduate policy, the effect of the crisis is "measurable" in this year's yield rate -- the percentage of graduate school applicants who accept Stanford's offer of admission. The rate typically ranges from 47 to 51 percent, but for 1998-99, it dropped to 38 percent. "As a result," Wasow said at the November meeting, "we offer places to candidates lower down the list." He quickly added that the University wasn't taking unqualified candidates, but that the trend threatened its ability to attract the very best ones.
Likewise, Provost Condoleezza Rice told a June Faculty Senate meeting of a disquieting development in faculty recruiting: Stanford succeeded in hiring only about 30 percent of the professors it sought this academic year. The usual rate is about 50 percent. Rice attributed the drop to the local real-estate market. Housing prices in the county, she noted, had soared even faster than rents: up 48 percent from 1995 to 1998.
The November meeting was the second act of a drama that began six months earlier, when a thousand graduate students and their families staged a demonstration in the Quad. That May rally was the first organized protest over the housing crunch; it coincided with a student-written report that roundly criticized the University for "not doing enough to address graduate housing concerns." The sight of 150 people camped overnight in the rain after the rally had the campus -- and news media -- riveted. It seemed unthinkable that Stanford, with all its resources and 8,000 acres of land, had a space problem. Provost Rice went out to commiserate with the protesters and assure them that the University was committed to finding solutions.
Rice, in fact, had already mobilized two groups to tackle the problem. A task force of eight administrators and three students had been working since November 1997 on short-term measures to fit more students into existing space on campus. Another committee, made up of officials from the Planning Office and Faculty/Staff Housing Office, was charged with the long-range task of exploring possible sites for new housing on campus.
The rally in the Quad sped these deliberations. By late summer, stopgap measures were in place to provide more rentals in the area. Moreover, University planners had prepared an ambitious three-part proposal (see map, below) that included fast-track construction of 480 single graduate units in Escondido Village and, further down the line, 450 homes for faculty, staff and medical residents.
The construction proposals are not without their problems, however. Environmentalists are wary of any new campus building, fearing encroachment on natural habitats. Members of the Stanford Campus Residential Leaseholders -- an association of faculty and staff who live on Stanford lands -- see campus green space shrinking and are pressing the University for a voice in the approval of new construction projects. Surrounding communities worry about increased traffic and parking problems, while local school officials fret over the effect of more family housing on enrollment. At the November public meeting, linguistics professor Stanley Peters quipped that his hometown, Menlo Park -- which has spent years tying up the University's Sand Hill Road projects -- had its own long-range plan: to obstruct any plan of Stanford's.
How did Stanford find itself scrambling for housing? The key to the answer is simply that Silicon Valley, like information technology itself, exploded beyond anyone's expectations. As new residents rushed in, demand outstripped supply, and vacancy rates shrank to as little as 1 percent to 3 percent in the Palo Alto area. The result: real-estate and rental prices soared.
As the market squeezed tighter, more and more graduate students looked to University residences, where room charges average 30 percent less than the going rate off campus. In the past, supply usually had matched or exceeded demand; suddenly, in 1996, 200 students who wanted to live on campus were turned away; in 1997, more than 700 students lost out in the housing draw; and last spring, that number topped 900. But the crunch could have been far worse. In 1997, two new graduate residences opened: Lyman, with 224 spaces, and the Schwab Residential Center, which houses 280.
Faculty and staff are hurting, too. Carolyn Sargent, director of Faculty/Staff Housing, says that even though Stanford's housing subsidies and loans are "among the best in the country," there simply aren't enough units available. And many potential recruits must confront the fact that a house costs two to four times as much here as in other university towns across the country.
As professors, students and staff move farther from campus in search of affordable housing, Stanford becomes less a residential university and more a commuter destination -- with all the attendant problems of traffic, pollution, parking and loss of the sense of community.
Last March, after the student housing task force completed its work, several new measures to help graduate students were announced. By turning some single rooms into doubles and doubles into triples in Crothers and Crothers Memorial, 260 more students would squeeze on campus in September. (A similar doubling-up was already in force at Escondido Village.) An emergency loan fund and one-time grants would help off-campus students pay security deposits to landlords. Community Housing Services -- which keeps a database of available housing in the area -- would reduce its listing fee for faculty and staff and drop the charge for students. Future housing draws would give priority placement to master's students for two years instead of one, and to doctoral students for six. Student couples could submit two applications instead of one.
But graduate student leaders labeled the steps minimal and turned activist, insisting the crisis would not be solved by "cramming more students into the same space" or "fiddling with lottery priorities." More than 2,100 students responded to an online housing survey; soon a 50-page report, "Graduate Housing: Discussion and Recommendations," circulated to University officials -- with 82 pages of survey comments appended.
The report was a page-turner. Students living off campus told of their frustrating searches for apartments, the extent of their debt, their difficulty in staying at Stanford -- and their disinclination to recommend Stanford to prospective students, given the housing situation. "We skimp on meals just to get by… it doesn't seem right to me. I don't even have enough money for groceries half the time," one student wrote. "I stopped recommending Stanford to prospective students, and I will probably drop out of my PhD program to take a job as a computer programmer: this is a purely economic decision," said another.
Respondents living on campus weren't appreciably happier. The price of rooms, lack of space and privacy, the annoyance of having to move every year -- those were just some of their complaints. "We're too old to share bedrooms with people with whom we aren't also sharing a bed," noted one.
The May 27 protest in the Quad sought to draw attention to these problems. It succeeded. Medical student Buck Wallace made headlines when rally organizers spread the word that he'd lived in a camper in the hospital parking lot -- "kind of like Trapper John, M.D.," he says -- for two and a half years. "But I was already $100,000 in debt for educational loans," Wallace explains, then adds, "Stanford's housing situation is pitiful. I hope they take steps to remedy it quickly."
