Students spent hours waiting in line in Johnson-McFarlane Hall last Friday in an attempt to secure housing for the 2013-2014 school year.
Unlike past years, in which everyone interested in living on-campus was entered into a lottery system to receive a housing selection time, the process for upperclassmen this year relied on a “wait in line” method, with the first students arriving in line at JMAC having the first choices on room selection. Additionally, selection was split into one registration day for current first and second-year students and one day for current third and fourth-years.
“Students who have the residence hall grant will be participating in the room selection process and will be able to receive a space at tonight’s room selection process,” Assistant Director of Occupancy in Residential Education Amanda Harris said over email last Thursday.
Lisa Parker, a third-year Business Administration Marketing major from Fort Collins, CO, lived in the university-owned Ridgeline Apartments this year and will live in a single-residency on-campus apartment for next year. She arrived to the line in JMAC at 1 p.m. last Friday for the selection, four-and-a-half hours before registration officially opened at 5:30 p.m., and secured the 13th place in line in order to get her apartment.
The first student arrived around 10:30 a.m., and by 4 p.m. there were about 50 students waiting in the JMAC lounge for the process to begin. In an attempt to make the process easier, the gathered students started a sign-up list showing the order in which they had arrived.
“All of us were waiting here but it gave us the ability to kind of create a line on paper without having to actually create a physical line,” said sophomore Michael Dugrandis.
Parker said she was frustrated by the lack of information available about the process.
“Nobody told me what the availability was, no one told me if there were any single units available, I didn’t know what the probability was and I didn’t know what my competition was,” said Parker.
Harris said that there would be spaces available for all students applying for housing who currently receive a housing grant.
“There will be spaces available for 3rd and 4th year students in the four on-campus apartment complexes and also on the 5th floor of Nagel Hall,” Harris said about Friday’s selection process.
When representatives from DU Housing arrived around 4:30 p.m., they informed the waiting students they would not honor the student-initiated sign-up list. In response, the students voted democratically that the list should be honored and then organized themselves into a line based on the order shown on the list.
Parker says she was “pretty angry” about the decision to not honor the list.
“It definitely set tensions pretty high pretty quick,” she said.
Parker says DU Housing representatives told her there is a very high demand for the university-owned apartments.
“With rent skyrocketing all around campus, this is the most economical option for a lot of people,” she said. “It seems like Housing is just dealing with a crisis. To a certain extent, I’m upset with how this whole thing has been handled, but they don’t have space. I mean, how else do you do this?”
According to Harris, housing expects to have the same number of students living in on-campus housing next year as they did this year.
Parker says she hopes a better system for housing selection will be used in the future, and that she would like to see a selection process based on factors such as past records with housing or GPA. She also said she hopes the two-year live on requirement will be changed.
“I feel like how they’re handling it now is pretty primitive and just not ideal for anyone,” she said. “What they’re doing now is just not sustainable. There is no physical way for them to keep doing the two-year live on requirement; they would have to be building another dorm right now to continue the policy.”
When asked about the requirement, Amanda Harris from DU Housing said, “I believe the two-year live-on requirement will continue for future years and there have not been any changes to the guidelines for that policy.”
