Last Tuesday, representatives from Kirchoff Campus Properties, the Dean of Students Office and Facilities Services unveiled new plans for a long-awaited housing project. The proposed Adirondack Apartments and new Ridgeline construction will be available in 2016’s upperclassmen housing lottery. These buildings, which will include townhouse-style apartments, will open up new beds for those students opting to live on campus. Overall, we at the Campus cautiously applaud this development.
The building project will replace the modular homes, which have served as housing long past their expiration date. The announcement of this new development arrives as the College comes to terms with a minor housing crisis. Increased enrollment has packed College dorms to the gills. And now, the overenrolled, 629-person sophomore class will enter the upperclassmen housing lottery this year, competing for a small number of housing units relative to their class size.
Without new housing options on campus, these students will be more likely to live off campus. This year, with an unusually large number of students living off campus, the College has already faced conflict with students’ neighbors. We saw a rift beginning to open between the College and the town. In an interview, President Liebowitz acknowledged that the College needed a solution to remedy the current housing situation, both on and off campus.
While we at the Campus recognize that there have been problems with off-campus living, we also feel that it has a certain value. Students who live away from the school learn how to navigate landlord relationships, how to be a part of a neighborhood and how to manage utility costs. In other words, they learn how to be independent and start to integrate themselves into life outside the college bubble. While some students struggle with these responsibilities, most thrive.
Furthermore, students who responsibly live off-campus help harmonize the town and the College. Students living alongside townspeople help to break down the psychosocial barriers between the two. We believe that if the College were to drastically lower the number of students living off campus, it would only serve to widen the divide.
The new housing, which was fast tracked during the most recent Board of Trustees meeting after having been postponed years ago due to prior budget constraints, is intended to entice older students living off campus to come back. This way the College can start to cut back on the distribution of off campus spots while at the same time more easily monitoring a greater number of students.
In doing this, however, the College risks losing a popular on-campus spot. Though the mods’ social scene has been less raucous in recent years, the memories of the quirky trailer park-esque neighborhood and their Modapalooza parties are strongly connected to the experiences of many Middlebury students. We at the Campus believe that the new on-campus housing should maintain a similar social sentiment. We hope that the Adirondack Apartments can fill the role that the the mods played in student life and continue to encourage community, unlike the Ross townhouses, which are similar in nature to the new housing plan, yet do not foster much of a neighb0rly attitude for their residents.
Ultimately, we at the Campus support these actions to remedy the housing situation. In fact, creating new housing around the Ridgeline area to bring seniors back on campus was one of the solutions we recommended to the College back in the fall. That being said, and building on our last editorial about the end of tuition increases calculated by CPI+1, the administration must be transparent about the origins of this new housing’s funding. While we commend the College for seeking student input on housing plans thus far, this pattern of transparency must continue, and it must be well-received by Middlebury students. All students, but particularly underclassmen who are likely to live in this new housing, should not pass up this opportunity to contribute to the plans and ensure that these townhouses will be made into homes.
