Planned scarcity in public university housing
When I first got to my university in 2016, I was surprised when I moved into my office. It was a dorm room with a professor's desk in it. There were shelves and drawers for clothes on either side of the room, as though the familiar twin beds for undergraduates had just been removed. Down the hall, there was a large collective bathroom with working showers. Wayne Hall, once a student residence, had been turned into offices.
Just ten feet across from Wayne Hall, a new dorm was being built: Brandywyne Hall. While the facilities in Wayne looked threadbare and dated--the tiles and sinks in the bathroom recalled scenes from Animal House--the new dorm was very modern. It had advanced security technology, flat screen TVs everywhere, and upscale-looking lounges for students.
It takes awhile to understand what's going on in any terrain. I didn't make much of it. Eventually, the university refurbished Wayne Hall as a proper office building and new dorm buildings went up. It seemed fine. But then I heard an alarming story: a trespasser entered Schmidt Hall, nearby to Wayne, and took a video of a student showering.
I was confused. The locks on Brandywyne were so extensive, how could a trespasser get in so easily? I was teaching a seminar in power and privilege in higher education at the time and my students, many of whom had been undergraduates at West Chester, gave me a knowing look. "Oh, of course," they said, "Schmidt is so ghetto; it's really old and not well taken care of."
Neoliberal student housing
They told me that there were two kinds of dorms on campus, public and private. The public dorms were old, falling apart, and lacking in updated amenities like increased security. They were also known around campus as the "ghetto." These public dorms are owned and operated by the university, a public university part of Pennsylvania's state system of education. Schmidt is part of that 'ghetto'.
But the private dorms are owned and operated by an entirely different entity: a limited liability company with the misleading name University Student Housing (USH). Sounds like just another bureau of the university right, maybe one that takes care of housing? Not really. For students, USH dorms--a a private company--cost twice as much per semester as public dorms. What's going on here?
USH is a division, or more technically a subsidiary, of the West Chester University Foundation (WCUF). The foundation is a non-profit entity connected to, but legally and financially distinct from, the university. WCUF presents itself as a fundraiser for the university, touting millions of dollars that it brings in for the institution. But it does a lot more than that, like house USH and provide an institutional context for the ongoing privatization of student housing on campus.
There's obviously a contradiction here, one that's very of its moment. A public institution is financing and administering student housing through a private entity within it. That's classic neoliberalism, using markets to deliver non-market goods, reorienting social democracy towards privateering entities and thus eroding the benefits social democracy can provide, like affordable on campus housing for working class university students.
I looked at this contradiction with my students in the seminar. We were aware of its terrible politics, rooted in neoliberal austerity, and understood its material impacts as directly hurting working class students by limiting their access to housing through increased costs.
While I'd bring this issue up in conversation every now and then, nothing seemed to emerge around it in terms of debate or action. But these gross contradictions just boiled over into a conjuncture; the scarcity of affordable on campus housing opening up a flaw in the university's neoliberal armor, which student organizers are now thoroughly pressing.
Make private campus housing public!
Last week, a number of undergraduates got a letter telling them they'd lost their spots in public dorms on campus. The letter informed them that they could move into USH housing at double the cost, but had no other options. After a similar development earlier in the semester, they'd had enough. With help from Students for Socialism, they organized a group called WCU Housing Crisis and held a protest that turned out a number of students.
The protest was covered by local NBC and CBS stations. The group has a petition going on change.org and marched on the university president's house last Wednesday.
(Photo courtesy of WCU Housing Crisis)
Their demands are well-constructed, reasonable, and radical:
These demands are expropriation claims. Like organizers in Berlin seeking to take private apartments out of the hands of private developers who charge exorbitant rent, these students are demanding that private housing be made public. It's an exciting and pitched terrain of struggle, striking back at the world that neoliberal austerity has created.
As I saw the successful action on university's main quad unfold Monday, I opened up the notes from my seminar and did a little more digging. Talking with some colleagues who are active in our faculty union and the Debt Collective, we wondered exactly how these dorms had been financed. We wanted to follow the money and maybe create a public record to support the students' demands. In contrast to the university's and media's framing of the issue as a natural outcome of increased student enrollment and supply/demand issues in campus housing, I found that the scarcity of affordable public dorms was actually part of the plan.
