UC Santa Cruz: The Case For the Meadow

by East Meadow Action Committee

Mon, Mar 19, 2018 4:10PM

The East Meadow Action Committee (EMAC) is a group of University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) faculty, students, alumni, staff, and concerned community members. We have joined together in an effort to prevent development on one of the campus's most important scenic landmarks, the East Meadow, north and east of the intersection of Hagar and Coolidge Drive on the UCSC campus.

The open meadows are central to UCSC’s world-renowned design aesthetic. This proposal overturns a fifty-year tradition of environmentally-conscious planning. We support more, better, and more affordable student housing and improved childcare facilities on campus. There are other places to build them that do not overturn UCSC’s proudest traditions.

Sign the petition!
#savethemeadow
https://www.eastmeadowaction.org/petition/

original image (1280x960)

Once gone, the meadow is gone forever.

A GREAT CAMPUS THREATENED

Our university among the redwoods, overlooking rolling pastures and the Monterey Bay, is a wonder of the world. Nowhere else has an institution of this size been built in an existing forest, on such rugged terrain, while preserving the fundamental feeling of the site. UCSC’s uniqueness is not just its spectacular visual beauty, but more profoundly its tradition of careful environmental planning, sensitive to trees, land, and vistas, an achievement recognized by landscape designers and planners around the world.

A fast-moving current project, “Student Housing West,” is a radical break with this tradition. Last Fall, with little public awareness and no debate, a plan to create 3000 new beds on the West side of campus spilled over into the East Meadow. Rigid growth targets from the U.C. central administration and new environmental restrictions have put pressure on the project’s footprint. To gain space, the Family Student Housing complex, with an expanded campus daycare center, is being relocated to the open meadow adjacent to Hagar and Coolidge Drives.

No one doubts the need to house more students on campus. Quality family housing and expanded childcare are also absolutely essential. What needs to be questioned is the hasty decision to occupy this very special site without time to seriously consider alternatives and without transparent public communication.

Everyone who drives onto campus knows the place. It is the first view of the meadows, gently sloping under a dramatic sky with glimpses of a university in the distant tree line. If the current plan proceeds, this gateway experience will be destroyed. It will be replaced by forty two-story units (each containing four family apartments}, accompanied by a daycare building, extensive parking, support structures and access roads. A large spillover from a West Campus project looking for a relatively inexpensive place to build will now despoil the East Meadow.

In contrast to the careful, environmentally-sensitive tradition that has guided UCSC since its founding, architectural planning for this project did not begin with the site in mind or proceed deliberately. Nearby Ranch View Terrace, a large housing complex set back from the road and mitigated by vegetation and topography offers an example of how to build responsibly. The sudden appearance in the East Meadow of this new project leaves many important questions unanswered: were any serious alternatives considered? And why the unseemly rush? Why a single massive complex? Could the West Campus project be scaled back to allow Family Student Housing to remain near its present location? Why do the new student beds on campus need to be crowded into a single place? (Plans currently call for nine-story residence halls, blatantly out of scale with the rest of campus.)

The East Meadow housing project, being driven forward aggressively, is the first serious encroachment on the open meadows in fifty years of campus development. Careless and heavy-handed, it should be resisted, not in the name of traditionalist nostalgia or opposition to change, but to carry on the best traditions of UCSC planning and building.

Bad Aesthetics.

Aesthetics here is not about beauty in a post-card sense. It’s about maintaining harmony and appropriate scale with the surroundings. This project will never “fit” in the meadow. What makes UCSC distinctive will be degraded, with incalculable long-term costs to our reputation and appeal. The clustered buildings will effectively block the East Meadow view. No scattering of planted trees can mitigate the impact. Current architectural plans show a densely packed, inward looking ensemble. Parking (at least 250 places for 140 families and the Childcare Center) will be scattered throughout the grounds and around the perimeter. Balconies, stairs, and variegated facades all face inward. From the roadways, the backs of structures and parking will be seen. This is hardly the best way to welcome people to campus. And, of course, the nearby intersection of Hagar and Coolidge, already clogged at times, will only get worse.

Bad planning.

Our widely recognized campus environmental design tradition is currently being overturned. The position of Campus Architect no longer exists. The design staff have played a marginal role in the East Meadow site selection, and the developer an unusually large one. The normal process of first selecting an appropriate site with a project in mind and then looking for an architect/builder has been reversed. The Design Advisory Committee, a long-established body of distinguished architects who advise on planning decisions, was consulted on the East campus site only two weeks ago, fully 3 months after the decision had been made. (We await publication of their reaction, which we understand raises serious objections.)

Bad Process.

