Dying breed: South Campus family housing to cease at end of academic year

By: Uyen Nguyen

Posted: 10/24/08

Jamie Desjardins lives with her daughter and husband on Slocum Heights on South Campus.

Families used to take turns dropping off and picking up kids from day care, she said. Or they would watch children for one another. That support system that had once been there is now gone, she said.

Now her neighbors are all undergraduates. There is only one other family living on South Campus.

"My daughter was the only kid on the playground," she said.

Desjardins, a doctoral student in the audiology program at Syracuse University, is living in one of the two last family housing units on campus.

As soon as these two families finish their degrees, families will no longer be allowed to occupy campus housing.

"I'm extremely devastated about the whole thing because we had originally come here
because they had the family housing," Desjardins said.

Desjardins, 31, currently lives in an apartment on Slocum. But in November, her family will be moving off campus as well. The move is in order to find a more hospitable environment for her family, she said.

Undergraduates predominantly occupy her apartment complex. It's an uncomfortable situation to place graduate students and undergraduate students together, she said. There are huge differences in age as well as lifestyle, she added.

"There's no way we could live here with our daughter," she said.

The first year that her family came to the school, they were admitted into the family
housing, but were never told of the intent to discontinue the program, according to Desjardins.

Toward the end of her first year, rumors began to circulate that family housing was no longer going to be offered, she said. Many families opted to leave at that point. Her family decided to stay.

In her first year here at SU, there were around 20 families on South Campus.

South Campus had once been all family housing, said Kristopher Millett, the associate director of South Campus Housing.
The apartments on South Campus were actually designed in a way to accommodate families.

"That's why there is the discrepancy in size of the bedrooms," Millett said. "Otherwise, there wouldn't be differences."

But with the increasing undergraduate population in recent years, there is a change in the climate of the college, he said.

Family housing on campus began after World War II, said Gillian Budman, the associate director for North and South Campus Housing.
A few years ago, however, SU made the decision to stop offering family housing. For 2007-2008, the number of full-time undergraduate students increased to 12,491.

"Undergraduate housing is in high demand, whereas demand for family housing is low," Budman said.

There is also a pattern of families who start off with university housing because of the campus atmosphere and security. Living off-campus is more economically beneficial, and also allows for parents to start exploring the different school systems for their children. As time progresses, they start wanting to integrate themselves more into the community, Budman said.

"What has occurred over time is the cost of living has gone up, families look to save money," she said. "There are certain amenities to families living off-campus."

Though the university does not want to exclude anyone, there is priority for undergraduate students, Budman
said. Undergraduates are obligated to live on campus for at least two years.

Desjardins believes that the primary reason for the change in population on South Campus is money, she said.

"Families pay half the money that undergrads pay," she said. "We're charged as one student."

The cost for an undergraduate to live in a South Campus apartment is $3,900 per semester. Desjardins' family pays $980 per month, she said. Over the course of one semester, or four months, that sums up to $3,920 for the whole family.

"It's more profitable to have undergrads," she said.

Though she reached out numerous times to administrators from South Campus Housing, she received no help, she said. Everyone she talked to felt bad, but ultimately did nothing, she said.

"Pretty much, they don't care," she said. "At this point, if we could transfer schools, we would."

Emilie Schoeck, 26, a senior environmental studies major, said that one of her major grievances about the school was the lack of support and services offered for non-traditional students.

As a mother of two and a full-time student who also works, she wishes she had known about housing options or day care services, she said. In the three years that she has been at SU, she has never received any support from the institution.

"I've had to bring the kids to class sometimes or even missed classes," she said.

Although she manages, it's been very difficult to try to schedule classes around the time her children get out of school. She often has to take night classes in order to be there to put her children to bed.

Schoeck said that what she fears for most is the safety of her children. Right now they live in a decent neighborhood, but it's beginning to become bad, she said. And there isn't the protection that one gets by being in a campus environment.

Schoeck said she believes that the lack of outreach by the institution could be due to her status as a student at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry student.

However, SUNY-ESF works closely with SU and she takes a lot of SU courses, so she was surprised by the lack of interest and outreach from the university.

"You think they would reach out a little," she said. "Point me in the right direction."

unnguyen@syr.edu