During one class period last week, I remember bringing up the possibility of affordable or low-income housing being implemented in the soon-to-come University Village train development, a facet of our University’s greater “North Star 2020” plan. In response, Jim essentially chuckled, and understandably so. The university administration have expressed no intention of implementing affordable or low-income housing in the area; their main intention is to spice up the campus and make it more attractive, a way to increase enrollment levels. In a sense, such spicing could entail creating another bourgeois downtown Redlands.

To provide some context, the University’s Institutional Plan reads:
“Let’s imagine just one student on this pathway with us who arrives at the University in 2020. She is a new graduate student who steps off an ultramodern, streamlined train onto the new “University Village” platform. She will cross through an inviting plaza to the north campus for her courses, encountering undergraduate students from the historic residential quad bicycling or walking through campus and on the new Orange Blossom and Zanja trails. When courses are over for the day, our new arrival will return south to townhouse-style apartments at the Village. Residences and apartments for young professionals, alumni, senior retirees and the general public encompass a lively plaza and green space dotted with amenities for our University and its town: a hotel-conference center, a coffee shop, a pub and restaurants, a significant college bookstore, a meditation-yoga studio, and a hub for neighborhood shopping, recreation, and services..”
How about that! Young professionals and yoga studios!
In my view, shaping the University Village into a bourgeois paradise would be a huge wasted opportunity to foster equitable housing solutions. Because the city of Redlands does not have much affordable housing in the first place, the future character of this development could be interpreted as a statement on the trajectory of this city. Will Redlands simply become more of an oasis for old white people and Esri employees in the sea of madness that we call the I.E. or will it become a space for inter-class mingling, where those living in South Redlands will no longer dominate city functions?
What have you all heard about the University Village development? Is its future character as significant as I describe?