The decision to move into the meadow was made over a two-month period last September-October, under pressure. There was no time for, and apparently no interest in, seriously exploring alternatives. Most disturbing, the public notifications of the move have been consistently minimal and misleading. The first public hint of the changed plans, on Oct.31, one day before scheduled community meetings, merely noted a “revised approach to siting” with no further details. The general rubric of this and all subsequent communications has been “Student Housing West”--the words “East” and ”meadow” always avoided. A week later, announcing a public meeting on Nov. 29th (the final day of the comment period) a web announcement still said nothing about any move to the East campus but provided a link to a complex technical document in which one short paragraph identified the new site. Thus, notice had been given, but only the most patient and savvy members of the public would dig deep to discover the most important alteration of the campus in decades. It was not until March 6th that a clear description, and image, of the site finally appeared in the campus newsletter. For everyone other than members of certain “stakeholder” groups, the project has been effectively hidden.

Conclusion: We must provide more campus housing for students, honoring the 2008 compact with the City. Quality childcare is a priority, as is Family Student Housing. But there are certainly other ways to achieve these goals. If it is claimed that this is the only possible solution, we need to say, “not so fast.” For 50 years, campus planners have inventively found ways to grow without wrecking a unique environment. Acting with judiciousness and care we can sustain the traditions of stewardship that have made UCSC famous.

Once gone, the meadow is gone forever.

EMAC (The East Meadow Action Committee)

For updated information and to add your support: eastmeadowaction@gmail.com

3/12/18

For more information: https://www.eastmeadowaction.org/

§Assault on the East Meadow: How We Got Here

by East Meadow Action Committee

Mon, Mar 19, 2018 4:16PM

First of all, much of the history of the campus is the history of the continual weakening of the planning and architecture functions, to the point where campus employees in those functions have no power and very little input. Within the administration the most out-front advocates for this project are those with no professional background in planning or design and who have no long history with UCSC and therefore no great understanding of its uniqueness and its values.

In the UC system on-campus housing has traditionally been funded completely separately from the university’s general budget. The State issues bonds specifically for university housing, then each of the campuses try to get a portion of the funds raised by those bond issues to build on-campus housing. The problem is that recently the bond funds available have nearly dried up, and UCSC is under pressure from the system President (UCOP), as well as from the City of Santa Cruz and the students themselves, to provide more housing.

At the same time the Regents and UCOP have pushed the idea of public-private partnership (aka P3) as a way to do a lot of building when you don’t have money. The idea is that you bring in a private developer who finances the construction and then is in effect the landlord of that building for the next 30 or 40 years, charges and reaps the rents, is in charge of the maintenance, and of course makes a profit. At the end of that time the university gets the building back (or whatever is left of it) and becomes its owner.

The Regents have made an initial amount of P3 housing available system-wide on a hurry-up basis, telling campuses they should compete on the basis of being ready-to-go, in particular by already having a site lined up. UCSC jumped at the chance of solving its housing problem and claimed to have a site all lined up. They got the go-ahead to proceed with 3000 beds worth of housing, but then were up against the fact that they really didn’t have a site completely lined up.

What followed was a highly secretive and highly rushed process to try to launch this project before anyone really had a chance to understand the significance of all this. They wanted as few other people looking over their shoulders as possible.

The first notion was to put it just west of Porter College, just off of Heller Drive, and they gave the overall project the name Student Housing West. But then there were sensitive species/habitat issues there, flagged by California Fish and Wildlife, so they shifted the site slightly south, and just west of Rachel Carson College, where Family Student Housing is now. That meant they would raze Family Student Housing (relatively low density housing) and put up mammoth buildings, up to 90 ft tall, with 3000 beds. That in turn meant they needed to find a new place to put Family Student Housing – no problem, the private developer was willing to do that too – bigger project equals more profit.

But a private developer needs to make the profit part of this pencil out, and among other things that means avoiding large infrastructure costs. So he wants sites near an existing road, near existing utilities, and on land as close as possible to level. It’s all about keeping his costs down, and not at all about the campus’s more than 50-year commitment not to build in the big meadow. What is key to understand here is, when it came to finding a new site for Family Student Housing, the private developer was driving the site decision, not the planning professionals on the UCSC staff.

So the private developer looked around for where to put the Family Student Housing, and he saw bare flat land right next to a road at the base of the East Meadow. Bingo. He found what looked like the lowest cost place to build. It was the private developer who first picked the East Meadow location for Family Student Housing. Suddenly the Student Housing West project was going to build on not only the west side of the campus but also on its southeast side.

This happened around late October, and things were moving fast. UCSC put out a hasty and vague document, buried in which is a vague reference to the possibility of a Hagar site. We now know that what that actually referred to was a hasty but hidden plan for the private developer to build not only a replacement Family Student Housing but also a much-needed child care facility, which would also be run by an outside corporation (which causes concerns about cost and quality for a number of parents) -- all of this in the East Meadow.

