As seen in the Washington Square News.
Though more than 80 percent of rising NYU sophomores received one of their first three choices in housing for next semester, the same could be said for only 16 and 47 percent of rising juniors and seniors, respectively.
After new changes giving sophomores top priority were implemented for this year’s housing selection process, the recently released raw data demonstrates the success of the university’s plans to create a sophomore cluster in Union Square. Nearly 6,500 students participated in this year’s lottery selection, up from almost 6,400 participating students last year, university spokesman Josh Taylor said.
“[Previously], if you were a sophomore, you would never think about applying to Palladium because it would be a wasted pick,” Taylor said. “All of a sudden, if you’re a rising sophomore, yeah, Palladium’s actually a realistic chance.”
WSN conducted a group interview yesterday with Taylor, housing director Jennifer Brown, auxiliary services vice president Robert Kivitz, student affairs vice president Marc Wais and residential education director Tom Ellett.
Across all classes, students were picking the same residence halls — especially Thirteenth Street, Broome Street, Carlyle and Palladium — because they hadn’t learned to adapt to the new system yet, Taylor said.
“It’s going take some years of current students passing along the information and RAs passing along the information to really get that ingrained in our culture, because it’s unlearning a lot of what people have been accustomed to,” Taylor said.
Sophomore priority shut most upperclassmen out of Union Square, Kivetz said.
“This year, you’ll find that rising juniors will not get any of the Union Square buildings because of the popularity and the high demand of sophomores,” Kivetz said. “Even if they had first priority, they may not be getting their top choice — they may be getting their top three choices. Not everybody can fit into Palladium.”
Taylor also said that more than 250 upperclassmen were selected to be placed in the Explorations theme floors, the number of which are nearly doubling from eight this year to 15 among upperclassmen next year.
“Anybody who’s in Explorations or Greek basically got their first choice,” Taylor said, regarding the Explorations communities that exist in various residence halls and the fraternity and sorority housing in Lafayette residence hall.
Kivetz said the selection process is two weeks ahead of schedule and has left many Study Abroad and transfer applicants, who have yet to be notified of their acceptance into their programs, without a clear plan for housing. For this year only, NYU will refund the first $500 housing deposit for students who change their plans and notify housing before May 1, he added.
“The deposit isn’t what’s important to us,” Kivetz said. “What’s important to us is really the number of students who are committed to university housing.”
The “single biggest surprise” in this year’s selection is that there was renewed interest from seniors for NYU housing, Taylor said. About 375 more seniors applied for housing than last year, he said.
“We expected to see some dip this year and we didn’t,” Brown said. “I don’t know that we can really predict what’s going to happen until we see it play itself out a year.”
Right now, NYU has an “uneven” housing system that has different buildings in spread out locations, Wais said.
“We’re trying to create a housing system … [in which] we can please as many people as possible,” Wais said. “At the end of the day, we know it’s hard. Three, four, five years from now, we’re gonna be in a much better position [than] now to make literally everybody happy — we’re not there now.”
NYU is still committed to maintaining its four-year housing guarantee to students, Wais said.
“That commitment is absolutely solid and right now, not in play,” Wais said.
NYU has been searching all year for housing, and will have to find “one or several” new locations to use as residence halls before September 2009, Kivetz said.
“When we renegotiated the Water Street lease, we already knew that we were going to be building a property on 12th Street,” Kivetz said. “We’ve had two or three other properties that we’ve looked at seriously that, for one reason or another, didn’t work out.”
Wais said, “Twelfth Street will be a freshman residence,” but Kivetz quickly corrected him and said the only thing that has been confirmed is that Twelfth Street will definitely be an undergraduate residence.
Kivetz said NYU has until September 2009 — when the lease on the Water Street residence hall expires — to find replacement spaces for students to live. The new Twelfth Street residence hall replaces only 700 of Water Street’s 1,000 bed spaces, he said.
“We’re always looking for housing,” he said. “It could be two smaller buildings to fight that void of 300, or maybe one large building.”
The city’s real estate market also impacts interest in housing, Wais said.
“No one can predict the housing market and the real estate market,” he said. “You can’t control it, that’s always out there that you have to be sensitive to.”
Wais said he hopes more juniors and seniors will stay with the system beyond the changes that have been made for freshmen and sophomores.
“I envision a day … at NYU where all the dorms will have different terrific attributes to offer, and it’s really going to be a choice between apples and oranges,” Wais said. “They both taste good.”
Wais said it is hard to ask students to “look past their personal lives” and “let the system play out” as they have in the past to see positive, long-term changes to NYU’s housing system.
“We created a lot of charm when we created the freshman cluster,” Wais said. “Now it’s viewed as one of the terrific hallmarks of NYU.”
Stern freshman Brett Shorenstein, who lives in Lafayette Street residence hall, said the new changes make him wish he didn’t live in NYU housing.
“That sounds terrible. I don’t think it’s fair,” Shorenstein said. “The decision to put sophomores over juniors on the lottery, seeing as we got the last pick last year, sucks.”
CAS junior Jessica Hadjistavrou said the results show how seniors who resisted being pushed out of housing got the short end of the deal.
“I’m pissed as hell,” Hadjistavrou said. “I think it’s terrible that, as seniors, we’re not getting our choice. We put in our time at this university, and all the juniors and seniors are going to be pushed back to Lafayette.”
Stern freshman Benj Garrett said he thought the results were fair in the long-term because it’s important for sophomores to stay close to campus.
“I would be a fool to say I wasn’t happy about it,” Garrett said. “It would be harder to make a freshman live far away if they’ve only been here a year. It gets easier as you [get] older.”