Time to change the way we deal with housing

Few issues unite the Tufts University student body quite like the housing lottery. One might imagine that, at a school where the majority of the undergraduate population is made up of full-time, non-commuting students, the system for finding housing would be nearly perfected by now, or, at the least, relatively pain-free. The unfortunate truth that thousands of undergraduates come to learn each spring, however, is that this is by no means the case.

Proposed solutions for this multi-faceted issue range from the simple task of making the ResLife website easier to navigate to the improbable task of building more dormitories to establishing more special interest housing. While all of these changes would most likely work to ease some of the struggles of the housing search, especially if they are enacted in combination, no definitive plans seem to be in place, or at least have not been openly shared. While it would be nice -- and in many cases necessary -- to update and improve many of the pre-existing dorms on campus, it is perhaps more important to ensure that all students, at the very least, do not have to worry about whether they will find a place to live for the upcoming year.

But while the majority of the responsibility for securing adequate student housing falls on the shoulders of the university, students must also realize that their actions have the ability to -- and do -- make a broken system worse. Confused and frustrated by a housing assignment system that is based solely on the lottery, rising sophomores feel panicked when it comes time to find roommates and register to choose housing only a few weeks into their second semester.A lack of accessible information about which dorms have historically necessitated which lottery numbers causes a general sense of uncertainty about which options are available to which students, a confusion that drove many students to dishonesty this past lottery session. Numerous groups seeking to secure group housing in dormitories such as Hillside Apartments and Latin Way Suites have been accused of signing up with upperclassmen with whom they had no intentions of actually living, only to take advantage of their higher numbers and split the withdrawal fee upon their moving out. Though students were threatened with disciplinary actions if ResLife were to find out about such intentions, little could be done to ensure that the housing assignment system remained absolutely fair, and many groups of sophomores found their options more limited than expected as the necessary lottery number averages to secure certain dorms were much higher than in years past. It is important to remember that while the housing lottery system is, undeniably, convoluted and difficult to navigate, we owe it to our peers and fellow students to be honest and bear in mind that we are all struggling to make the best of the same situation.

Finding student housing, both on- and off-campus, is a necessity plagued by countless issues that have no immediate solutions, but while it is easy to be self-interested and concerned only with the housing struggles that one faces on an individual basis, no changes will be made if we do not approach each situation as part of a greater broken system.