The rally let students vent their frustrations, but it also publicized the report's recommendations: to raise stipends, build residences to accommodate 1,000 more graduate students, "unstuff" residences that assigned more than one person to a bedroom, subsidize off-campus housing and lower University housing fees.
"Some are very good," Provost Rice said of the proposals, as she walked among the students camped on the Quad. In fact, many of the students' demands were met, at least in part, by steps taken over the summer. That's when the University decided to:
- Subsidize off-campus housing in 152 apartments in Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Mountain View, providing $600-a-month rents for 250 students.
- Raise graduate students' stipends by 8 percent instead of the planned 6.5 percent.
- Waive all listing fees at Campus Housing Services, and appeal to faculty to rent spare rooms to students.
The University firmed up its longer-term plan in early fall. Larry Horton, director of government and community relations, describes the three-part program as "a measured set of realistic responses" to the housing crisis -- but considers it "a step, not a solution." Phase One will add 480 graduate singles to Escondido Village, building on five sites. Two of these sites are currently vacant, and three are occupied by one- and two-story buildings that will be replaced with structures as tall as four stories. Half the units should be ready for occupancy by the fall of 2000, the rest a year later.
Phase Two calls for building (and selling) up to 250 faculty and staff housing units on a 20-acre site on the west side of campus, adjacent to the old Stanford Barn. Phase Three would provide rentals for up to 200 medical residents on a 7-acre site near the hospital, at the corner of Arboretum and Quarry roads. For medical residents, a lengthy commute is more than an inconvenience. After a 24- or 36-hour shift, it is a safety concern.
Horton emphasizes that planning for the second and third projects has barely begun. "Only Phase One is concrete," he says. Because additional faculty and staff housing will add to local school enrollment, the University has met with the Palo Alto school board, but no architect has been hired and no application prepared. A University pamphlet on the housing crisis states that the residence for medical students "cannot move forward until funding sources have been identified."
In the meantime, Horton points out, the 628 rental units in the Sand Hill Road apartment project, scheduled to be completed in 2002, will be earmarked for Stanford affiliates. Postdoctoral fellows and medical residents should be able to live there too, because 25 percent of the units will be leased at below-market rates.
Mindful of public opinion -- and of town-gown acrimony over other construction projects -- the University rolled out a public relations strategy over the summer. The message: the more Stanford people who live on campus, the more housing will be freed up off campus and the fewer commuters there will be. A brochure on the housing shortage, subtitled "What Stanford University Is Doing to Help," even asserts that the new housing will "contribute to improved air quality." The University's proposals have won the endorsement of numerous local organizations, among them the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, the Silicon Valley Housing Coalition, the Palo Alto Housing Corporation and the League of Women Voters in Palo Alto.
Graduate students are noticeably mollified by the University's response to the crisis. In a letter published in the Daily on November 9, the provost explained the timetable for the Escondido units, announced that the off-campus subsidized leases would continue in the interim, pledged to try to find ways of unstuffing rooms -- and encouraged students to show up at the open meeting to share their stories and views with county officials. They did, in force.
"It's fairly unusual for college students to cheer university administrators, but Stanford is getting high marks from its graduate students," said an editorial in the Palo Alto Weekly following the meeting. Graduate Student Council member Karin Wahl-Jorgensen put it this way: "Ideally we would have 1,000 new spaces by 2000, but we feel that the University, under the circumstances, is doing the best it can."
The administration has been less successful in placating several hundred faculty and staff members of Stanford Campus Residential Leaseholders, who want a say about future construction plans beyond the three-part proposal. The University has said it is looking at some 20 "infill" sites on the core campus that could be used for single-family housing for faculty or staff. The leaseholders contend that five of these sites, totaling 12 acres, are currently neighborhood parks, green space and play areas used by children and students.
"Do we have any civic rights and responsibilities?" asks campus homeowner Diana Dutton, pointing out that Stanford is the equivalent of a "municipal government" for campus homeowners, but as that "citizens," they have no vote. A 1993 agreement stipulates that Stanford consult the leaseholders on any additions to the stock of faculty housing; Dutton says they were neither adequately informed, nor consulted, about current planning before it was announced. Following several heated meetings with university officials last spring, the provost set up a joint leaseholders-University housing task force.
Dutton, a task force member, says it met twice over the summer, but accomplished little. However, the November meeting gave leaseholders the chance to take their case to the public. Just before the meeting, 180 faculty wrote to President Casper urging the University to develop a long-range plan "in consultation with homeowners and open to public review." A number of county residents have made similar requests.
For their part, administrators have to juggle future planning with today's crying needs -- and critics. Kathleen Bransfield, housing assignments manager, says she expects this spring's housing draw will be a letdown for many students again, in part because measures put in place so successfully this fall will encourage even more to enter the lottery. The University continues to explore off-campus housing options, but community relations chief Horton downplays recent press reports of Stanford taking over hundreds of empty houses when Moffett Field is decommissioned and handed over to NASA in 2000. While Stanford is "engaged in discussions of broad areas [of collaboration] with NASA," Horton says it is "very premature" to speculate on the Mountain View site as a housing solution. Such an arrangement would certainly spark controversy, as Mountain View is eyeing the property for senior-citizen housing.
Perhaps the biggest frustration now is that the housing crisis is not just keeping prospective students and faculty from coming, it is even driving current students away. Vice Provost for Student Affairs James Montoya, ’75, MA ’78, worries about this trend. He notes that minority students and single mothers are the first to abandon Stanford--but others are not far behind. Says Montoya: “It was when graduate students started coming to my office last summer to say goodbye that all this really hit home.”
