By Elizabeth KeatingThe Daily Northwestern
The winter competition has begun, and it’s not over Dance Marathon fundraising or summer internships. Many juniors, seniors and even some sophomores are racing to sign leases on prime off-campus real estate – housing for next year – before the great apartments are snatched and stragglers are banished to Plex.
Northwestern’s socially acceptable housing equation is simple: a stint in the dorms, Greek house if applicable, then straight to an Evanston apartment. A full 35 percent of us opt out of campus living. The 65 percent who stay include 99 percent of freshmen. Staying in on-campus housing for four years is undesirable, and based on our housing choices, who can blame us? But the exodus of NU students to Evanston proper is a rut in the road to community enhancement.
Dorm life is vital to the freshman experience. Some sophomores head off campus, but most happily spend another year with the guarantee of clean bathrooms and rent covered blindly by Mom and Dad. But after two years, a vivid antipathy develops to dining halls, strict CAs and too many mystery smells.
So off-campus we go, the lucky and endowed to the Green Doors on Clark Street or Evanston Place, the cash-strapped to Ridge Avenue. For the simple pleasure of a personal kitchen and living with a few close, carefully selected roommates, we’ll shell out hundreds in rent for quarters we go aboard after failing to find a subletter. We’ll trek a mile back and forth from campus in February. We’ll put up with unsafe side streets every night.
The Residential College Board has tried to keep dwellers in themed housing through their junior years. Although these students associate part of their NU identity with their housing, by the third year, many res college facilities have likewise proven inadequate.
Kemper Hall is perhaps the only genuinely appealing option to upper-classmen, but demand is high and supply is low for suites, and it’s impractical for the South Campus-centric.
This isn’t the only way. Temple University in Philadelphia offers apartment-style housing with a full kitchen and living room. Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers upperclassmen suites of singles with a huge common room and a resident assistant who is more building super than disciplinarian. Ninety-seven percent of Harvard undergraduates stay in campus housing all four years, because dorms are more appealing than pricey Cambridge apartments.
Building upperclassman housing or renovating current facilities would be costly. Purchasing new buildings could increase town-gown conflict in the short run, but more students living together in swankier shared space also would improve NU’s eternally debated “community.” We have our whole lives, or at the least our 20s, to live in apartments with friends on our own. NU shouldn’t compel us to start now.
Medill junior Elizabeth Keating can be reached at [email protected].
