College students in Austin, Texas, have dwelled in windowless rooms for years − here’s why town finally decided to ban them

In the past few years, town of Austin, Texas, has approved the development of 1000’s of windowless rooms in latest apartment buildings next to The University of Texas at Austin.

Most of those rooms are being leased to UT students, leading to a deterioration of their well-being.

In April 2024, the Austin City Council finally voted to ban the development of windowless bedrooms.

As a professor at UT’s School of ArchitectureI see this ban as a belated but welcomed development. For 25 years, I even have given my students an task called “My Window,” where I ask them to attract a piece of the window of their bedroom. In 2021, some students began to tell me that they didn’t have a window of their room.

I used to be shocked because, as a practicing architect, I had at all times assumed that windowless bedrooms were illegal. Some students began to share with me photographs of their rooms and what dozens of scholars have described as their terrible experiences living in them.

Adverse effects on mental health

A standard criticism is “tousled circadian cycles” and the event of “depression and fatigue.” They attempt to avoid their rooms as much as possible. One student told me about experiencing “unbearable loneliness and claustrophobia brought on by the 4 solid partitions.” Another one lamented waking up “with anxiety every morning.”

As soon as I learned that windowless bedrooms were being inbuilt Austin, I began advocating to ban them. I even have asked the City Council to act, via letters and in op eds. I even have educated myself on the difficulty and shared my views with architects, professors and students in multiple venues.

Students have mobilized, too. In the spring of 2023, they ran a survey to match students’ experiences living in rooms with and without windows. Students who lived in rooms without windows scored lower in all of the categories on a well-known scale that measures well-being.

In a September 2023 [letter to Austin’s City Council]762 students demanded a ban on windowless rooms. “Our city’s negligence to defend its residents is being weaponized by developers as a method of profit,” they wrote. They also identified that windowless rooms are illegal in cities similar to New York City and Madrid.

Not legal elsewhere

Indeed, in New York City – as in major cities around the globe – windowless bedrooms are illegal. A percentage of the room’s floor area, set in each city’s constructing code, determines the minimum window size. In New York City, every bedroom will need to have a window area at the least 10% the scale of the room’s floor area; in Madrid, 12%; and in Mexico City, 15%.

In Austin, the number has been 0% until the recent ban.

Why? There is a straightforward reason: Austin, like most cities within the U.S., follows the International Building Code, and this code has a glaring loophole. Its lighting section states: “Every space intended for human occupancy shall be supplied with natural light by way of exterior glazed openings in accordance with Section 1204.2 or shall be supplied with artificial light in accordance with Section 1204.3.”

The code then goes into great detail on the precise requirements for every situation. But the word “or” leaves the door open for some developers to interpret the code to mean that natural light is optional.

To protect themselves against those developers, cities similar to Chicago and Washington, D.C., have closed the loophole by simply replacing “or” with “and” of their adopted codes. Austin is finally doing precisely that. The recently approved code revision will ban windowless bedrooms when it takes effect on May 20, 2024.

Putting profits first

Unfortunately, developers have already exploited the loophole and built 1000’s of windowless bedrooms that soon will now not be legal to construct but might be legal to proceed to be leased.

Windowless rooms haven’t resulted in lower rents for college students in Austin. Moreover, during my two-year campaign to ban windowless rooms, no developer has spoken of their favor in front of the Austin City Council.

They have been quietly constructing them for so long as they’ve been capable of because student housing is very profitableand more so when windowless rooms are allowed.

How come? Because a bulky constructing, with interior rooms away from the facade, can capture more interior space with a smaller ratio of exterior partitions, that are costlier to construct than interior partitions.

A vulnerable population

Namratha Thrikutam, a UT architecture student, sums up the predicament of her peers living in windowless rooms: “Students are a population that developers know they will benefit from.”

“We don’t have as much money. We don’t have as much standing on this planet. We don’t have as much experience about things that we’ve been through, so it’s very easy to benefit from us,” she told the Daily TexanUT Austin’s official newspaper.

Lured by the proximity to campus, students in windowless rooms attempt to cope with abundant room decoration, circadian rhythm LED lighting, mental therapy or medication.

For example, an exchange student from Spain who had unknowingly leased a windowless room contacted me asking for help. She told me that, being illegal in her hometown of Barcelona, it never crossed her mind that the room she had leased before arriving in Austin may very well be windowless.

She described her anxiety and deteriorating mental health after just just a few days in her unit. When I wrote on her behalf to her constructing manager requesting a room with a window, they responded: “We don’t promise windows in any of our rooms. Like other buildings within the Austin area, windows will not be promised.” Shockingly, their leases don’t disclose the absence of windows either.

Much like immigrants in New York City’s tenement buildings within the 1850sUT students have been left to fend for themselves. Austin has failed them by approving the development of 1000’s of windowless units.

UT, a top-tier public universityhas failed them by not providing enough university housing and by remaining silent in the course of the campaign to ban windowless rooms. The university’s position relies on the incontrovertible fact that West Campus “falls under town of Austin’s jurisdiction,” in response to an announcement obtained by The Conversation.

My position is: Yes, but these are your students asking for help.

And architects have failed students by willingly designing windowless rooms. In doing so, architects have ignored certainly one of the core guidelines of the American Institute of Architects: “to contemplate the physical, mental, and emotional effects a constructing has on its occupants.”

Changes sought

The experiences of scholars living in windowless rooms in Austin should function a cautionary tale for authorities who control constructing codes. If windowless rooms are already illegal in your city, keep it that way. If they will not be, ban them as soon as possible. If not, students and other vulnerable populations similar to immigrants, seniors and low-income people would at all times be a possible goal for developers.

In the meantime, and to guard these populations, I’m working with other concerned architects across the U.S. in closing the loophole on the source, by directly modifying the International Building Code as a substitute of assuming that every city will close it by amending their codes locally, as Austin just did.

It is a slow and bureaucratic process, but, ultimately, the message must be clear: Having natural light in buildings must be a human right, not a developer’s selection.