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Discussed previously here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first mostly-windowless dorm he’s built. His previous work at UM has generally very good reviews and was built without much (if any) protest.

Michigan: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...

It sounds to me like the evidence so far is that Munger is correct, and on average people (or at least the kind of people that would sign up for res in a building like this) would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous one.

Edit: I previously mentioned the Stanford Munger Graduate Residence as well, but it appears that one is of more “traditional” layout (and is relatively expensive). Thanks dkarp for pointing this out. I've edited it out of my comment as to not mislead.

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> It sounds to me like Munger is correct, and on average people would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous ones.

There's something that feels off about this statement. It reads much like the articles that talk about how young millennials are "choosing" to live in pod houses/tiny homes when in reality they can't afford anything better. They are forced to live in these conditions which are then normalised by authors framing it as a free choice.

This isn’t the only residence on UM campus! The rest are “normal”. And what you said doesn’t align with the good reviews the pace gets, even compared to “normal” housing.

And to be honest, we’re always going to have to “force” people into some sort of living condition. There are more people than ever going to higher education, so people will have to accept either smaller living spaces, denser construction, higher costs, or longer commutes to school - space is (unfortunately) a rival good, and giving everybody a large dorm is likely not viable.

> articles that talk about how young millennials are "choosing" to live in pod houses/tiny homes when in reality they can't afford anything better. They are forced to live in these conditions

"conditions"? 1 in 20 UC students is homeless [1] and they want to a build a 5,000 single occupancy rooms for 1.5 Billion. But somehow everyone and their mother finds a reason to veto new development.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-02/what-crit...

I don't know US situation but this still seems expensive: 1.5Billion / 5000 == 300k USD per person. I understand the whole building provide also different kind of space but it still feels too expensive to build.

I don't why they cannot build simply longer buildings with each room having a window instead of big square one with most rooms not having window at all? Both such buildings would occupy the same amount of squares per meter.

A decade ago I was exchange student in Umea, Sweden and dorms were really good. In every corridor there where 8 rooms. Everyone had their own room + own small bathroom. Room was like 3x size of those in the article. Corridor had big shared kitchen and living room. Rent per month was like 450 euro. Campus was really big - it was basically a student city so there was a space for everyone. Those buildings were just simply longer. Building student campuses/universities outside of big cities also helped.

> I don't know US situation but this still seems expensive

It is expensive.

> I don't why they cannot build simply longer buildings

It's not simple. They have to deal with zoning laws, land owned/available to the university, costs (which you already think are too high) and maximizing occupancy etc, etc.

> Everyone had their own room + own small bathroom. Room was like 3x size

Sounds nice in Sweden... meanwhile in the UC system 1 in 20 students are homeless.

> 1.5Billion / 5000 == 300k USD per person

No, it's effectively 300k per room, not per person. This structure will be up for more than 1 semester and certainly up for more than than length of one person living in it.

That being said, I have no frame of reference for the cost of similar structures. It definitely sounds fairly expensive considering the size of the room + common area.

As I was reading the article, I started thinking this guy was right. At university, I would often have to get to a lab or whatever early in the morning and then get home late at night. I would have this sort of routine for weeks or months at a time. I may as well have had no windows.

I think as long as you get out during the day, and as a student, that’s probably likely, this sort of arrangement seems to make sense. But still offends me.

It's offensive because it's someone dictating how student's should live. It besmirches any goodwill from the original act of philanthropy.

Aren't the opponents equally dictating how student's should live?

Furthermore you are dismissing the fact that there still is a market, with choices.

I presume the "opponents" are the students themselves. They are the voice that matters I would imagine.

In essence, you could describe your stance as forcing all residents to pay a tax for a benefit that you deem is for their own good. In this case it’s windows, but would you support this stance for other reasons? What if it was that all rooms come with a large crucifix on the wall (wasting wall and floor space)?

Not at all. I'm calling philanthropy with strings attached barely philanthropy.

> dictating how

It's actually the opposite... It creates an option with different tradeoffs.

I’m sorry what? No matter what type of dorm that is built it’s dictating how students should live?!?

If it's the choice between this with no windows or one that's much further away or costs more, the choice isn't to do with the windows, but putting up with the lack of them.

It’s a public university, and in my opinion the public should decide what to build… not unelected, unaccountable twits with a lot of money.

