Southern Universities Get Snow Day, Reddit Bans X, Good Ugly Dorms, & More

Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of Jan. 18 - Jan. 24.

Jan 24, 2025

Note: It was a busy week of news. I think things are finally settling in after the holiday break—I guess schools have now been starting the Spring semester. Things are also taking shape with the new Donald Trump administration coming in, which I am not going to cover here (there are plenty of other outlets for that).

I loved this illustration from DOOM LOOP, a cartoon series by Brett Hamil out of Seattle.

Dorm News

Universities in the South Cancel Class Due to Snow

Last week we had universities here in Southern California cancelling classes due to fires, this week we have universities in the South doing the same due to snow! Weather patterns have been truly turbulent recently. These are states that do not usually get snow, let alone more than a foot in some places. Here is a list of some universities that I found that canceled class due to the snow and ice:

Berkeley Opens Ugly Dorm to Honor Local Native American Group

I’m glad to see UC Berkeley getting some much-needed dorm space. The town of Berkeley is in a tough housing crisis and some students at the elite university face homelessness. These are even named in honor of the local Native American groups from the area: xučyun ruwway. Unfortunately, the dorms themselves are fairly ugly structures.

Exterior of the dorms via Bruce Damonte Photography.

There is some truth in that one reason people do not support these types of developments is because they look ugly (see the above cartoon). Yes, there will always be people complaining, but we don’t do ourselves any favors when the places we build also don’t look appealing. I guess I’m with the Statue Twitter accounts on this one. Granted the interior of the dorms does look nice—we have a modern inclination for function over form. Why not both?

Interior of the new dorms via UC Berkeley.

SDSU Plans for 7 More Tower Dorms

In more dorm news, San Diego State University (SDSU) is building seven new tower dorms around its campus. Much like its Northern California peer, San Diego has faced a housing crunch in recent years, with considerable pushback from locals on building student housing. So I am glad to see that these will finally be done. I don’t have an aesthetic judgment for these towers yet. If I had to guess, they will probably be spartan in form with good function, just like the ones reported in Berkeley.

“Controversial” Student Housing in U Kentucky

I don’t have much on this fairly typical story of a student housing project being built in a college town right near the college except that it’s ridiculous that this common practice would ever be labeled “controversial.” But as I have begun following this news week-to-week for these articles, I find the same exact story every week in a different college town. It really is quite frustrating to watch.

Can’t Scapegoat International Students For Housing Crisis

New research published in Higher Education shows that international students aren’t at fault for local housing crises. Guanglun Michael Mu and Hannah Soong of the University of South Australia used large-scale data of the rental market in Australia to understand how international students impacted prices. The authors concluded:

Overall, international student enrolment numbers do not statistically significantly predict the rental costs for residents in Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart, and Melbourne after controlling CPI for Rent and considering rental vacancy rate. This is also the case for Darwin, Perth, and Sydney pre-COVID, and for all capital cities after the COVID pandemic. At the national level, international students contributed negatively to the rental cost overall, pre- and after-COVID when the contributions of CPI for Rent and rental vacancy rate were controlled and considered.

I have long defended international students from being scapegoated, ignoring bad local policies chosen by locals. We can see those just by the protests to any housing built in every college town. I am glad to see scholars have illustrated the point empirically.

Tech and Urbanism

Reddit Sites Ban X and Other Links

There was a big push this week from subreddits across Reddit to ban links from X. I think it’s somewhat fair considering X’s deboosting of outside links, a tit-for-tat moment. I think more interesting is that some subreddits are going further by banning Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and RedNote links, too. This really is the long decline of our connected Internet: