UCI Needs to Rethink Student Housing Plans
Re “For UC Irvine Neighbors, Debate Over Housing May Be Academic,” Oct. 1:
The article regarding UCI’s development of East Campus is factual. The comments by Irwin Alber, Turtle Rock Area Community Council chairman, is based on the environmental impact report that UCI released for public comment. What Vice Chancellor Wendell Brase is basing his comments on (Letters, Oct. 7) is the conceptual design of Phase One.
The EIR gives the university the right to build as many as 3,000 units, starting with three-story buildings within 10 feet of Culver Drive and about 150 feet of residential homes. Regardless of what they design today, the EIR gives them the right to change it as they see fit in this or future phases.
Brase is correct that East Campus housing has been part of their Long Range Development Plan since 1962. I have several documents of UCI’s plan dating back two decades, and each one is different. It was poor planning to put students next to homes to begin with. Common sense would have put faculty housing next to Turtle Rock.
It was not until the latest plan, however, that they decided to put undergraduates in the East Campus. In the second workshop they referred to them as “mature, upper-division students.” The fact is they are thousands of 21-plus-year-old kids on their own for the first time, potentially living within 150 feet of families. No other community in Irvine has this situation, so UCI’s position of “meeting or exceeding city of Irvine standards” is irrelevant.
The EIR states that three-and four-story buildings will “frame views” and that the impact on views is “insignificant.” An outright lie. UCI answers to no one. Turtle Rock citizens are afraid of the EIR, UCI’s track record for changing its mind and some downright ugly and cheap housing the school has built recently.
If you are reading this, UCI, please increase the setback another 100 feet with landscaping (bike trails optional) and not parking lots. Consider in your design that homes within two miles run from $500,000 to $15 million. Be a good neighbor. We’re losing 30 years of pastoral views and open space. The burrowing owls in the EIR are losing another home.
Rich Luttrell
Irvine
*
Instead of new law schools, UCI regents should establish a new medical school or greatly expand enrollments. In practically all other areas of higher education, enrollments have vastly increased, including in law, business and engineering. Not so in medicine.
Despite massive public concern for health care and costs, where are proposals to increase the number of physicians? On this we hear only eloquent silence from liberals and conservatives alike. The UC medical schools acknowledge that they reject thousands of applicants only because of space limitations.
Yet UCI Chancellor Ralph Cicerone wants to raise $40 million from private sources for a new law school.
Robert E. Hayes
Garden Grove