> should decide

Everyone with their own money. The university with its own, the donors with their own.

Munger's contribution would be 13% of the projected cost. And a public university's money belongs to the public.

Of course. Your note does not seem consistent with the parent points. Different parties will propose conditional contribution. Those who do not agree with the project will retract the participation. The public does not decide on Munger's money, Munger will not decide over the public money.

The parent post makes no sense: Charlie Munger does not decide "what to build", he decides whether to participate.

> Charlie Munger does not decide "what to build", he decides whether to participate.

Sure, this is a convenient way to look at this particular situation. Yet I google "strings attached donation university" and see many instances of this crap: Koch brothers, John Allison, etc. It's serious enough that Harvard recently issued a "Gift Policy Guide" discourage strings-attached giving. Ironically, only the elite private universities have enough cachet to make such a policy stick.

And what alternative would you propose? Whatever I finance, I will have to approve. This is a pretty solid principle.

What other «way[s] to look at this» are there? Point of view or practical proposal, I do not get what are the other options.

Raising taxes, primarily. Or at least force donations to public institutions to be no-strings-attached. Many years ago when I attended UCSB and this project was in its infancy, someone told me that UCLA has a long-term development plan where large donors can choose from a menu of pre-planned projects. Not sure how true that it, but much better idea.

But my more extreme view is that individuals should not be able to amass so many resources to begin with. It's absurd.

The schools are entirely free to just reject the donation.

Can they? I have seen politicians cut budgets whenever they smelled blood in the water, even when the idea was completely harebrained^1 . Just the offer existing may interfere with a proper building funded through public means.

^1 For some time German universities had to require higher fees from students, officially to provide an improved learning experience. Seeing that universities now had an alternative income source some states cut public funding, they didn't care about the specifics, the courts did, some universities ended up not heating their buildings during winter because they couldn't legally touch the money.

What! Just for 13% of the contribution he is getting his name on the building and able to detect architecture!

You meant to say "dictate" architecture, right? Well, it serves the university right for not building a dorm that was 13% smaller or cheaper. They obviously had that choice and decided to go with the donation option instead.

There's more options for the students to live than this singular building.

There's nothing hindering students from renting an apartment, they don't have to use the 200$ million building.

Availability, cost. We live in a housing shortage and an era of housing exploitation.

I don't live in the US and don't know the local market, but a quick google says you need at least $2000 a month to get a basic apartment in Santa Barbara: https://www.apartments.com/santa-barbara-ca/. Who has that kind of money, especially combined with a full time education?

Your elitism is showing.

So instead of attempting to deliver cheaper dense housing for 5000 students close to campus, we should make a windowed one that houses 3000 and tell the other 2000 to go to Sacramento and start lobbying for new state laws? Or do we instead try to get solutions at multiple scopes and not let perfect be the enemy of good.

Well, in theory increased supply will lower the rents in the surrounding area.

No one will be forced to live there, but that location is a much better alternative than homeless or not.

There are actually many UCSB students living in hotels due to a severe housing shortage.

> There's nothing hindering students from renting an apartment

The ridiculous expense because of the acute housing shortage in SB. Which building the largest dorm in the country would help alleviate.

> they don't have to use the 200$ million building

1.5$ Billion Building

I remember the stress of worrying about rent pretty clearly, especially given my room was basically a sleeping and hygiene chamber that I hardly spent time in, but still had to have for those two critical functions.

> They are forced to live in these conditions

I agree that the choice between crippling rent rates and having no access to windows is not a good one, but it seems a function of where we are economically. Base rents everywhere I've ever lived are much higher compared to minimum wage than they've been for past generations.

> I agree that the choice between crippling rent rates and having no access to windows is not a good one, but it seems a function of where we are economically. Base rents everywhere I've ever lived are much higher compared to minimum wage than they've been for past generations.

They are absurdly high and I think the people who are put in that position are doing what they feel is in their best interest. What worries and frustrates me is that many publications/people seem to be seeking to normalise the situation we're in rather than thinking about how we could provide a better standard of living to people.

Because people don’t really see opportunity costs, and say everyone should get a large private room with a window.

In reality half the people get a massive debt burden and the other half live off-campus, but the complainers don’t really see that part.

