According to the California Lutheran University website, the university guarantees housing to any student that desires it, be it an incoming freshman, a new transfer, or a returning junior.   This year’s policy was no different. Every student who wanted housing received it. It just wasn’t housing that was necessarily on campus.

This year, 15 male students were placed in overflow housing at The Knolls Apartments off of Avenida de Los Arboles. These apartments are contracted by the school and the students receive the same fees as if they were living on campus.

“All of the same policies exist. We have those students sign an acknowledgement of what our policies are as if they were living on campus. And because it is an apartment complex in our community here, the landlord treats them the same way, and knows to communicate with us if there are issues,” said Nate Fall, Assistant Director of Residence Life.

The apartments are furnished with every utility that on campus housing provides, including Wi-Fi. These students are housed temporarily as the numbers for the current amount of students in on campus housing are still changing.  At the beginning of each school year, there are a number of students who pull out of housing for various reasons. Residence Life then takes these empty beds and assigns them to students in the overflow housing. At most, the students living in the overflow apartments will be there for the semester.

“As soon as we discover an open bed or we get a student who cancels, we ask them to move into that open bed in about 72 hours depending on where we’re at in the semester. We actually just pulled one student yesterday,” said Fall.

While the use of the Knolls Apartments is not an unprecedented occurrence for CLU, the numbers this year are higher than normal. In addition to using the over flow housing off campus, the school is also utilizing two university owned houses on Faculty Street for 14 female students. These houses will most likely be used for the entire year.

As far as resident assistants are concerned, while there is not an official RA for the off campus apartments, it does not mean that the students are off the hook.

Nolan Monsibay, an RA in Pederson, said “That jurisdiction falls to Grace Hall. They don’t do rounds there per say, but they’re on call if something were to happen, so the Grace or Kramer RAs would go there.”

With the amount of overflow of students this year, there is the question of building a new residence hall in the near future.

When asked about this, President Kimball said “The last 2 years we’ve kind of put that [idea] on hold. But now with this year’s housing numbers, as well as some other factors, we’re back to thinking about, well maybe we should build one more residence hall. Probably not as big as Grace and Trinity, a smaller size.”

While this year’s housing numbers may spark some discussion about new residence halls, it will probably not come into effect any time soon. For the time being, students may be asked to live in university contracted off campus apartments.

Sarah DeLaGarrigue
Staff Writer
Published Sept. 18, 2013