Addy Pittenger- Arts & Life Editor Emeritus–
With the incoming class growing in size every year, the amount of housing needed for all students to live on campus has become a big issue for both students and the administration. Rumors have been circulating that Denison is running out of housing, so the question remains: where will the students go?
When it comes to the housing selection process, students enter in a lottery system. The time slots for students are picked at random, so it comes down to sheer luck. Some students were lucky enough to get the housing they wanted, but others were not as fortunate.
Typically all Denison seniors get the chance to live in apartment-style housing whether that is traditional senior apartments on North Quad, suite-apartments like Taylor House, or the three-to-five-person apartments on South Quad. However, with seniors wanting their own “single” rooms, this has resulted in a few seniors residing in single dorms next year rather than the single “rooms” in apartments.
Rising senior Julia Assis Azevedo will be living in a single in Curtis West next year.
“Housing could have been more effective in facilitating the connection between rising seniors that didn’t have a full group,” Azevedo said.
Another rising senior, Emily Bost, will be living in a single in Schaff House as she “had a poor time slot and decided to go for a single instead of an apartment.”
“There were apartment beds for all seniors,” said Josh Kush, Senior Director for Residential Communities and Housing.
“There’s a small distinction in that the single-person apartments with the four singles, that’s one style of apartment housing we have. But we also have apartment style housing that has multiple occupancy rooms in those spaces too… So if we include all of the apartments across all of campus, not just the ones on North Quad, then there [was] enough beds for seniors.”
Taylor and Stone are examples of residential halls in the apartment-style but with multiple occupants in the same room space.
But the housing process itself was not as simple as putting senior groups together and having each group get some sort of apartment on campus. Like Bost and Azevedo, many groups of students faced issues with obtaining senior apartments. This led to roommate groups breaking up and students ending up in singles, doubles or other residential halls like Taylor House, Preston House and Sunset Hall.
The biggest determinant of getting an apartment was having roommate groups be all rising seniors instead of a mix of juniors and seniors.
“Now functionally how our process works is seniors can choose to group with people of other classes, right? So then if groups of seniors are pulling in juniors, that leaves fewer options for other seniors who are later in the process [of the housing selection],” Kusch said.
Roommate groups of only seniors receive seniority in the housing selection process, and Silverstein is the dedicated seniors-only apartment. When only senior groups did not choose Silverstein, it limited the amount of apartments that groups with juniors could choose from.
“No juniors can live in Silverstein, so only fully matched senior groups could have picked Silverstein. We wanted to be able to capture a senior experience [in Silverstein],” Kusch said.
With more housing being needed to accommodate the rest of Denison’s students, old buildings are being utilized for housing purposes on campus. Burton Hall and Rose House are now housing options for underclassmen and rising seniors.
“Rose Hall has been beautifully updated,” said Kusch. “It [now] has four double rooms and two bathrooms, a full kitchen, air conditioning, and a small lounge space. We created two four-person spaces basically, but the suites are situated in a house rather than a traditional residential building.”
But students also have also taken issue with the housing lottery system itself.
“It was incredibly stressful and confusing to figure out if my roommates and I were going to get an apartment or not,” said Matt Goodhart ‘25. “We were told conflicting answers when we went to ask questions, and it was oftentimes difficult to get in contact with housing.”
“There’s just not many options unfortunately,” said Maddie Gaylord ‘27. “My friends and I went into the housing selection process excited to see what different living situations we could have. But we were incredibly disappointed to find out, even before we’ve even got to pick, that there [were] only doubles in a few dorms left. For a school that doesn’t accommodate off campus housing, there is a lot of uncertainty if there is even room for all of us.”
