How UC Irvine Makes Offers They Don’t Refuse
Irvine’s immaculately landscaped French Country and Spanish Colonial homes could tempt almost any college professor to trade in the textbooks for a briefcase and the lucrative corporate life.
But what serious academic could afford to live in such Orange County neighborhoods, where even a modest single-family home can run half a million dollars?
Actually, most any UC Irvine professor.
UC Irvine’s answer to runaway housing prices is University Hills, the handsome, faculty-only master-planned community of homes that rivals even the swankiest developments in town--and at half the price.
Ever since famed Yale deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller surprised the academic world by bolting to UC Irvine 15 years ago--lured in part by an affordable custom-built house in University Hills--the college’s faculty housing program has provided a huge edge in recruiting. Few, if any, other universities can offer the majority of their professors luxury homeownership at a deep discount.
The latest batch of talent the upscale residential neighborhood helped bring to UC Irvine includes an endowed department chairman from New York University and a distinguished professor in the sciences from UCLA. UC Irvine’s dean of humanities also reports negotiations with at least one Harvard professor and said a number of junior faculty members have passed up offers from the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and other top schools largely so they can keep living in University Hills.
“We have it all here,” said Michael Szalay, an associate professor of English who has turned down several higher-ranking schools.
Szalay’s fiancee just left a tenured teaching post in Ann Arbor for a faculty job at UC Irvine, and last week the two bought a four-bedroom Craftsman-style home in University Hills for $334,000.
“We get to be academics at a great institution, but we also get to live the lifestyle most of America dreams about,” he said. “We’ve escaped the garrets that academics in major urban areas are so often forced to live in, and we get to have it all.”
“Garret” life has become reality for more academics as housing prices in metropolitan areas soar. Big-city colleges and universities report that recruits are turning down even the most lucrative job offers because housing is so expensive.
At Stanford University in upscale Palo Alto, a report from the Provost’s Committee on Faculty Housing in 2000 concludes that the housing crunch was so dire that “Stanford’s future is in jeopardy.
“Chairs and deans have a very difficult time recruiting the best faculty, given the local price of housing,” the report states.
Stanford has about 850 homes on campus that faculty are welcome to buy, but they lack the price caps of UC Irvine’s University Hills homes. The homes typically cost more than $700,000.
“Most people who are coming here can’t afford to live here because of the housing crisis,” said Betty Oen, associate director for faculty and staff housing at Stanford. “If they have offers from outside universities, they are usually in places with much lower housing costs.”
Stanford and other universities have helped faculty members fill the gap by dipping into their endowments to fund cut-rate loans, grants and other housing assistance for faculty members. Still, many professors, especially junior faculty, can’t afford to buy a house anywhere near campus.
“As housing prices go up, as they have been outrageously, it is only going to get worse,” said Courtney Caldwell, a Newport Beach-based university housing consultant who helped UC Irvine set up its program and now helps schools nationwide. “It has just gone crazy,” she said.
Caldwell has been besieged by calls from desperate administrators watching recruits slip from their grasp. Now many colleges want to set up a program similar to the one UC Irvine established nearly 20 years ago, which will soon be complete with 1,100 homes, enough for half the professors on campus. Schools are having varying degrees of success.
Big private schools such as NYU, Columbia, Harvard and Princeton offer some faculty members affordable apartments in high-rent neighborhoods. The perk has helped recruiting and also kept some of the faculty stars from leaving, especially in areas where the rental market has soared, Caldwell said.
The most activity appears to be in California, where skyrocketing land prices are particularly pressing.
Pepperdine has built faculty housing over the years to keep faculty and recruits from bolting as a result of sticker shock in Malibu--and it is working on several dozen more units. UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara have started buying apartment and condominium buildings to help solve their housing problems. But there are far too few units available to meet demand.
Universities are being careful not to repeat mistakes made by UCLA. The school built 86 homes--costing $550,000 apiece--about 10 miles south of campus in the early 1990s. Unlike UC Irvine, the university didn’t own the land and was unable to control the prices. The homes ended up costing more than faculty members could afford, and all but eight were sold to buyers not affiliated with the university. The university lost about $7 million in the debacle.
Officials at Cal State campuses in Fullerton, Channel Islands and Monterey Bay are taking care to avoid such missteps as they set out to create a combined total of more than 1,000 units--most of them on school-owned land.
“We are losing highly prized faculty appointments,” said Bill Dickerson, executive director of the Cal State Fullerton Housing Authority. “One top faculty recruit was offered an $80,000 salary and turned it down to accept a position for $10,000 less in the Midwest because the price of housing here was so high.”
Junior faculty members make far less. At UC Irvine, salaries for professors in the humanities start in the high $40,000s.
For Linda Vo, the ability to buy a four-bedroom, 2,200-square-foot Spanish Colonial that is walking distance to campus and costs in the low $300,000s played a big part in her decision to stay at UC Irvine.
“I have friends in the Bay Area who know that for the rest of their careers there they will have to rent,” said Vo, an assistant professor of Asian American studies. “Here I am--not only owning a big house in Irvine, but I’m able to walk to work.”
Buying in University Hills is made easier through special low-interest loans backed by UC Irvine.
The catch in all this is that professors are limited to how much profit they can make on their investment when they leave the community and sell their house to another faculty member. The university restricts the appreciation of homes on its land to match the average percentage increase in faculty salaries. So, if the average UC Irvine faculty pay raise is 3%, that’s the maximum amount a University Hills home can appreciate that year. That keeps faculty members from cashing in on housing market booms.
Residents of University Hills also admit there is a certain irony in so many academics rushing to the suburban good life in a master-planned community, the kind of place some intellectuals might criticize as soulless and antiseptic.
“Sometimes the beigeness of it all can be overwhelming,” said Hugh Roberts, an associate professor of English. “It’s typical Irvine suburbia, except your neighbors are all academics.”
That gives some professors pause before moving in. They might try a stint at living in Hollywood or Silver Lake at first, but many who swore they would never live in the place end up at University Hills.
“You can’t help it,” said Roberts, who bought a two-bedroom condo for $156,000. “You think, ‘I can actually buy this huge place for this cheap?’ ”
His colleague, Richard Kroll, said the place being filled with academics does enhance the suburban experience. Kroll initially went house shopping in Aliso Viejo but discovered few of his would-be neighbors shared his interests in 18th century British literature.
“I felt like if I lived there I would be surrounded by people who drive Camaros,” he said. “Here, I’ve got a neighbor who is an art historian and does classical archeology. We share a joint amateur interest in Napoleon.”
