Campuses Smart on Housing

Like the dorms and fraternity houses that are so much a part of university and college life, faculty and staff housing are becoming a necessary ingredient of Orange County’s campuses.

In an innovative three-way approach among Cal State Fullerton, the neighboring city of Buena Park and the county, an eight-acre patch of nearby unused former flood-control land along Brea Creek is being converted into a faculty village to attract top professors and staff.

Like all employers in Orange County, the area’s universities and colleges have a major problem attracting the faculty they need to maintain their high educational standards. It’s not that the nation’s top-flight educators don’t want to come here. They can’t afford to, not when they see how much more income they have to sacrifice to relocate to an area that has some of the highest housing costs in the nation.

An executive survey compiled last year by the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management singled out housing costs as the top barrier to doing business in the county. UCI wrestled with that problem for years before developing its 100-acre University Hills, which provides about 600 apartments, condominiums and detached homes to faculty and staff.

Fullerton’s first academic village, which comes after a 12-year effort to find affordable housing for new faculty and staff, will have 86 single-family houses and townhomes. It needs many more.

Prices of university-supplied housing are generally 40% to 50% less than other homes in the area and carry controls on resale so that they always remain affordable for faculty and staff.

Out of necessity, the idea is catching on. In Fullerton, a joint task force of the city and five campuses serving the area--Cal State Fullerton; Fullerton College; Southern California College of Optometry; Western State University College Law; and Hope International University--have joined to assess the campuses’ future affordable housing needs.

In still-growing Orange County, where according to one research firm only 15 newly built single-family detached houses under $500,000 were available for purchase in December, the campuses will find it increasingly hard to hire critically needed new faculty without innovative market approaches.