Deal Will Help New Faculty at CSUF Move In
Orange County’s costly housing market has led Cal State Fullerton to begin building its first off-campus homes to attract top professors and staff who otherwise couldn’t afford to take a job at the fast-growing campus.
And it has found an improbable partner in the venture--the city of Buena Park.
Under a three-way swap, the university, the city and Orange County set in motion a deal to create a faculty village on eight acres of barren, weed-covered flood retardation land along Brea Creek on Buena Park’s north side, at the corner of Dale Street and Malvern Avenue.
University Gables, as it has tentatively been named, will include 56 single-family homes and 30 townhomes for new faculty and staff. Prices will top out at $235,000, roughly 40% to 50% cheaper than comparable homes in the area.
Part of a larger 12-acre city project called Buena Park Transit Village, University Gables will provide property tax revenue from land that has brought in nothing. The development will include the city’s first railway station for Metrolink service and a day-care center.
“We’re ending a blight this city’s had for a long time,” said May Wong Hui, the city’s economic development director, who was instrumental in putting the deal together.
For its end, Cal State Fullerton hopes the new housing village--six miles from campus--will reduce the numbers of professors forced to reject job offers because homes in Orange County are too costly. It is a growing problem faced by universities in high-priced housing markets around the state, including the San Fernando Valley, west Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
At Cal State Fullerton, most starting salaries are under $50,000, which dramatically limits home buying in Orange County, considered to have the greatest shortage of affordable housing in Southern California, according to the California Assn. of Realtors and other national developer surveys.
In a recent report addressing the housing problem, Cal State University President Milton A. Gordon said the school has hired 54 full-time and 100 temporary faculty in the past year. The university also expects to be hit with scores of retirements in the next five years, as well as further student enrollment growth.
“We’ve grown to 29,000 students now; who knows where the top is,” said William Dickerson, director of its housing authority.
A “significant” number of professors who eventually turned down job offers cited housing as their primary reason, Gordon said in a letter to the city.
Here’s how its deal with Buena Park becomes affordable: The university will sell to new faculty a University Gables house, but only lease the property it sits on. That way it can sell the homes for $165,000 to $235,000. Similar homes just across Dale Street are selling as much as 50% higher.
The new owners must agree that when they sell the house--and only to qualified faculty or staff--they will stay within price limits so the homes will remain affordable for those coming in. It’s a program similar to one UC Irvine operates for faculty and staff on its campus.
So how much did Cal State Fullerton pay the city for this lucrative plot?
A single dollar.
In the other part of the three-way swap, that same dollar is what the city is paying the county’s Flood Control District for those same eight acres.
Buena Park also will pay the county $345,000 for an adjoining four acres where the railway station and day care will be located. But city officials consider that a bargain for what the community will get in return.
The rail station and day care will cost about $2 million to build. But the city expects they will attract enough businesses to the area to offset that cost. Metrolink will make 13 weekday stops there and the day care will be open for the entire community, although city officials expect it to be most attractive to rail commuters.
Cal State Fullerton will finance $17 million to build its housing project, and expects to recoup that with the sale of the 86 units.
The Buena Park housing project marks the first success of a 12-year effort by the university to find affordable housing for faculty and staff.
It was in 1989 that the university’s president at the time, Jewell Plummer Cobb, first put together a housing task force. The group quickly learned that the need for faculty and staff housing would be urgent by the millennium.
Yet one deal after another fell through. One of the most promising was in Lakeside, a new development also along Brea Creek. But the developer willing to cooperate with Cal State Fullerton for affordable units got outbid by another developer who saw no profit in an affordable housing market.
By coincidence, it was a gathering at Lakeside three years ago that led to the current alliance. Buena Park Mayor Art Brown was chatting with Conrad Sick, who had developed UC Irvine’s faculty housing and had ties to Cal State Fullerton.
Sick nodded in the direction of the flood retardation basin and asked what the chances might be it would ever become available.
“I knew right away something exciting might just come of this,” Brown said.
*
City officials knew that major improvements to the Brea Creek channel--still ongoing--had made the 12-acre retardation basin unnecessary. It was bordered on the north side by the creek, and by the railroad tracks used by Amtrak and Metrolink on the south.
“The county was using the property to dump dirt from the channel dredging, and the neighbors would complain about the dust,” Brown said.
The county was willing to unload it if an attractive project could be put together. So Hui of the city staff and Cal State Fullerton’s Dickerson began two years of planning.
Cal State Fullerton isn’t the only Orange County campus with an acute faculty shortage problem.
The city of Fullerton last week agreed to a request from a task force of the five colleges that serve the area to help them assess future affordable housing needs for the campuses. They include Cal State Fullerton, Fullerton College, Southern California College of Optometry, Western University College of Law and Hope International University, a Christian school.
Hope President LeRoy Lawson wrote the Fullerton City Council that many of its faculty live in Corona, in Riverside County, because they cannot afford Orange County.
Added Lawson: “Not having the faculty live near the campus affects their ability to relate to students and their fellow faculty.”
Whatever ventures the joint task force pursues will be separate from the Buena Park project, Dickerson said. In fact, he said, Cal State Fullerton will continue to pursue its own arrangements like the one with Buena Park.
But it will face the same old problem: The university can’t afford to build unless it can get the land at Buena Park rates--about 13 cents an acre.
“Obviously, 86 homes won’t even scratch the surface of meeting the ongoing needs of new faculty,” Dickerson said. “But it’s a start.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
From Flood Basin to Village
Part of a former flood-control retarding basin will be turned into an 86-home village for new Cal State Fullerton faculty. On the remaining land, the city plans its first rail station for 13 daily Metrolink stops, plus a day-care center aimed at rail commuters.
Source: City of Buena Park
