UCI On-Campus Housing Problems

The resident councils of the Graduate and Family housing communities at UCI, Palo Verde and Verano, have created a website where residents of both communities can keep themselves informed about the current affairs in their communities.
While each community obviously has concerns specific to the particular community, there are lots of issues, e.g., Resnet mismanagement, Length of stay, affordability, etc. that affect both communities. Bundling the resources gives these issues better visibility and promises a more effective and more powerful representation of residents concerned about these issues.

In their infinite wisdom (NOT), the UCI Housing Administration has decided to move 89 undergraduates (plus 1 Resident's Assistant, who also is an undergrad) into Palo Verde Graduate and Family housing.
Not surprisingly, they didn't tell the Palo Verde residents. Only after one Palo Verde resident overheard mentioning of the imminent move-in, did the UCI Housing Administration ask for an "emergency meeting" with the Palo Verde Residents Council (PVRC).
They claimed that the failure to communicate this significant development was simply an oversight. Never mind that they meet with members of the PVRC and other PV residents nearly daily...
There have already be noise complaints yesterday, even though most of the undergraduates only moved in today.
The Palo Verde Residents Council has distributed a flyer to all PV residents, informing them about this issue. It is sad that the PVRC has to do the work of informing the residents that the UCI Housing Administration should have been doing. The flyer is also available on the PVRC website.

Over the last month or so, the Housing administration has come up with a couple of scenarios to find out if and how they can fulfill the looming On-Campus housing term limits.
They don't like to discuss the fact that the term limits are a bad idea in the first place, because they are detrimental to attracting new students to UCI. Essentially, the housing administration sees itself more as the messenger squeezed in the middle, and they have a point. The university administration is pushing for guaranteed housing because large admission numbers look good...
That people would have to drop out a couple years later because they can't afford to live off-campus doesn't show up in the ranking numbers.
Anyway, the housing administration basically got tasked by the UCI administration to come up with a plan to implement the term limits, not to discuss them.
And that's where their scenarios come in. They try to figure out the best (for whatever definition of 'best') way to make this term limit plan work.
I've scanned in the scenario pages I received at the Open Forum meetings with the Housing administration. I haven't been to all of these meetings, so there may be more (please let me know.)

So, without further ado, here are the scenarios:

Read more »

As I had mentioned here already, UCI wants to implement 3-year term limits for residents.
While people who moved into graduate housing before June 1, 2002 are exempt from this because of an agreement with the administration after the "tent city" protest in 2002, the situation is rather unclear for people who moved into on-campus housing after June 1, 2002.
Starting June 2004, the housing office added an additional one-page document to the rental contract that states that new tenants "may" be subject to 3-year term limits. Interestingly, though, at least until June 13, 2005, the websites for graduate housing stated:

Doctoral and Medical students:
...
The time limit will be established by the Graduate Council and
approved by the Dean of Graduate Studies, as either seven years or
normative time-to-degree.

So, nothing at all about 3 years.
Furthermore, on March 28, 2003, the UCI Housing office distributed a letter to all Palo Verde and Verano Place residents which also contained the exact same wording (see below.) The current try by the Housing administration to back out of that statement is worrysome. IANAL, but I think the letter and the website create a strong precedent.
The older versions of the Housing website are accessible through the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive last stored the website in October 2004. The Verano Place website is archived under http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://housing.uci.edu/vp/, the Palo Verde website is archived under http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://housing.uci.edu/pv/

Read more »

The shortage of affordable housing for UCI graduate students has long been known.
In the past, this has led to student protests, like the "tent city" in the central UCI park in 2002 (see here and here for accounts of the protests.)
For most graduate students, off-campus housing is not an option due to the exorbitant rent.

Recently, in an effort to grow the graduate admission numbers, the UCI Graduate Council has decided to offer every incoming PhD and MD graduate student on-campus housing.
While on the surface that looks like a generous offer, it in reality is very deceptive, due to the graduate housing shortage.
This offer would only work if students get thrown out of graduate on-campus housing after 3 years. The consequence would be that students who are in the middle of their dissertation research would instead have to scramble to find off-campus housing and, given the extremely high rents off-campus, may be forced to drop out of the graduate program due to unaffordability of off-campus housing.
The only real solution would of course be for UCI to build more graduate student housing, but that's not on the horizon for at least 2010.

Because of this practice of offering a deceptive deal to prospective incoming graduate students, UCI's reputation is already sinking. Students thinking of applying for graduate studies at UCI are well advised to take into consideration if they want to be affiliated with a university whose administration resorts to deceptive practices to "make the numbers."