See also: people who are vehemently opposed to building more density, because a detached house with a large yard is better for mental health

i see your point, minimum size rules for appartents in Ireland cause similar issues.

But I draw the line at windows. They are a basic human necessity and a fire hazard mitigation. I stayed in a hostel underground once in Liverpool, and it was aweful... I was not rich at college and shared crappy houses all the while, but I would not take this up under any circumstances.

Based on the stats, you're probably underweighting the damage of very high debt levels and overweighting the importance of windows. Although there are serious questions to ask about the ventilation of these rooms - as long as they've got satisfactory answers it looks like a good idea.

The options can't be perfect or nothing. The options should be perfect, good and bad.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that windows and manageable debt levels can coexist.

This design isn't because students can't afford buildings with windows, it's because a billionaire has a fantasy that it's the optimal design for such a building, thinks architects who disagree are "ignorant", and is making his donation contingent on it.

An ignorant and devious billionaire plot to deprive us of our hard earned right to a window is the most entertaining thought I've had all week.

You have to admit that there is at least a chance that this is a good idea and Mr Munger has good advice on the subject? It isn't like the students are confined to their cell, they just need to sleep there. A lot of them may not consider a window important, particularly in the face of saving some money.

I think there's at least a chance the people opposing this also know what they're talking about (as indeed do the Building Regulations people in my country, where this design wouldn't be legal to let as accommodation). If Munger's had good advice on this it's not exactly coming across in his interview.

If your country has banned designs with no windows you're talking to a badly skewed sample of people experts. Obviously nobody would be able to figure out if the idea work well, since it is banned.

Months can go by without me raising the blind in my bedroom. While I certainly want a window there, I don't think it is essential.

You've gone from suggesting I'm possibly underestimating the quality of advice Munger receives to insisting that literally every construction professional in the UK (as well as all the critical experts in California) must know less than him about the habitability and safety of buildings because having banned certain designs, they can't possibly understand the reasoning behind their regulations. Wow, and I thought Elon Musk was Peak Contrarian Billionaire Worship.

> ...that literally every construction professional in the UK (as well as all the critical experts in California) must know less than him about the habitability and safety of buildings...

Not every one. But it does seem likely that Munger has access to people with more experience building windowless bedrooms than anyone in the UK. I've heard from a source on the internet that it would be illegal to have such experience in the UK, so I doubt anyone does.

It is a trivially obvious one. You won't have people with experience in a technique available if it has been banned. It is a safe guess that the US architects will be better at this than UK ones.

You will also find more experts in the practicalities of employing children where child labour is legal (or at least de facto tolerated). This doesn't mean that a billionaire who insist that everyone who objects to him hiring children to work in his factories is ignorant is correct, and the experts who think it's a bad idea just haven't employed enough children to know anything about the consequences.

Permanent accommodation which is multiple doors away from the nearest natural light source, relies on artificial means to circulate air and has a distinct lack of exits might find a few more supporters than child labour, but funnily enough the laws ended up in place for similar reasons. We saw what happened when we assumed that people must know best because they were rich enough to pay people to agree with them (and others were too poor and uninformed to have much choice)

What is trivially obvious is that you won't have a building design with windows in bedrooms if the person funding the design makes funding contingent on the building not having windows in bedrooms, as Munger states he's doing. In all probability the experts hadn't built masses of windowless cells backing onto windowless kitchens connected via windowless corridors to the outside world before (the reason the design is controversial, after all, is that its not exactly standard building practice in the US either) and probably had plenty of ideas on how to maximise floorplan whilst guaranteeing natural light to inhabited spaces, but they detailed this design because the person cutting the cheques told them to. Your implicit argument that a design constraint imposed by the ego of a billionaire design dilettante is likely to yield better advice than a design constraint imposed by regulators based on decades of built environment research is far from trivially obvious...

And if Munger had some insight the regulators missed, it's not exactly evident from the bizarre set of contradictions he offers up in the interview..

> where this design wouldn't be legal

Can you demonstrate that this is true. AFAIK UK regulations consider fire-safety, and they have nothing to do with banning windowless-rooms outright.

> The options should be perfect, good and bad.

Certainly. The problem comes when you present something that is bad as something that is good or perfect.

Looking at pictures online, the Stanford one seems to have windows.

