Editorial: Silicon Valley college board should look elsewhere for student housing

The Foothill-De Anza Community College District wants to help house its students struggling to find affordable rent. The district’s solution displaces Cupertino residents.

The board of trustees had five years to come up with a plan after district voters passed Measure G in 2020 — a $898 million general obligation bond to help upgrade college facilities and consider affordable housing. Trustees had an opportunity to be creative trendsetters in student housing. Instead, the school district plans to purchase a Cupertino apartment complex on McClellan Road and convert it into De Anza College student housing, uprooting 94 families.

Property owner Prometheus Real Estate Group plans to sell, but another buyer could let renters stay. Trustees have slammed the door on that, unless they step back and consider two other options.

De Anza College sits on 112 acres in the heart of Cupertino. The district could carve out a portion of the campus for housing. A number of school districts are considering this approach for teacher housing. Why not do it for student housing, a standard practice at four-year colleges.

The community college has the space and has already demonstrated a willingness to repurpose existing campus property. The district applied Measure G funds to demolish the Flint Center and construct a new event center and student services building. Trustees could have considered housing, but didn’t. The district could still construct a dorm elsewhere on campus and it wouldn’t need to be apartments with kitchens, since the community college has dining services.

Another option is purchasing a hotel and converting it to a dorm. The Cupertino hospitality sector has struggled post-pandemic. Two hotels in Cupertino are in trouble: the 165-room Hilton Garden Inn on Wolf Road and the 123-room Aloft Cupertino on De Anza Boulevard.  Aloft Cupertino has already defaulted on a $34 million loan and is heading toward foreclosure. The Hilton is in financial trouble as well.

The board said the hotel configuration doesn’t work for students because there are no kitchens, and appears quite hung up on this feature. Yet San Jose State University had no problem figuring this out when it converted the second tower of the Signia by Hilton hotel into dorms. The students have dining passes baked into their tuition. The new digs for De Anza students could reconfigure the rooms and repurpose the Aloft’s kitchen for student meals. The college could operate a satellite dining service.

The board might even be able to negotiate a deal with the Aloft lender to pay off the loan and still have more than $30 million for the conversion. The Prometheus deal is $65.6 million — and that doesn’t include the cost of converting the property into a college dorm.

Somewhere during the last five years — despite COVID-19 putting the brakes on life — the school district and the city should have sat down and discussed the situation. The district needed to explain its student housing dilemma. Cupertino could have provided insight on potential properties, since it has insider knowledge on leases and properties changing hands. Neither party benefits from trying to solve this problem in a silo.

The apartment purchase has become controversial and unfriendly due to a lack of communication. It’s time for the city and school district to come together for the community’s betterment.

In Cupertino, affordable housing is slim to none where the average rent is $3,550 a month, according to Zillow. Trustees need to try thinking beyond the easy solution.

Consider these two potential options — build on campus or convert a hotel — to avoid displacing anyone. Trustees see themselves as helping students, and on the surface that’s true. But they need to find another way. Their actions will result in collateral damage by uprooting almost 100 families who may not be able to find comparable housing in the city they call home.

Moryt Milo is an editor at San José Spotlight. Contact Moryt at [email protected] or follow her at @morytmilo on X. Catch up on her monthly editorials here.