Any comparison between Cal Poly Pomona and a hermit crab is likely to be met with skepticism. It is absurd to suggest that a 1,050-acre university campus in Los Angeles County has anything in common with a crustacean scuttling across the ocean floor. Except for one thing, that is: Both the university and the deep-sea creature want to set up housekeeping in structures left behind by others.
Hermit crabs, as most sixth-graders know, occupy sea shells abandoned by other creatures. Cal Poly Pomona, in this tenuous analogy, plans to occupy a set of office buildings and laboratories to be built by commercial developers on university land.
The new buildings would be part of a 65-acre business park known as Innovation Village, which the Cal Poly Foundation is developing. The plan is this: The university will invite developers to build high-tech facilities, and lease the facilities to tech and bio-tech companies. The assumption is that tech companies will be attracted to the university's pool of engineering talent, while the companies - and the possibility of lucrative jobs -- will make the university even more attractive to engineering students. In other words, Cal Poly Pomona is trying to ignite the kind of town-and-gown “synergy” that has occurred in places like Palo Alto, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.
While Cal Poly is not the only university that is trying to find the alchemical formula that created Silicon Valley, the concept goes one step further here. When the high-tech tenants depart in a decade or two, Cal Poly plans to take over the buildings and remake them into academic space. In other words, the university has conceived a way for commercial developers to build the next phase of campus expansion at their own cost.
Although Cal Poly is not beating a bass drum about this aspect of Innovation Village, the concept is strikingly new in the world of campus development, at least in California. Public universities are traditionally built with public dollars. Those dollars are shrinking, however, and could conceivably shrink further in Schwarzenegger-era California, when the public university system, which used to be the envy of the world, becomes one more program to be slashed in the name of balancing the state budget. Even before the budget crisis, the state had gone from fully supporting the campus to paying only 90% of its cost, according to Ed Barnes, the university's associate vice president of executive affairs.
“Cal Poly has gone from being a state-supported institution to a state-assisted institution," Barnes said. The message is clear: The Lord helps engineering schools who help themselves.
The mission statement for Innovation Village Research Park calls for a “world class research and development environment for public-private partnerships and the leaders of tomorrow's industries to meet, exchange new ideas, challenge frontiers, and work together….” The village has gotten off to a good start, with the completion three years ago of a NASA-sponsored building for technology “incubator” companies. A 190,000-square-foot Red Cross Biomedical Services facility is scheduled to open in a few months. In October, the university was scheduled to choose a developer for the third phase, a 100,000-square-foot office building.
The rub about Innovation Village is that the university has placed many limitations on developers while offering few incentives in return. The university retains ownership of the land, which may make it difficult for some developers to get financing because many lenders want the land as collateral. Also, developers do not have the ability to sell the buildings, restricting their income to rent. In exchange, the university will not assist the developers, who will take all the risks and pay market rate rents for the land. In addition, tenants are expected to participate in some way in the life of the university, which may not please wizards who are racing their rivals to develop new products. In short, the Cal Poly office park is a tough sell.
It is not easy to make a miracle like Silicon Valley happen anywhere, much less in the smoggy Pomona Valley. Cal Poly, in fact, is one of several campuses in the state - including University of California, Riverside, UC Irvine and the medical school of UC San Francisco - that is trying to create a university-industry synergy. Cal Poly's Innovation Village was first conceived nine years ago, but a poor commercial real estate market did not help move the project along quickly. And Cal Poly is not alone. All of the UC efforts have been relatively slow starters, even in San Francisco, where developer Catellus is having difficulty renting out lab buildings in Mission Bay.
While it is true that technology companies often cluster around universities, simply providing land near a university does not re-create Cambridge. Examined closely, we see that each of the locations for the synergy success stories offers something more than a research university and a tract of empty land. Places like Palo Alto, Cambridge and San Diego's University City are all highly desirable places to live, with nice housing, great cultural amenities, an abundance of outdoor recreation opportunities, and the like. They are places where smart, energetic people choose to live.
And, for better of worse, there is little technology market in the Pomona Valley, where tech companies fill less than 300,000 square feet of space. The university hopes to build about three times that amount - 800,000 square feet - in the foreseeable future.
Still, needing a few years to get started and a having to make a difficult sale are not necessarily a foretaste of failure. Innovation Village may yet take off. We should remember, though, that real estate development and university development follow different time lines. Cal Poly itself is eager to expand, and its need for new space could conceivably outstrip the pace of development at Innovation Village. Unless the technology market improves dramatically, the great Cal Poly Pomona hermit crab may find itself outgrowing its old home before it has a new one to move into.