The snake logic of planned scarcity
Bond statements don't lie. If you can find a bond statement related to an issue, you can know what's happening with that issue. Borrowers are incentivized to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth to their lenders, so help their bottom line. And everyone needs credit to finance what they do. The trick is finding the bond statement and decoding its dry and esoteric contents. But I've gotten much better at this and, indeed, I uncovered some stuff around USH and WCU.
I knew about USH and its status within WCUF. What I didn't know was whether and how USH got its financing. Was it through the university? The foundation? If so, how did the money flow? If it was through the university, then they'd have to do some reporting on it in their budgets. I looked at a budget statement from 2018 and search for USH. Jackpot: there was a timeline of the university's financial dealings with the foundation and USH around housing, going back to 2001 when the foundation started.
The whole story is there, but not necessarily the details. The key thing was that I had my lead to the bond statement: USH sold bonds through the Chester County Industrial Development Corporation (CCIDC). I was familiar with these IDCs from my work on charter school finance. They're a go-to for financing neoliberal projects, particularly ones with complex juridical statuses where market entities set up like colonies within social-democratic ones.
So I went to my favorite search engine, the Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) and found the CCIDC's bond statements going back to 2005 (they didn't have the 2003 bonds). I opened the most recent statement from 2015 and right there, a few pages in, my jaw dropped: In 2013, the university penned a cooperation agreement with USH that, among other things, stipulated that WCU would "limit the use and growth" of the public dorms, so that demand for housing would increase and justify increased supply of private housing.
The University agrees that, upon completion of the 2013 Student Housing Facilities, it will reduce by approximately 393 the number of beds then available for service in University owned student housing facilities. Furthermore, the University agrees that upon completion of a Subsequent Phase, it will further reduce the number of available beds by approximately the number of beds made available in such Subsequent Phase so that the total number of available on-campus beds does not exceed 5,835.
The cooperation agreement even stipulates specific numbers of public beds that would be limited, and gives monopoly power to USH:
The University will not (a) undertake to construct, own, or operate any additional new on-campus or off campus housing, (b) maintain or reinstate available beds otherwise required to be reduced pursuant to Section 3(a) above, or (c) provide significant financial support for housing owned by an entity other than the Borrower
In an earlier statement from 2013, I found even starker language, talking explicitly of demolishing public dorms: "The University has covenanted and agreed that upon the completion of the Student Housing Facility, it shall take off-line or demolish, at its election, 393 existing beds…”
The bottom line is that there's was a planned scarcity of affordable student housing, an agreement written into the financial bones of new dorm construction on campus that the stock would tend towards the more expensive, privately-operated dorms. I wrote a thread about on twitter as soon as I could, and it made its way around somewhat. (Organizers in Seattle reached out to share information about their similar struggle.)
This neoliberal logic snakes its way through the ongoing financial processes of the university: WCU provides semi-private housing at double the cost through the LLC subsidiary of its nonprofit foundation. That means USH's revenues are tax exempt under nonprofit law and go back into the university's coffers. Students pay more for housing, the university makes more tax free money, and plows that money into...what?
You might argue that the money goes to programs for students, but how can you justify it that way if you're hurting your own students in the process? The scheme violates the university's mission of providing public education. It is in direct contradiction to the institutions' goal of ensuring student success and excellence. How can students succeed if they're homeless?
Of course this situation is a paradigm case of neoliberal capitalism, but I don't make that argument for its own sake. Neoliberal capitalism hurts people. It makes students homeless. It corrodes the very purpose of the public institutions whose leaders willingly and greedily enter into these financial arrangements, rationalizing them as being for students' and faculty benefit but ultimately hurt them.
It was a response from a colleague on twitter that pointed out the Wayne Hall connection to me. I hadn't realized that my office--the weirdness of its being a dorm--was a manifestation of the neoliberal dialectic taking hold in WCU student housing, leading to the tensions and actions we saw last week. Solidarity with the students and anyone pushing back against the dark consequences of neoliberal finance!