Two New Residential Clusters Planned

by Chloe Mulderig

Building on the glorious aesthetic success of the "Tree Houses," the Office of Residential Life has announced further plans to solve the housing crunch. The College has decided to build permanent housing. The Tree Houses are only supposed to be a five to ten year temporary solution —just as the River dorms and the Choates were originally planned to be. The plans will replace and augment the already unpopular housing to accomodate the many students living on campus as off-campus options disappear.

The large class of 2005, as well as the SLI's effort to keep students out of the Greek houses, contributed to the current housing crunch. Many sophomores called for ORL to allow them to live in Greek houses in the fall, but Director of Housing Lynn Rosenblum said that the option was not and will not be considered.

ORL states that it intends to continue attempting to house students on campus as comfortably as possible. This translates to students living in converted lounges, singles-turned-doubles, and the Tree Houses. Rosenblum stated that she "has little to do with the planning" of the new hall and refused to talk to The Dartmouth Review regarding the plans, as did Martin Redman, Dean of Residential Life.

ORL will spend over $60 million to build new residences. The plans calls for two new clusters of residence halls, one on Maynard Street and the second on Tuck Mall. A final decision concerning the time-frame for the projects is pending. Most likely, the Maynard Street residences will be built before the Tuck Mall project.

The Maynard site, already approved by the Hanover Zoning Board, is located in the medical school parking lot. The Tuck Mall site is located on Tuck Drive. According to Roland Adams of Dartmouth Public Affairs and Reed Bergwall, Director of Facilities Planning, the new Maynard Street housing will be a cluster of long, interconnected buildings "to get more students on each floor for social interaction." The buildings will be the same height and scale as McCulloch, Dartmouth’s newest dorm, that houses roughly eighty students. The dormitory will consist of two-room doubles for freshmen, but Adams notes "other variations are under study for the possibility of including upperclassmen room types." These buildings will have elevators to meet with current accessibility requirements, kitchens, social spaces, and study rooms.

Maynard Street’s addition will house 500 students and the Tuck Mall project will hold an additional 200 beds. The firm, Moore Ruble Yudell Architects, in partnership with Bruner Cott, will design the Maynard Street project. Atkins Olshin Lawson-Bell will design the Tuck Mall project, and North Branch Construction, the same company Dartmouth used to build McCulloch last year, will build it.

Even though ORL scrambled to throw together the Tree Houses to fit all on-campus students, it states there was no housing problem. Officials note that the housing crunch of Fall 2000 was avoided this year, in large part due to the shifting of FSPs. This fall, eighteen FSPs (originally nineteen, now eighteen after the cancellation of the St. Petersburg FSP) sent almost 300 students across the globe, as opposed to last year's thirteen trips. This winter’s seven trips will make 150 new beds available, although the fall’s 300 returning students will need housing.

Students, frustrated with the constant construction on campus, wonder if more construction is really necessary. ORL did not build any full-scale residential clusters after the River and Choates until the elite East Wheelock Cluster. These four buildings, Andres, McCulloch, Morton and Zimmerman, house 314 students, but many residents of the halls believe the space could be put to better use. Residents of six room quads in Andres and Zimmerman have over 800 square feet for four people. One said that "this housing crunch is ridiculous. We could easily fit two, three, even four more students in our suite and still be more comfortable than a lot of our friends in the River or Choates." The housing office, however, chose not to place more students in the East Wheelock Cluster. 326 freshmen applied and only 114 were accepted. East Wheelock acceptance rates were even lower for upperclassmen.