The Wake

Move-in weekend. After a few semi-awkward calls to new roommates, plenty of shopping, a whole summer spent thinking about college, and long drives in stuffed cars, thousands of energetic freshmen arrive on campus, eager to fill their tiny rooms and meet everyone on the floor.

But what happens when, instead of a permanent space in a residential hall, you are granted a “temporary housing space” in the expanded housing program? For a number of University students, this meant that they experienced their own “extra” move-in weekends just a couple of weeks ago. As much of a hassle as it may be to move all of your belongings halfway through the year, students in expanded housing are required to move to their reassigned, permanent space. “Moving all your stuff was really tough,” says Bridget Gallogly, a freshman who recently moved to Middlebrook from a lounge in Centennial. “It’s not like the first time you move to college when everything is packed up really neatly.”

While it may seem illogical to require a few hundred freshmen to live in temporary spaces (like study rooms and lounges) for part of the year, it’s the best answer that the university has found for a couple of inescapable problems with housing: demand and vacancies. According to the Housing and Residential Life website, demand for on-campus housing each fall semester generally exceeds the number of spaces available. The result of this supply and demand problem is that a few hundred freshmen must move into temporary spaces if they want to live in university housing, which is an opportunity that is guaranteed to all freshmen that meet the housing application deadline. According to Housing and Residential Life, this freshman guarantee is in place in order to give freshmen their best chance at the university and because statistics indicate that GPAs of on-campus freshmen are higher. “Even freshmen who live in expanded housing have a higher GPA than those who live off-campus,” says Mannix Clark, associate director of housing.

However, having too few available rooms is not the only issue. If that were the case, the University might simply build more housing, maintain stricter limits on incoming numbers and students who wish to return to housing, and do away with expanded housing entirely. Ironically, what allows expanded housing residents to eventually move into rooms is the same thing that makes expanding housing necessary in the first place: there are always vacancies. “We know going into the year that there will be potential vacancies,” says Clark. Rooms open up for a number of reasons, including transfers, study abroad, no-shows and other cancellations. Because housing is self-supporting, only the money that comes in from students can be spent. Certain costs (such as heating) wouldn’t change if there were empty rooms, which would cause other students to have to subsidize the extra costs and, in essence, pay for those vacancies, explains Clark. While expanded housing situations are not ideal, neither are problems of overcrowding and rising housing costs. “You have to try to balance it and find a happy medium,” says Clark. “Our target would be to keep about 200 to 250 students in expanded housing. Then we could move them out before fall semester starts and remain as close to full as possible.”

At the beginning of this school year, there were 305 students in expanded housing. The most that the university has had in recent years (the university had more housing problems before Yudof was built in 2002) was about 450 last year, when students were housed at the Days Inn. This year, most students had been assigned permanent spaces by mid-November, when the remaining students (about 100 of them) in expanded housing were told that they would receive their assignments over break because of the already busy and stressful nature of the remaining weeks of the semester. By the beginning of spring semester, all students had been assigned a permanent space in university housing and the last ones had to move during the first week back. “Our goal is always not to put more students in expanded housing than we can move out by the beginning of second semester,” says Clark.

However, none of the statistics or reasoning behind expanded housing can quite describe what the experience is like. “We try to provide them with everything we provide traditional students,” explains Clark, although usually the kinds of furniture and the amount of storage space are different in expanded housing rooms. Residents can feel somewhat cramped. “It was really annoying having four people in one room,” says Nicole Heppelmann, Gallogly’s current roommate and fellow former resident of the Centennial lounge. “You’re with everyone all the time,” adds Gallogly.

After two of their roommates moved out, though, they saw the benefits of sharing the large room. “We had so much space. It was awesome,” says Gallogly. “[Living in expanded housing] wasn’t that bad for us, but I could see how it could be terrible. We kind of lucked out.” Socially, though, she explains that she prefers their new place in Middlebrook: “We were on a floor with lots of singles and upperclassmen who were not very social. We’ve seen and met so many more people even in this past week.”

Ultimately, “expanded housing wasn’t that big of a deal,” says Heppelmann, and “I’m so glad we’ve moved now.”