Friday, 4/18/97 Community voices anger over proposed dorm
expansion Local residents complain about noise, growth of
campus
by Hannah Miller Daily Bruin Contributor For Wolfgang Vieths,
it’s the encroaching buildings. For Alvin Milder, it’s the "primal
screams" of students. For Catherine Rich, it’s the birds. These are
just a few of the concerns of non-student Westwood residents who
have long seen UCLA as an invasive empire threatening their
property. At Tuesday’s public hearing about a proposed
three-building, seven-story construction on north Gayley Avenue,
these concerns found passionate expression. "This project is
massive, and it effects us tremendously," said Vieths, of the
Northwest Village Residents Association, taking the podium in the
Faculty Center to a small but impassioned crowd of 13. "It will
practically destroy at least half of the buffer zone between us and
campus," Vieths said. The "buffer zone" is mandated by UCLA’s
Long-Range Development Plan as a protective margin where the campus
abuts residential areas. It is also a crucial issue for the
residents’ associations, who have watched as UCLA has undertaken
one construction project after another since 1963. The proposed
project would add 1,400 graduate and undergraduate beds to UCLA’s
dorm space plus a four-story parking structure with 350 new parking
spaces. "This is Phase 2 of a project that was approved in 1988,"
said Mark Horne, assistant director for Capital Programs. "Since
then, housing has projected the need for additional beds." "There
is now a waiting list to get into the dorms," Horne said. "We also
wanted to change the three-person rooms into two-person rooms."
Until May 2, Capital Programs is gathering community testimony
about the project, which will then be submitted to the regents when
they vote on the project in June. Tuesday night’s meeting was an
expression of a collective neighborhood fear: that UCLA is slowly
and stealthily urbanizing a quiet, green Westside. "What a greedy,
bad neighbor UCLA has been," commented Andrew Milder, a lifelong
Westwood resident. "We’re getting a New York City atmosphere. Bel
Air is being ruined," he said after the meeting. Capital Programs
admits that the buffer zone is very important. "But the issue is
the width of that zone," Horne said. The current project locates
three new buildings 40 feet off from the street. Alvin Milder,
Andrew’s father, raised his family in the area, sent his son to the
University Elementary School, and has been battling to keep UCLA
construction within bounds for 20 years. "We’re asking that this
project be scaled down," said Milder, a representative of the
community group UCLA Watch. "We’re concerned about open space on
Gayley, plus the removal of about 350 trees." The proposal includes
measures to give some of these trees away to local residents. For
many of the Westwood activists gathered to defeat what they see as
an environmental disaster, the nature of student life is itself a
problem. "There is tremendous party traffic on nights and weekends
– hordes and hordes and masses of students," Vieths said. "You see
them walking with beers in hand. And as they drink more they get
louder." Murmurs of assent went up from the audience. Vieths and
others worry that more dorms closer to the residential areas would
be louder, messier and generally more of a nuisance. Alvin Milder
speaks of the "primal screams" that he hears students making at
night: "Students have a tendency to scream across Gayley to the
frat houses." Another issue in the debate is the birds that live on
Gayley Avenue. The report proposes that UCLA hire an ornithologist
to come and survey the number of occupied nests two days before the
trees are to be removed. "What I’m asking," posed resident Harriet
Miller to the assembled crowd, "is what can be done in two days
about this?" Catherine Rich, a biogeography student and president
of the L.A. Autobahn Society, said, "This survey of nests is
something we will be looking at." Countersuggestions abounded, such
as relocating proposed dorms to Lot 32, erecting a giant,
unscalable fence to limit partygoers to Strathmore and shrinking
the proposed high-rise dorms to a more manageable size. Horne says
he cannot speculate whether the plans could be altered. "It’s a
question of when it occurs in the process," he said. "If these
suggestions would reduce the cost of the project, I’m sure the
regents will listen." In the end, Alvin Milder says, he is
skeptical. "We’ll make comments, and they’ll respond with ‘comment
noted’ and then march along." He points out that construction
stakes that have already gone up on Gayley and contract bidding on
the site has already taken place. "I certainly understand the need
for dorms on campus," said Terry Tegnasian of the Westwood Property
Owners Association. "But UCLA has to look at the cumulative effect
of all these construction projects in the past few years," she
said.