Long before this year’s public furor over UCSB’s proposed mega-dorm and Goleta’s lawsuit over the school’s apparent non-compliance with its 2010 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), 3rd District Supervisor Joan Hartmann and District Representative Gina Fischer sensed a problem. In order to meet its LRDP obligations, UCSB needed to build an additional 5,000 beds by 2025 while capping average on-campus enrollment at 25,000 students. By 2017, with enrollment already probing the limit, the university had only completed apartments to house 1,515 additional students. But in communications with Hartmann, Fischer, and other stakeholders like Sustainable University Now (SUN), a community coalition, UCSB officials made assurances that deliverance was coming in the form of a dormitory, which came to be known as Munger Hall.
Those assurances did not have the intended effect. One of the problems, Fischer said, was UCSB’s reticence about its specific plans, leaving stakeholders with little warning of Munger Hall’s most controversial features. “In the last two to three years that the county has been meeting with UCSB, we have always asked for them to provide details such as a firm timeline for building Munger Hall. Nevertheless, we were given only a vague idea about what was happening until the middle of [July 2021].” That was when the university went public about Munger Hall‘s full design.
The lack of bedroom windows and a limited number of exits for 4,500 residents raised intense questions about livability and safety from the community, faculty, and alumni; the outcry was so outsized that there was a question of whether the project would go forward at all in spite of UCSB’s sanguine projections. “There is a great deal of concern in the wider community about whether it is possible for Munger Hall to get permitted and whether it ought to get permitted,” said Hartmann.