Notes on possible next steps for a student housing struggle
In a previous post, I wrote about some of the recent financial and political history behind the student housing crisis happening at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, where I'm a professor of education policy. That post made the rounds both among the student activists (who had asked me to write it) and West Chester faculty, staff, and administration.
It was pretty cool to see facebook threads of faculty talking about this, hearing about scandalized dinner parties of former West Chester administrators who had read it, and even seeing some student bloggers taking up the project of looking at the neoliberal finance underlying the problem.
The student organizers aren't letting up. They're continuing to organize and from what I hear, students throughout the university are talking. They either know someone who got kicked out of their affordable public dorm and doesn't know what to do now, or they themselves are struggling with finding housing to continue their studies.
Meanwhile, administrators are freaking out about dropping enrollments and you have to wonder whether they have any awareness that their own business-centered approach to university governance has gotten them into this situation. In fact, a few days ago, the president of the university issued a direct response to the op-ed in the student newspaper, addressing the movement's demands.
The letter is a resounding victory for the student movement. The university had to respond to their pressure. Even more, there are the beginnings of concrete short-term and medium-term concessions. The president is offering $2,000 stipends for students who lost their on campus housing--a paltry sum given that it maybe covers a month or two of rent, but it's not nothing.
Meanwhile, the president states that a "Cabinet-level decision" has been made to reverse previous administrations' approach to housing and any new dorms that are acquired or constructed will be university owned and operated, rather than privately through University Student Housing, LLC, a private/public company whose dorms are exponentially more expensive that the university's dorms.
Breaking away from historic practices implemented by previous University and State System administrations, a decision has already been made at the Cabinet-level that additional housing will be University owned. We are looking at an approximately 36- month process to build a new residence hall once a site has been determined.
That's a huge statement, particularly given that the movement knows it's the university's previous arch-neoliberal approach to student housing that got it into this mess in the first place. Also, given that the movement's emerging demand was for the university to purchase the USH private dorms back and offer those rooms for affordable prices to all students. There's an interesting response to that demand in the president's letter.
Make em public!
To recap, we know that the private housing on campus is operated by University Student Housing (USH), a nonprofit LLC subsidiary of the West Chester University Foundation, which is legally and financially separate from the university but entirely dedicated to sending the university with revenue. USH's goal is to provide West Chester students with housing, currently at double or even triple the price of university-owned dorms.
The students' idea is for West Chester University purchase USH's private dorms and make them public. Decommodify the USH stock, make all the housing on campus affordable. The student movement has picked up on the concept and is running with it.
I love this demand. It's actionable, radical, and clearly advances an agenda that serves working class students by taking up and taking on neoliberalism directly. We might even call it expropriative since the demand envisions the public university taking its housing stock away from private ownership.
What's even better is that USH isn't any old private developer or housing corporation. It's this weird (non)university entity that is both private and public and neither at the same time. It exists to provide housing to the university. So there's less of a chance you'd see the pitched struggle with simple capitalists that tenant organizers have to engage in, or Berlin organizers got when getting the city government to expropriate private apartments, for example.
Remember the debt
But there's a catch here. When we play out this demand and how the administration might react, we have to be careful. A Debt Collective organizer, West Chester faculty, and friend of mine Jason Wozniak made an important point about costs and targets.
Let's say the administration agreed to purchase USH housing and make it public. USH has massive loans that it needs to pay off. It took out these loans to finance the construction and maintenance of the dorms. They promised their creditors that they'd pay back the loans with interest using revenues coming in from the high housing bills students pay.
I don't think the creditors would look kindly on USH selling the dorms for a dollar and the new owners reducing the cost of living in them. And even if they did, the university--in purchasing the dorms--would now be responsible for the debt. What do you think they'll do in that case? WCU leadership would maybe want to try separating West Chester University from the state system like they did in 2013 so they could raise tuition and pay for these new dorms. They might just put the price back into fees that every student has to pay. Maybe they'd cut programs, fire faculty, and do other bad austerity shit to cover the cost. We don't want that.
And indeed, the president's letter addresses this directly. In response to the demand that WCU "Reverse USH-owned housing facilities back to WCU-owned facilities" he writes
The remaining debt service on USH-owned housing is approximately $188 million, which is currently bonded through USH. If the University were to attempt to pay off those bonds and reissue on the University books, a $12 million early payment penalty would be required. In addition, the cost of issuing bonds at this level is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost of transferring those halls to the University would be more than $200 million, which would irreparably harm the University’s finances and credit rating. Those costs, by Board of Governors policy, would have to be passed on to students through increased housing fees. For those reasons and more, we cannot pursue this option.
A friendly amendment to the "make them public!" demand is to say that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania should pay for this by increasing funding for higher education. It's not the university's responsibility to do this on its own, and other campuses are hurting from this issue.
Let's make this change systemwide: the state government should provide sufficient funding for affordable student housing, either through appropriation of tax revenues from the general fund or the state taking over the loans through the Commonwealth Finance Authority or the economic development authority. Indeed, we know that the new governor is inheriting a $5.4 billion surplus. Why not shift $200 million of that into student housing?
A bigger, more powerful terrain
Jason's amendment to the original demand opens up a new terrain for campaigning. The movement can target elected officials with this demand now, rather than just staying at the university level. And the Pennsylvania state government at this moment is very unstable, but in a good way. Whereas for the last twenty years it was on conservative lockdown, now squishy Democrats have a one vote majority in the house, the Republicans hold the senate (but are open to smart demands that benefit their districts), and there's a new Democrat governor with a mixed mandate is in office.
I think with the right strategy this incoherent situation could be conducive to legislation funding student housing. There would have to power maps of the right committees, members, and important moments. But it's doable.
The movement can thus fight with every other university in the PASSHE system now, not just on our campus. And the movement can get the faculty union involved to help nudge the governor and other electeds.
So it seems like the demands could be:
1) University Student Housing should sell their dorm buildings to West Chester University for $1.
2) West Chester University should purchase the buildings and take over their maintenance, converting them into affordable housing units for all students.
3) Pennsylvania state government should provide funding for affordable student housing in the state system of higher education in the form of legislation that uses the budget surplus. In particular, the state government should take over the bonds from USH and let WCU make all its dorms affordable.