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Comment by theroqwpeo | Hacker News Reader

Reviews of this residence: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...

Residents seem to like it overall but reading though them, most qualify them as "great except the rooms don't have windows".

It feels mean, for lack of a better word. Maybe particularly in Santa Barbara with its beautiful sunny days. There's something dystopian about putting young students in windowless rooms and figuring "they'll get used to it". Next step is to save money by getting rid of windows in apartments, office buildings, etc. and everyone will spend their day under artificial lighting. There will be social clubs for people who want to see the outside world once a week.

It's probably better in SB than just about anywhere else, since you can quite literally always just go outside. I think that's almost part of the "point" here. To try to demotivate students from sitting in their rooms. I don't like that approach at all, but I actually don't think windowless bedrooms are the worst thing in the world.

I had a windowless dorm room for a year in a very cold northeastern city where I couldn't realistically spend time outside for most of the year. It was attached to a windowed suite common room and I liked my roommates, so it was no big deal. I think I would have suffered a lot had I been a real social recluse, though.

Trying to demotivate students from sitting in their dorms by making it a sad cramped place doesn't seem to gel well with the modern idea of psychological safety helping people get more done and take more risks.

Its a stick instead of a carrot in your most personal place, your home.

Yeah strongly agree there.

Students seem to love it. It's a shame that this sole piece of actual data is buried so far down underneath piles of speculative naysaying.

Seems like they love it for the location, convenience and price. Not for the lack of windows. Granted, no windows are cheaper but still...

I don't think anybody is saying that the lack of windows is itself a good thing, even the "forced socializing" line of reasoning clearly uses the lack of windows as a stick to get people out of their rooms. It's just an acceptable tradeoff for a sizable subset of students.

This is a graduate residence hall and graduate students tend to be a much higher mix of foreign students — looking at the reviews, many are praising that it’s pre-furnished and they didn’t need to do a whole lot to get set up. It’s also been my experience that foreign students (particularly from Asia) are just used to cramped, windowless accommodations like this for student housing so it’s not as dystopian-feeling to them.

Hard to believe that they didn't use this in their advertising copy

"Feels less dystopian than what you're used to"

Are the ratings reliable?

Most of the 9 or 10 star reviews say the lack of windows is a problem, yet still give 9 or 10.

There are very few low ratings. A 1, a 5, a 6, the rest 7+.

Note that many of the positive reviews are from pre-covid times and the two that coincide with the pandemic note how ill suited it is to such conditions.

I agree, but I'd also challenge that we shouldn't be designing our permanent, 100+ year structures around pandemics.

Well….designing a building to be good for pandemics also means making it be good for respiratory viruses in general.

You do, in fact, want to have 100 year water systems that would work in a cholera epidemic. Designing buildings for good airflow will probably not go out of style either.

The reason old NYC buildings have radiators that are so hot, you need to open a window to let in the winter air, is because they were purposely designed that way. Because of the 1918 flu pandemic.[0]

Also, there are a bunch of things that we consider normal that were born of crisis: [1]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio...

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/war-famine-pestilence...

I'll wait for the medical profession to tell me the cure for a major ailment is a windowless, tightly enclosed space with limited circulation.

Has the medical profession told you that your current housing situation cures a major ailment?

Yes. Homelessness. It's a bit of a barely worth saying, but it's there.

It can help against radiation sickness (with thick enough walls providing shielding) or possibly agains drowning or vacuum exposure (if sufficiently pressure tight). ;-)

I view it as exactly the other way around: if you're building barracks in any normal year, sure, don't care about pandemics.

But for any long-lived building, thinking how it will work in various disaster scenarios is crucial, as your design will affect the life or death of thousands living there, even if it's "just" for one-two years. And given everything we know about the recurrence of pandemics, it's virtually certain that at least another one will come around within 100 years.

A lot of those reviews seem to be posted in late November 2019. Seems suspicious to me. Granted, I'd probably be fine living there.

Thanks, it seems very well liked.

Not really - looking through the reviews, it's cheap and newly furnished, but almost everyone is concerned about the windows (even those who say they personally don't mind it seem to be well enough aware that it's a problem).

Wow, did not expect those to come in at an 8.8.

Interesting, most reviews are fine with it.

I had the same initial reaction as most here when reading the article. This data has caused me to think more critically about the concept, thank you.

A lot of the reviews amount to "well at least it's cheap" which is not really a ringing endorsement. When you build living spaces that are terrible to live in, they become inexpensive relative to the horror that is the current rental market.

But that seems like a bad solution to rent inflation.

Well, if they are better considering the cost, then they are better considering the cost...

Maybe someone else can design a building that has similarly good/better reviews and gives students windows. But to just assume that there are unproven better cost/benefit options at the needed scale... Well, does not seem justifiable either

Surprisingly positive reviews.

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