The Michigan one doesn't have windows in the bedroom, but does have windows in the apartment (shared kitchen/living room of 7 bedrooms, i.e., common area.).[1][2]

The 3d render of the apartment in this article doesn't have any windows at all, anywhere! The windows in common areas they seem to be talking about are study spaces outside the apartment.

[1] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iRaug6kB14 [2] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtkALW6Q2_A

OK, I found an article with a floorplan[1]. This thing is not at all comparable to the Michigan dorms. Recall, in the Michigan dorms you have an apartment housing 7 people with a spacious, well-lit living room (6 windows, but the count isn't important.) Sure, you don't have a window in your bedroom, and that sucks, but to see the sun you just go through that one door.

But in this proposed building? Look at that insane floor plan[2]! It looks like a maze! If you're in one of those inner rooms, you exit your bedroom (no windows) into your apartment's common area (no windows), exit that to a long corridor that eventually leads to your "House's" common area, which finally has windows. But is the opposite way from the building's exit.

Yeah this thing is insane.

[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/02/architect-resigns-grotesqu... [2] https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2021/11/munger-hall-univer...

It's downright evil.

The Michigan building houses just 630 graduate students who chose to live there. Over 98% of students live elsewhere. How does that show most people prefer it?

The bedrooms are much larger. They have individual bathrooms. And a number of reviews said at least the suites have windows. UCSB's wouldn't.

> or at least the kind of people that would sign up for res in a building like this

You added this later. It's tautological. And often undergraduate students don't get to choose their building.

Just looking at the Stanford residence and it seems to have incredibly bright windowed rooms (maybe they're not showing the windowless ones?)[0]

[0] https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/munger-graduate-resi...

Yeah, IIRC I lived in (that) Munger for a year, and had a large, windowed bedroom and bathroom to myself. My 3 roommates had the same, and we shared a living room and kitchen. Not really anything like this new building.

Looks like you’re right! My bad. The Michigan one definitely doesn’t have a window in every room though.

But they have windows in every apartment, and the UCSB dorm does not.

No worries, it's interesting how incredibly bright these rooms are. The windows are unusually large.

Maybe Munger didn't have much input there.

[edit] downvoter is maybe unaware that I'm referring to the Stanford Munger building and not the proposed windowless building

Stanford students get windows. Cal students don't. :P

>I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous ones.

Nobody heard about the building in Michigan, so nobody talked about it. Also, in Ann Arbor it's very likely that the CoL is not so high that students are de facto forced to tolerate these conditions.

It's not really Munger who's the villain here, he instead plays the role of an enabler. There's no inherent reason that housing costs should be so high that students have to live in these awful boxes, it's because of the policies chosen by the City of Santa Barbara. For context, the population density in SB is about a quarter of that in SF.

What's outrageous is that students pay the price in mental health and fire safety for housing policy that benefits the well-off and well-connected seeking aesthetics and investment returns. What motivates people to comment is the implied risk of this callous abuse of construction restrictions ("zoning") being extended to other vulnerable populations.

> I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous ones.

Looking at the layout it is positively dystopian.

People will say they feel a private room is better, but that’s no guarantee that it actually is.

Conversely, we have a lot of research showing that natural light brings all kind of benefits.

If anyone is bored at work, here's a long discussion podcast that dives pretty deep into the architecture of Munger Hall (unloving dubbed 'the Cube' by locals):

https://youtu.be/4grR3qoSV90

As a point of reference, many hotels in China have windowless rooms. I wouldn't want to live in one, but, for a short stay I actually preferred it. There was much less noise in these "internal rooms". Normal rooms usually get a lot of street noise.

True, but you need the air inflow, and no windows suggests forced ventilation, which is still noise pollution (to my experience it can be very noisy, owing to both fans and engines).

Thanks for the alternate view.

My initial reaction was to react against a windowless dorm room layout. But you make some good points.

What I still don’t get is why insist on such few egress paths and emergency exits?

Do you know if they are piping in some natural sunlight to the interior?

Just feels like its presented as undergraduate accommodation comes with either a shared room or a window. which is complete BS. I don't think this would even be allowed to be built in a lot of Europe.

Munger is one of the most expensive residence halls at Stanford. The rooms are quite spacious compared to EV and Rains, and all the finishes are much nicer.

In addition to the caveats in your edit, the scale is also different. The new proposal is several times larger by interior square footage

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