For most of us, the word dorm conjures a fairly bleak picture of existence. Desks squished next to bunk beds, instant ramen heated in a communal microwave, the occasional cockroach.
You surely don’t imagine a rooftop vegetable garden, a fully functioning art studio, or a curated library of classic books. But that’s exactly what the 772 new residents of Anchor House get to call home.
“It’s like a five-star hotel,” says Paulina Stephania Farias Silva, a second-year transfer student in the Haas School of Business. She lives in a four-bedroom, two-bath apartment with three other roommates and a cat. “They were saying that they were going to build something like this. But I never thought it was going to be this nice.”
The roughly 450,000-square-foot building, located just a block from campus at 1950 Oxford Street, is one of UC Berkeley’s latest and greatest housing projects. It’s also the first dedicated entirely to Cal’s transfer students, a diverse group that makes up 21 percent of the undergraduate student population. From the towering bookcases and the precisely placed potted plants to the large, geometric linen lamps suspended high overhead, Anchor House feels more like a high-end hotel than a student dorm. Which was exactly the point.
“Traditionally at a university, transfer students are more of an afterthought,” says Kyle Gibson, director of communications for Capital Strategies at Berkeley. Supporting this underrepresented, underserved student population “really resonated” with the donor, according to Gibson. The Helen Diller Foundation covered the full cost of design, construction, and furnishing, which amounted to around $300 million and took just over two years to complete. The first class of students, who were admitted through a lottery system, moved in this fall.
In addition to dedicated study and lounge areas, a maker’s space run by the Berkeley Art Studio, and a fully-equipped teaching kitchen, Anchor House is also home to a second Transfer Student Center, which offers counseling services and workshops for incoming transfer students.
“It is a hub of resources and activity,” says Julian Ledesma ’97, executive director of the Centers for Educational Equity and Excellence. “With the built-in resources and programming that folks have direct access [to], we’re literally meeting students where they’re at. But I think probably more powerful than that is the fact that they immediately get to make cohort and community with fellow transfer students who are also experiencing something similar.”
At Berkeley, a huge majority—nearly 94 percent of this year’s incoming transfer students—come from California community colleges. And they comprise “a huge part of Berkeley’s diversity,” says Ledesma. Compared with the wider undergrad student body, the transfer population has a higher proportion of students who are low-income, first-generation, parents, formerly incarcerated, and veterans or military-affiliated, according to Ledesma. They’re often older with more life experience—and don’t necessarily relate to the experience of an average freshman. All of this is compounded by the universal challenges facing any undergraduate at Berkeley: affording the high cost of living and integrating into a bustling campus-city environment.
“You mix that with being low income, and you mix that with trying to get out of here in a little over two years,” Ledesma says. “The phrase ‘drinking water from a fire hose’ comes to mind.”
Silva recalls a sort of “culture shock” when she first arrived at Berkeley in the fall of 2023. She immigrated to the United States from Mexico when she was 4 years old and is the first in her family to go to college. Transferring to Berkeley from community college in Hayward marked her first time living away from home, and it was overwhelming.
“When I was first studying at Haas, I didn’t see a lot of people that looked like me… I didn’t see that many Latinos there. I didn’t see a lot of Black and Brown folks,” she says. “I felt so lonely. Like, I remember crying as a transfer student. I was telling my mom, ‘I don’t know if I made the right decision.’”
The design team took students like Silva into account. Hardly just a dorm, Anchor House was conceived as an ecosystem to cater to the needs of this particular population, an ethos that’s reflected in every detail, from the fully furnished apartment-style rooms all the way down to the name itself.
“It’s about finding a stable anchor, a place on campus to anchor yourself, to form communities, to be solid, to be landed,” Gibson says.
The building’s design is also Californian to its core. Residents can gaze over the Golden Gate Bridge from the rooftop garden, stretch out in the yoga studio, or take their reading into the Sequoia Room, a communal study space featuring wood panels salvaged from a fallen sequoia tree and a vibrant reproduction of California artist Wayne Thiebaud’s iconic 1962 Boston Cremes. The building is certified LEED Gold, with high ceilings and vast windows that illuminate the space with natural light. Twelve-story walls of living plants cascade down from the outdoor courtyard.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a new Berkeley housing development without some pushback. In this case, the drama hinged on the fate of several buildings occupying the original site. This included 1921 Walnut Street, a 112-year-old rent-controlled building with eight units, some of which had housed residents for more than two decades. Also on the chopping block was a historic parking garage.
The so-called University Garage dated back to the 1930s and was designed by Walter H. Ratcliff Jr., Berkeley’s first and only city architect. Originally a service station for the Richfield Oil Company, the Spanish-style, shingled building was designated an official city landmark—Berkeley’s only gas station with that honor—in 1981, shortly before becoming a staging area for campus parking and transportation services.
Threat of demolition to the buildings angered tenants and preservationists alike. The developers were sympathetic to residents’ concerns, but with the student housing crisis weighing heavily, they decided to push forward.
“One of the biggest challenges we have is we have almost no sites available for development,” Gibson says. “There [are] inherently these development trade-offs on every site we’re looking at, whether it’s an old bank building or an old garage, that we have to redevelop in order to address our housing crisis.”
But they didn’t erase the garage entirely, he adds. “We laser measured the entire facade, and we’ve recreated it up in the new courtyard … with the actual bricks that we salvaged from the garage.”
During a tour of the building, Silva points out the arcade game room (“It’s free!”), the outdoor patio with potted plants and sweeping views of the Berkeley Hills (“I love all the green!”), and the Hobbit-like entrance to a cozy reading nook (“This is one of my favorite spots.”).
But more than anything, she’s grateful for the little ways that Anchor House helps transfer students settle into a new environment, from in-house lotería nights to ice cream socials. “You’re in the books, but they’re like, ‘Hey, you know, you’re not alone. Come and study with us.’ Or, ‘Hey, come have a refreshment. De-stress your mind’… So, on top of living in a really nice space, there’s community.”
Construction on Anchor House, which Gibson said was first conceived of in 2019, began officially in February 2022. The development is part of the Chancellor’s Housing Initiative, which first convened in 2016 with the goal of housing incoming freshmen for two years and incoming transfer and graduate students for one year—a target that requires nearly 9,000 more beds. As of this fall, the university has completed four housing projects, including Anchor House, for a total of 2,413 new beds. Only about 75 percent to go.
For all its glory, Anchor House can accommodate only a fraction (11 percent) of Berkeley’s transfer students, not to mention the rest of the student body. It’s hard not to wonder if they feel any resentment—or jealousy.
“I’ve been asked a lot when we come in … do I find this to be too nice, too fancy? And, well, the answer is, ‘This is what the donor felt compelled to do for our students,’” Gibson says. “They want to give this transfer student population the nicest student housing at Berkeley… to put it right on the doorstep of the campus, to show everybody transfer students, and to make them feel appreciated and to feel elevated.”
