We’ve all seen the construction site along Massachusetts Avenue, the bare bones of what will soon become another housing unit for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Massachusetts. The buildings will replace the Lincoln Apartments and North Village Apartments, which is now called University Village. This project endeavors to make housing more easily available in a competitive University-area housing.
How much did this endeavor cost, though? A whopping $274 million. The breakdown of this project, according to UMass, is approximately $200 million for the undergraduate and graduate housing, along with an extra $73.8 million for the student family housing, part of which is being paid for through “campus borrowing.” Now, if you’re like me, your first thought would be, “wow, that’s a lot of money,” but your second thought would be, “I can definitely think of other places on campus that could use at least a portion of that money.” Personally, Southwest Residential Area would be the first place I’d direct money for improvements.
Southwest is the biggest residential area on campus. The buildings were completed in the early 1970s, meaning they likely still have all of the architectural downsides of that time, like single paned windows. The only big renovations to the area were focused on sustainability and environmental improvements that are “integrated throughout the landscape to encourage student interaction.” So, the actual dorm buildings have much of the same infrastructure and technology that they did nearly half a century ago. As I mentioned before, this likely includes single paned windows instead of double paned, which aren’t as effective when it comes to insulation.
Thousands of first-year students experience their first year of college in these dorms. Southwest is known for its skyscraper-like towers and active nightlife, but it is also known for its shoddy elevators, unreliable heating and cooling and single gendered bathrooms on every floor of the towers. If you’re a woman living on the floor with the male bathroom, you have to go up or down a floor to use the bathroom for any reason. It’s 2023, it really seems like we should have male and female bathrooms on every floor.
Do we really want freshmen to have to experience this for their first year at our school? I get it, money can be tight, and who wants to shut down a building for construction when people will still live there with few complaints? But I believe that people who are paying good money to be here should be able to live in a dorm where they feel comfortable. They shouldn’t have to go to a different floor to go to the bathroom or file a complaint to maintenance about how freezing or hot their room is. Your room is meant to be a place you can go to when you want to relax. You should feel comfortable. I think that’s worth taking the time over the summer to change out the single paned windows for double paned windows, and adding another bathroom to each floor.
I am not calling for Southwest to be ripped down and rebuilt. I’m also not against the new housing they are working on now because it will improve the lives of some new students. But what about the students who are already living here, who are invested in this school and want to be proud of it? I think that should be reason enough to make a few changes.
Katie Seda can be reached at [email protected] and followed on twitter @KatieSeda_.
