Cyde Weys Musings

The University of Maryland is facing a serious housing crisis. Just two days ago, the Department of Resident Life announced that all rising seniors who had planned to live on campus in the dorms (nearly 600 of them) would instead be denied housing and told to find off-campus housing on their own. This was two weeks after the deadline for applications to live in all of the on-campus and near-campus apartments and suite-style living affiliated with the University. The housing market around here is already harsh anyway, and the city of College Park has made it quite clear that they don’t like all of these students living in their midst.

There is no short term solution, so many students are simply going to have to find housing somewhere within driving distance of University of Maryland and commute. Housing prices on all of the nearby walkable houses are going to go through the roof, and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone. Just get a house in Hyattsville and buy a used car with the money you’d be saving. Long term solutions, like the construction of new on-campus dormitories, have actually been denied in recent years, though hopefully, after the outcry out of this, whoever holds the power of the purse will reconsider and grant funding to alleviate Maryland’s desperate housing crisis.

Here’s some more background information as published in The Diamondback, University of Maryland’s #1 student newspaper.

April 5, 2007

• “More than 600 students rejected from housing” - news article.
• “Kicked to the curb” - staff editorial.

April 6, 2007

• “Hundreds scrambling for shelter” - news article.
• “Residents shocked after abrupt ResLife announcement” - news article.
• “Housing bill ready for delegates” - news article.
• “Disaster” - staff editorial.
• “Curse the whole system” - my opinion column.
• “Resident Life timing unjustifiable” - guest opinion column by Vice President of the Resident Halls Association.
• “Mission accomplished” - letter to the editor.

As you can see, this is a huge issue on-campus and it has been covered in extreme depth by The Diamondback. The timing of this was actually rather lucky (at least for me, not for the people being evicted from housing). On Tuesday I had written a column recommending a student-run system for exchanging used textbooks as a way to bypass the exorbitant fees sliced off the top by commercial resellers like the university’s bookstore. I sent it in to my editor, and he gets back to me by Wednesday saying, “Look at this opinion column from Monday and tell me how your idea differs from his …”

Well, wouldn’t you know it, someone had basically written the exact same damn idea I wanted to write about, but two days earlier, and what’s worse, I missed it. So I was scrambling around on Thursday looking for another idea to write about when the housing crisis unfolded, giving me the perfect subject to write about.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 11:05 and is filed under Maryland, Personal. Keywords: Tags: dormitory, housing, housing crisis, off-campus housing, on-campus housing, University of Maryland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.