Students displaced by Hurricane Katrina were unexpected visitors for the campus housing office this fall, but already-vacant rooms made accommodating them a simple matter.

The end result was a negligible change in the occupancy rate of campus housing, according to Mark D’Arienzo, associate director of the University Housing Administration.

“We are approximately where we were last year at this time,” D’Arienzo said. “We’re in a state of flux right now. We wouldn’t keep rooms open by choice, but it’s always nice to have a little wiggle room. The preference is to be more full than empty.”

The housing office will not have final statistics on the occupancy rate until the end of Fall Quarter, D’Arienzo said. During Spring Quarter, campus housing operated at about 94 percent capacity, slightly less than the current percentage.

Campus housing comprises dorms and residential colleges, which at full capacity could house 4,191 of NU’s approximately 7,650 undergraduate students. The undergraduate housing Web site estimated that 4,150 students live in undergraduate housing, with 900 in fraternities or sororities and the remainder living off campus.

University housing on the Evanston and Chicago campuses also can hold about 640 graduate and professional school students, D’Arienzo said. Although he said these residences are not completely full this fall, there are not many open spots.

After Katrina forced many Gulf Coast schools to evacuate, a total of 61 undergraduates, 10 graduate students and 14 professional-school students came to NU as visiting students in September, said Michael Mills, associate provost for university enrollment. The visiting students came mostly from Tulane University, with others coming from the University of New Orleans, Dillard University and Xavier University.

Since there are vacancies that occur every year, finding housing for the students who wanted it was not a problem, D’Arienzo said. Twenty-nine students chose to live on campus, and most of them were given rooms in the Public Affairs Residential College, Foster-Walker Complex and 2251 Sheridan Road, the transfer dorm. Dorms were chosen based on room availability.

“We tried to keep them together as communities within communities,” D’Arienzo said. “It’s a question of where things are. The visiting students were offered housing at Northwestern, and some chose to take us up on it. Some chose not to. Those who chose not to were already local residents.”

The 626 Emerson residence, which can accommodate 29 people, was the house of the Phi Mu Alpha men’s music fraternity until this year. Twelve fraternity members opted to remain living in the house, but an influx of freshmen and other students took up the remaining rooms. D’Arienzo said he could think of only one available room in that building.

Even though some campus-housing rooms remain empty each year, the cost of maintaining them is the same as if they were occupied, D’Arienzo added. As a result, it is preferable to fill up campus housing as much as possible.

“The thing is, we’re budgeted as if all the rooms were full,” he said. “It costs X number of dollars to keep it running. Housing really doesn’t make any profit. We are self-sufficient within the university.”

Reach Nitesh Srivastava at [email protected].