How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Dozens of students may end up sleeping in hotel beds when they move back to campus this fall because of a lack of space in the residence hall system.
Topics
According to Tom Ellett, associate vice president of student affairs, 250 students guaranteed housing for the fall semester have yet to be issued room assignments. As of Friday, August 6, 98 of the 250 students could not fit into any NYU residence hall. The other 152 students may be split up from housing pairs to fill remaining beds that are still empty.
NYU is in ongoing discussions with a hotel in the Village to provide rooms for upperclassmen and therefore could not disclose its location. In 2002, NYU used midtown hotels to house undergraduates temporarily that could not fit into the then under construction Second Street.
But since then, NYU has built and purchased a handful of properties around the city to house its students, like Palladium, Gramercy and Founders residence halls. For years, upperclassmen dorms like Lafayette residence hall have been underutilized with dozens of empty beds.
But last year, the university transferred 26th Street and University Court residence halls to NYU Langone Medical Center — two buildings that were previously used for undergraduates. The loss of 725 beds, or 6.5 percent of capacity, reversed the trend of easy housing options.
Administrators have said displaced students will pay comparable rates for housing if placed in Greenwich Hotel or the local area hotel. The going rate for a standard bed in a double room is $13,438 for the academic year.
To alleviate space constraints, the housing cancellation deadline has been indefinitely extended. Looking at past years, Ellett estimated that 30 to 50 students will still cancel before the beginning of the semester.
"We're anticipating somewhere around 50 to 70 people may begin the year in a hotel," he said.
Upperclassmen are not the only students affected by the bed shortage; as many as 60 freshmen
may be placed outside of traditional freshmen residence halls.
However, NYU's summer melt — the number of students who place a deposit to attend the
university but never show up to campus in the fall — will likely decrease that number by 20
students.
"If they cannot be additionally accommodated in the FYRE halls, these students will be assigned
with other freshman students and offered the same programming and services as all freshman residents," he said.
Ellett said the possible overflow of freshmen into upperclassmen dorms will not affect the placement of upper class students who selected an apartment through the lottery process, nor will it affect newly admitted transfer students. The university decided against placing transfer students in temporary housing.
Although plans are still underway to secure housing for the handful of overflow students, NYU
does not plan to secure a hotel for the entire year based on further housing occupancy estimates for the spring.
The high occupancy level has also made it more difficult to facilitate room change requests than
in the past, though close to 70 percent of such requests have been approved this year. But for sophomore Tanya Chen, her room-for-room switch between two floors in Coral was denied.
After calling and e-mailing the housing office, Chen and her roommate were informed their request could not be met in mid July.
"It was a pretty short e-mail," she said. "They didn't specify or even mention why."
Ellett said university administrators would be working through August to adjust housing accommodations.
"We will be keeping a data log of people who are interested in changing rooms and we are trying
to negotiate," he said. "But if we don't have space, our priority is to get people out of the hotel. That will be our focus."
The housing office will be in contact with students in the next two weeks to finalize room assignments if they have not yet received them.
