Chancellor Yang Stays Silent on UCSB Housing Nightmare

THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM: It’s not business. It’s personal. That’s my reaction to UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang’s relentless, deafening silence on the housing crisis that his five-star rocket ship of a campus has made infinitely worse.

It’s personal because I have loved ones who dwell in the shadow of UCSB. They live in constant fear that their apartment complex — affordable for now — will be sold to some hedge-fund investors who have an acronym, not a name. Soon thereafter, they will be forced out of town by the cruel but catchy phrase known as “renoviction.”

Yes, the City of Goleta needs to write an emergency just-cause eviction ordinance. And immediately. But these only delay the inevitable and soften the blow.

Henry Yang should have taken serious steps to start building 5,000 new units of student housing back in 2010. That’s when he and his university signed a binding agreement with the community committing to do exactly that. 

To say Henry fiddled as Rome has burned gives him and his administration — larded with an abundance of talented, big-brained administrators who should have known better — too much credit.

Instead of planning for housing that could actually get built — a cluster here, a cluster there, all strewn strategically throughout UCSB’s vast land holdings — Henry set his stars on an 11-story wet dream conjured by Charlie Munger, multi-gazillionaire and massively generous benefactor to UCSB. 

In a sad, pathological, codependent relationship, Yang became Munger’s enabler in exchange for the $200 million Munger reportedly promised — though never in writing — to finance his $1.4 billion, 4,500-bed, window-free dorm project.

Munger, for all his vast wealth and formidable intelligence, apparently never sought treatment for his raging case of what psychiatrists call his Edifice Complex. The über-rich — like those who find themselves living on the streets — are known to be “service-resistant.”

I mention all this now because the Munger project — Dormzilla, as my colleague Tyler Hayden christened it — is now officially dead. It’s worth noting that Henry Yang never saw fit to announce Dormzilla’s demise. In fact, Yang never once saw fit to issue a single public utterance on the subject — not one — to the community he lives in. 

He and Munger did crash a Board of Regents’ meeting way back in 2016 to announce the $200 million gift. Munger, being candid in the way people who don’t have to give a shit often are, told the Regents there was “one huge catch” with the deal. His 11-story building would have no windows. But that wouldn’t matter, he assured them, because artificial light portals would provide what families experience on Disney cruise ships where “starfish come in and wink at your children.” Munger would go on to boast, “Our design is clever.”

But he may as well have said, “too clever by half,” as the uproar over his window-free dorm rooms proved. The architects who worked on Dormzilla hated it. The Academic Senate hated it. The County Fire Marshal hated it. The Federal Aviation Authority hated it. And they all outdid one another in their withering vituperation. 

Munger has talked about “the Psychology of Human Misjudgement” and what he calls the “Lollapalooza Effect,” to describe the bad decisions of others. Lollapaloozas are triggered when a handful of delusions compound each other. Munger, ever outspoken and irascible on Dormzilla, has never acknowledged he might have Lollapaloozed himself. But he sure lollapaloozed Henry Yang, whose legacy will be sadly defined by this utterly self-inflicted fiasco. 

This is all doubly sad since Chancellor Yang took UCSB from good to great. He also holds the distinction of having been the longest-serving chancellor in the history of the UC system, having edged out UCLA’s legendary Charles Young, who retired in 1997 after almost 29 years at the helm. Henry, who turns 84 in two weeks, surpassed the 29-year marker this year. 

We all should be cutting cake, wearing party hats, and drinking warm champagne, toasting these achievements. But what about that 2010 agreement to build 5,000 units of student housing by 2025 or whenever enrollments exceeded 25,000? Yang is still 3,500 units short. 

Only by resorting to the sort of accounting magic that got Donald Trump indicted has Yang been able to maintain the fiction that UCSB has not exceeded 25,000 students. The City of Goleta sued Henry. The County of Santa Barbara sued Henry. No settlements have been announced. 

Dormzilla, it turns out, was never so much a credible wet dream as it’s been a pipe dream. Henry — for reasons we will never know because Henry doesn’t talk — had no Plan B. But in the end, sometime late this August, UCSB sent out a request for qualifications from high-end institutional architectural firms to devise plans to build 3,500 units of student housing in clusters throughout the campus.

Henry, naturally, has not made himself available to acknowledge the moment. He never made himself available to defend Dormzilla, or even to explain it. In the meantime, however, the growth of UCSB — in so many ways a boon to the economy and culture of the South Coast — has fueled the astronomical increase in housing prices. 

Rents have skyrocketed. Outdoor broom closets now go for $1,000 a month. If I’m exaggerating, it’s not by much. Predatory speculators have discovered student housing with the amoral vengeance of those fixated on the bottom line.

In the meantime, the rent checks are in the mail. But so too are the eviction notices. 

Henry, you coulda been a contender. But when it comes to housing, you’ve been a bum.

Like I say, it’s not business. 

It’s personal.