There were alternative sites on campus for this portion of the overall project, all of them less obtrusive, but in haste they were never given serious consideration. By January 26, all of the Schematic Design for the East Meadow project was completed, 140 units in a lot of quick two-story buildings packed over 16 acres, requiring a considerable amount of earth-moving to level the site. Prominent near the entrance to the campus, at Heller and Coolidge, these buildings will sit up on an earthen embankment as high as 12 ft and be another 20-some feet on top of that. Yet the completed Schematic Design was not released to the public.

Only in early March did the administration start becoming a little more candid about what they were doing. And they will now try to ram it through as quickly as possible, before the opposition they know will come has a chance to get organized. Their plan is race through the environmental review and break ground in the meadow this summer.

We need to keep in mind that the existing student population needs more on-campus housing and needs a child care facility with that housing. The issue here is how the administration has gone about trying to meet those real needs. The haste, the secrecy, the over-reliance on a private corporate developer who is not familiar with what makes UCSC special, and the management of that private corporate developer by a few administrators who seem to have no more understanding of what makes UCSC special than does the developer, and who largely leave the developer to his own devices – these are the issues that have led to a really bad decision to put a major development in the East Meadow. There are other sites that would be less controversial and more in keeping with the UCSC tradition of how to site buildings on our unique campus.

-- Paul Schoellhamer

Cowell College, Class of 1969

Mr. Schoellhamer served for many years on the Democratic staff of the US House of Representatives, specializing in transportation, environmental, and building issues, including serving as Chief of Staff of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

§Why the Meadows Matter

by East Meadow Action Committee

Mon, Mar 19, 2018 4:17PM

The Founding Principles of the UCSC Campus

The founding principles of campus planning and design were laid out by a group of talented and eminent architects of their era, foremost among them John Carl Warneke, Theodore Bernardi, and the great landscape architect Thomas Church. At the behest of the Regents that group put together the first Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) for the University in 1963, two years before the campus opened to its first students.

While any such plan must balance many competing imperatives, they made clear their commitment to open space in general and to the large meadows in the southern part of the campus in particular.

In their opening list of basic principles they declared “Open spaces will be retained, and handled as wilderness, park, scenic and buffer areas.”

But the radical core of their work was that they overturned the earliest assumptions about development of the campus – that development would be focused in the open meadows of the south part of the campus. They instead determined that development should be focused in the central part of the campus, the forested knolls and “at the meeting point of the forest and meadow,” as they put it.

Of the meadow land in the south part of the campus they had a specific observation: “…there is the advantage of the great meadow rolling away toward the south of the campus center. If the University maintains this space as an open area, by the year 1990 it may well be one of the most rare, gratifying, and valuable assets of the campus.”

The University did, and it is.

These distinguished architects anticipated the very direct benefits of open space to campus life and study. The very first of their “landscape policies” was: “To maintain wilderness areas, where the present condition will remain as source of enjoyment and inspiration to students and faculty (with important use in the study of Botany, Natural History, and the Earth Sciences).”

But it is the Landscape Architecture section of their report that most directly reflects the views of the great Thomas Church, as the landscape architect of the group. And those views are clearly stated: “…the landscape design of the campus is inextricably related to the siting of buildings and the design of road systems. The major decision with regard to the siting [is] that the great meadow to the south of the campus should not be built upon, that the first buildings encountered in entering the site would be at the crest of the hill where the trees begin…”

That’s pretty clear.

And it has been campus policy ever since. The most recent and still current LRDP (2005) carries on that tradition: “The meadows south of the developed center of the campus will be maintained as undisturbed grassland. In these meadows no building will be allowed. Agricultural research that maintains the visual quality of the lower meadows may be allowed.”

The result has been open vistas that delight those who work, study, and visit here, and which have become a core part of the UCSC identity and of what makes UCSC special. The question now is, why would we throw all that away, especially when there are alternative locations for development?

§Sign the petition! #savethemeadow

by East Meadow Action Committee

Mon, Mar 19, 2018 4:18PM

We call upon Chancellor George Blumenthal and Executive Vice Chancellor Marlene Tromp to immediately halt plans to develop the East Meadow. The UCSC campus is world-renowned for its careful, environmental planning. Its stunning beauty, in harmony with forest, meadows, vistas, and canyons, is the campus’s most distinctive feature. All of that, and over fifty years of careful stewardship, is now under threat from a plan that was hastily conceived and abruptly adopted with little consultation. We support more student housing and improved childcare facilities on campus. There are other places to build them that do not overturn UCSC’s proudest traditions.

--

Sign the petition!
#savethemeadow
https://www.eastmeadowaction.org/petition/

§Before

by East Meadow Action Committee

Sun, Mar 25, 2018 6:36PM