Delmar Loop Lofts assignment unwelcome for sophomore students

| Staff Reporter

The Lofts of Washington University are near completion, but the additional space hasn’t alleviated current sophomores’ housing concerns.

For some sophomores, panic ensued on March 22 when those who had applied for housing on the North Side or off campus through Round 2 housing selection were notified of their assignments. Many students found they had been placed in the Lofts even after ranking it last on their petitions due to its high price tag and distance from Danforth Campus.

Sophomores Stephanie Langella, Charlotte Bourg and Meredith Klashman did not want to live in the Lofts due to the apartments’ distance from campus: without a car, it would be inconvenient to travel between the Lofts and their classes.

“They’re so far away from campus, and I won’t have a car next year,” Langella said. “And they’re way more expensive than most other housing options. It just doesn’t make sense to pay more to live in such a faraway location.”

The high price of the Lofts, $12,566 per year for a two- or three-bedroom apartment, also contributed to the sophomores’ aversion to the Lofts. The Lofts are one of the farthest Residential Life-owned housing buildings from campus, but there are equally priced to options that are significantly closer to campus.

“You had to rank the Lofts, so we put them last, and in the comments [we] said that we couldn’t afford them,” Langella said.

Despite what they wrote in the comment section on their housing petition, the three girls were placed in the Lofts. They had from midnight on Friday to the following Tuesday, the accept/reject deadline for housing assignments, to figure out what they were going to do.

“We called and emailed ResLife, but since they gave out assignments on Friday at midnight we couldn’t get in contact with anyone,” Langella said. “So we emailed a bunch of off-campus apartments to try to find an open place because we had no idea how or if ResLife would help us on Monday.”

Langella and her roommates were able to find a privately owned apartment on Washington Avenue over the weekend and rejected their ResLife assignment. Because they rejected it before April 2, they will not face the $500 fine for cancelling a ResLife contract.

Sophomores Rachel Eun, Laura Harrison and Jess Weiss had wanted to live in the Millbrook Square Apartments on the North Side of campus.

“Going into housing, we told ourselves that the Lofts were super nice and new, but we put [them] as our last choice,” Eun said. “We didn’t want to pay that much knowing that there are other options that we could have chosen if we hadn’t gone through the ResLife selection process.”

Eun explained that the three of them had decided they wanted to live on campus for their junior year and that they had chosen not to live in an off-campus apartment they found in December, thinking that they would get housing on campus.

When they saw that they had been placed in the Lofts, the future roommates tried looking online for available non-ResLife apartments near campus but couldn’t find anything.

“We realize that our lottery number as a whole was not that impressive, but our parents are pretty bummed out that we have to pay that much when we didn’t even ask to live there,” Eun said. “I just don’t think it’s a reasonable price for us to be stuck with.”

Because the group only had a four-day time frame to accept or reject Residential Life’s offer, the three decided that they could not wait around for an apartment to be on the market and accepted the offer.

Tim Lempfert, associate director of Residential Life and director of housing operations, explained that students who ranked the Lofts low or last on their list were still assigned there because all students who petition for housing are guaranteed placement.

“If students entered the Round 2 petition process and their lottery number average wasn’t sufficient to get them into one of their first-choice locations, but it was good enough to get into one of those locations [ranked on the petition],” Lempfert said, “we’re still going to offer them that space so that they have the option [to stay in ResLife housing], and then they can make that determination.”

Lempfert directed students who had concerns about paying for their assigned housing to Student Financial Services.

“Student Financial Services has informed us that they want to hear from students who have concerns about the costs associated with going to Washington University,” Lempfert said. “My recommendation would be to follow that advice and reach out to that staff so they can have a conversation and determine what the next step should be.”

Langella felt that Student Financial Services would not have been able to help her group in the short time frame in which it had to accept or reject the petition.

“There is absolutely not enough time to talk to both offices and straighten things out in just two days,” Langella said, “so that’s ridiculous.”

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