Jeremiah Tillman is considering moving off-campus next year.
“It’s not bad,” said the SESP junior. “I’m just tired of smuggling my alcohol.”
A newly created CTEC-like service is intended to help Tillman and others like him prepare to leave Northwestern residence halls. Associated Student Government’s Off-Campus Housing Evaluations, which became operational over Winter Break, use student-provided information to create a database of housing options sortable by address, rent, perceived quality of housing and other standards.
The site also allows students to examine each listing for further information, such as distance to transit stops and the utilities included in the price of the rent, as well as individual comments.
Bill Pulte, ASG’s vice president and public relations director, said the Web site was a good choice for ASG to expand its available services.
“It’s a low-cost initiative and kids want this type of resource, myself included,” the Medill junior said. “If you’re a Northwestern student, it’s hard to know which apartments and which landlords are legitimate.”
The service in its current form was proposed last spring and approved by the ASG Senate this fall, but senators were talking about a housing evaluation Web site as early as 2004.
External Relations Chairman Samir Pendse, who is in charge of the service, said the data collected came from more than 400 off-campus students surveyed through off-campus and fraternity e-mail listservs.
Pendse, a Weinberg junior, said the survey and housing guide uploaded to the site came largely from his committee’s insights as to what they themselves would want to know about a housing location, although they also used Evanston and NU resources.
“A lot of the people who were working on this were underclassmen who hadn’t lived off campus, so it was mostly brainstorming ourselves,” Pendse said.
The site’s survey uses NetIDs to check whether visitors are NU students, but does not verify commenters’ addresses or identities. However, Pendse said there was no practical method for checking an individual’s address and the potential for abuse of this system was low.
“The opportunity is there, but we don’t think it will be used,” he said. “They could be mad with their landlord and slander and lie, but they have the same opportunity with their CTECs and their professor.”
Pendse said he had been focused on off-campus housing because of his committee’s jurisdiction, but there had been discussion about creating a dorm ranking system again as well.
“Once we’ve actually done it once, we know how to do it,” he said. “So it’ll be something that we’ll look to do going forward.”
According to Pulte, the response to the system’s launch has been overwhelmingly positive and students have already found it useful.
Looking at the Web site for the first time, Communication freshman Corinne Eckart, who said she wanted to move off-campus next year, said she found all the information she wanted.
“I think it’s really helpful, especially when you click and they give you the details,” Eckart said. “I don’t think they left anything out.”
Tillman said that it was the most comprehensive group of housing listings he had seen.
“You could go through the housing sections in the magazines at the gas station, but you won’t do better,” Tillman said.
