Isla Vista is no foreign territory for Chris Richards. Now the chief of operations for Core Spaces, around 2009, Richards ran the Fontainebleu apartments at the corner of El Colegio closest to UC Santa Barbara. The property underwent cosmetic renovations during her tenure, said Richards. "I will never forget how we would open a door and there'd be an entire room full of linens people had left behind," she said, chuckling at the memory. "One garage in the parking lot was full of old lamps."
At Core Spaces, a developer based in Chicago that is at the epicenter of a struggle against the renoviction of hundreds of tenants in Isla Vista, Richards runs property operations, asset management, and team support across the company's 46 properties in 29 college towns. She said she didn't recall "this level of community involvement," when asked about eviction protests during her two years with the company. Memorably, when Isla Vista's Core Spaces Tenant Association formed last week, they coined a jingle for their new landlord that summed up their unhappiness with Core Spaces: "We hate the poor; we're rotten to the core!"
Formed by three University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign grads — Marc Lifshin, Barry Howard, and Brian Neiswender — after various jobs in construction, student housing, sales, and IT, they launched a company in 2010 to fulfill a dream of "building dope homes," their brief history states. Top-tier schools would be the least impacted if enrollment ever fell, they figured, and they first went into building and selling — up to eight new developments a year, with up to a 50 percent return on properties, the website claims, including its luxury college apartments. According to Richards, the company still owns most of the properties they've built or acquired — with a variety of investment partners — since 2013. "We intend to remain a long-term partner in the Santa Barbara community for years to come," Richards said.