Scholars in Residence : Schools Offer Housing for Faculty; USC Hopes Its Project Will Aid Neighborhood

USC film professor Michael Renov and his family were tired of renting but couldn’t afford to buy a house in many Los Angeles neighborhoods. And they had neither the inclination to buy a fixer-upper nor the time to brave the commutes from exurbias with more reasonably priced homes.

Meanwhile, USC was concerned that the high cost of Los Angeles-area real estate made it difficult to keep and attract top-flight professors. In addition, the school had embarked on an ambitious plan to improve the residential neighborhood north of campus and to attract more teachers to live there.

So, a match was made. And another step was taken in the national trend for universities, particularly in California, to help their faculty and staff obtain affordable and attractive housing.

The Renovs soon will be among the first tenants in a 27-unit townhouse condominium project that USC is building at Hoover and 30th streets, just two blocks from school.

The neo-Craftsman-style development is for USC teachers and staff willing to be pioneers both in a neighborhood that many faculty flee after classes and in a new financial relationship with the school.

“We looked around and we really felt that for the price the faculty housing ended up being, we would either be a great distance from campus or find something very small or in need of repair,” said Renov, who is chairman of the critical studies department at the USC School of Cinema-Television.

He and his wife, Cathy Friedman, an official of a nonprofit organization that aids female survivors of crime and domestic violence, bought the largest of the USC floor plans: 1,950 square feet, with three bedrooms, three baths, family room, study and a two-car underground garage with an internal staircase to living quarters. The price: $285,000.

Prices (which start at $140,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bath unit) are kept relatively low because USC, unlike commercial developers, is not seeking profits. In addition, the university is keeping ownership of the land, leasing it to the homeowner association.

For the Renovs, other attractions included the prospect of walking to school (and thus making a small contribution to lessening auto emissions), proximity to the child-care center near campus where their 3-year-old daughter is enrolled (their second child is due in a few months) and increased opportunities to take advantage of USC cultural and sporting events.

All that overcame jitters about crime, isolation and a lack of some neighborhood amenities.

“We feel we are attaching ourselves in some ways to the university,” said Renov, who has been renting a house in the Carthay Circle area of Los Angeles. “We are committing ourselves because we are fairly convinced that this is part of a real long-term, broad-based effort to improve the environment of the USC community.”

That commitment from USC is real, according to Gerald M. Trimble, president of the USC Real Estate Development Corp., the university-funded organization that is building the $5.6-million project.

Fifteen of the 27 units are reserved, and Trimble is so confident of eventual sellout that he is planning another 126 units (114 for sale, and 12 for rent) on what is now a parking lot across 30th Street, in conjunction with neighboring Hebrew Union College.

The projects are supposed to deliver what Trimble described as a “double whammy”: providing housing as a lure for scholars and creating a university community outside USC’s gates.

“We want people to move into this area and add purchasing power to the neighborhood. It’s important for the university and we are committed to doing that,” said Trimble, a former official in the redevelopment agency of downtown San Diego.

The USC group also plans a large hotel and office complex on Figueroa Street across from campus and has worked on restoration of Victorian homes in the North University Park neighborhood, which is a National Register Historic District. In the past, USC has been accused of being a land grabber, seeking to impose its will on the mainly Latino and black residents in neighborhoods surrounding the campus.

With the condos, the school clearly wanted to avoid such a perception. The first 27 units are on land donated by the late marine biology professor Irene McCulloch, after whom the project is named, and was the site of a small apartment house occupied mainly by students, officials said. The next phase requires no demolition.

On the flip side of any possible gentrification are professors wary of the neighborhood because of crime, even though USC insists crime statistics in North University Park are below the citywide average.

“We like the units and like the project,” said one USC teacher who came close to buying one of the townhouses but backed off. “While I don’t mind renting and living in the area, I’m not too thrilled about owning there because of the gangs and graffiti. I don’t think the value will appreciate enough.”

To overcome such resistance, Trimble’s firm paid particular attention to attractive design and good security at the townhouses, which will be surrounded by an ornamental wrought-iron fence and be patrolled by USC campus police. All units have studies where an academic can retreat among his books and possibly meet with students and colleagues.

All that, plus the collegiality of living in an academic community, attracted USC neurology professor Richard Thompson and his wife, Judith, a USC researcher, to buy one of the three-bedroom units on 30th Street.

They had lived in Stanford University’s faculty housing before moving to USC and a small condominium in Culver City three years ago. Now they are optimistic about North University Park.

“Let’s be blunt. Even at Stanford’s campus housing there were robberies and occasional rapes and assaults, and that’s a wonderfully safe place,” Richard Thompson said. “In the long term, this is going to be a very nice neighborhood as USC moves toward the city and the city moves toward USC.”

As added bait, USC is putting no limits on resale prices and is not demanding a share of profits. (Most schools, such as the UC branches, tie resale prices of their university-built housing to various indexes and take a portion of profits.) Some buyers can even get favorable mortgage deals from the university credit union and grants for closing costs from the university.

However, like many other universities, USC has placed some restrictions on resale to ensure the future buyers are on the staff.

USC is a relative latecomer to the faculty housing field in California. For example, UCLA, Stanford and UC Irvine long have been involved in the field.

UCLA has the opposite problem of USC: The Westwood campus is surrounded by some of the priciest real estate in the nation and little is available.

Through purchases or its own construction, UCLA has 144 apartments and 52 condos in Westwood for teachers to rent or buy at favorable rates. In addition, in 1986 UCLA built 58 faculty townhouses north of campus in the Beverly Glen area, which sold at the time for between $155,000 and $255,000.

The school is expected to break ground this autumn for 86 large single-family faculty houses in the Bluffs area of Westchester. Those are expected to sell for about $500,000, a price that is startling to most non-Angelenos but well below what a commercial developer would charge, officials contend.

“Everybody has stories of faculty who come here from out of state and everything looks fine until they start looking for housing. Then you get various adjectives they use to describe their state of shock,” said Harold W. Horowitz, executive assistant to UCLA’s chancellor.

UCLA has lost both potential hires as well as professors who were already on the staff because of housing costs, he said.

UC schools also offer below-market-rate mortgages for both university-built and private housing. Decisions on who should get those loans and homes can be difficult, with department chairmen evaluating how important a particular professor is to the school and how badly that faculty member needs housing help.

UC Irvine has 388 faculty housing units on campus and 44 more are being planned. The existing homes range from one-bedroom condominiums that sold for about $100,000 to three bedroom detached houses that sold for $300,000, all well below the prices in the Orange County market off-campus. And, faculty can walk or ride bicycles to class, avoiding the freeway snarls.

“It’s very clear this housing is part of the inducement to recruit faculty to Orange County,” said Leon Schwartz, UC Irvine’s vice chancellor for administrative and business services.

At USC, a majority of teachers live in Pasadena, Culver City and the South Bay cities but only about 20 in neighborhoods adjacent to campus, according to Trimble.

The university could have reinforced that pattern by building condominiums in suburban communities and developing a shuttle van system to school, but that would have done nothing for the campus neighborhood, not to mention the freeway traffic situation and parking crunch, he stressed.

Over the next eight years, Trimble wants to build as many as 300 faculty housing units in the USC area. “If it’s going to work anywhere,” he declared, “it’s going to work two blocks from campus.”