Due to legal restrictions, the extension to Umrath House, to be completed next year, will not be able to fill all of its 188 available beds.

This newest addition will add 59 beds to the South 40, replacing the old Rubelmann Hall’s capacity of 129 residents. Washington University will likely not be able to fill all of these beds, however, due to a cap on the total number of beds on the South 40, set by the city of Clayton at 3,300.

A crane operator positions metal framework in high wind conditions on Wednesday, Feb. 3. The new dorm will become part of Umrath House.

While the University may be forced to keep the new Umrath House below capacity in its first year of operation, administrators say they are confident the cap will not prove to be an obstacle to their long term plans.

Assistant vice chancellor for community relations and local government affairs Cheryl Adelstein noted that the cap is not a new restriction, and in fact has been adjusted to fit the University’s needs in the past several years.

“Up until 2010, we had a requirement that we could have no more than 3,000 people living on the South 40,” she said. “So in 2010 we came forward and said to Clayton, ‘Here’s the next stages of the master plan for the South 40; here’s what we’re thinking, and we would really like to increase our occupancy to 3,300.”

The cap was expanded, but with the expansion of class sizes over the past five years, the new cap will be exceeded next year.

“The number of beds on the South 40 over the past 20 years has kind of been a moving target,” associate vice chancellor for students Rob Wild said. “We’ve tried our best to stay just under the cap, and this is one of the first times we’ve been even a few beds over.”

Wild added that there will be “slightly more” than 3,300 beds filled on the South 40 next year, but that he does not anticipate it to be a problem.

“Most of the beds that we leave open will be beds that are naturally left open through the natural housing process,” he said. “Beds open up because a roommate moves out or joins a fraternity or for various other reasons.”

As such, while the bed cap will be exceeded, the city of Clayton nonetheless allowed the University to build the new Umrath House, with the understanding that, on average, only up to 3,300 will be filled.

“Clayton is very well aware that we have more than 3,300 beds, but we have a commitment to them to try to continue to average 3,300 occupants over the course of an academic year,” Wild said.

Administrators do not feel the cap will pose a significant obstacle in the future.

“We don’t have a plan to take in larger and larger classes. We have approval from the board to go to 7,000 students, so that means that classes of the size of the last couple of years are about the largest classes that we have approval to go to,” Provost Holden Thorp said. “So whether we eventually wanted to ask Clayton to raise the cap or not doesn’t really have anything to do with the increased enrollment.”

In any case, the completion of the new Umrath House next year means that more freshmen will live on the South 40, with less being displaced to the Village.

“We did have some students who had to go to the Village this year, but that’s because Rubelmann was offline. We don’t expect that situation to happen again anytime soon,” Thorp said. “This is the maximum class size we’re going to have until we would go to the board for approval to get any larger, which we don’t have any immediate plans to do, so the situation is pretty much going to stay as it is for the time being.”