The timing couldn't be worse. Graduate students are already facing a housing shortage. Statistics provided by the Housing Office indicate that there were roughly 200 unsuccessful bids for graduate housing in last spring's lottery. That's more than 21 percent of the draw and 8 percent of the total graduate student population. These figures, moreover, represent a substantial increase in the number of graduate students who failed to obtain housing in previous years.
It doesn't have to be this way. When faced with housing shortages for graduate students in the past, the University has taken prompt and responsible action. At the beginning of the decade, when a housing crunch displaced a large number of graduate students, Princeton built hundreds of new units in the Lawrence complex south of campus. In meetings with the Graduate Student Gover in 2002, the University claimed that New Lawrence was only the beginning. Then-Provost Amy Gutmann acknowledged that the new units in the Lawrence complex would not fully meet demand and promised graduate students that the construction of more housing was a certainty.
Yet the new plan includes no additional graduate housing. Instead, it projects a more than 10 percent increase in the graduate population in the next decade. And a preliminary assessment based on information made available by the Housing Office indicates that when the new plan is complete, there may be fewer units available to graduate students than there are now. While about 250 units at Hibben-Magie and the Stanworth Apartments will be converted to graduate housing, graduate students will lose more than 300 units when the Butler Apartments are demolished.
Instead of constructing more housing, the University will create a website offering apartment listings in the Princeton area on the premise that graduate students can "rely on the local rental and real estate market to satisfy any unmet need."
This assumption is based on wishful thinking rather than reality. The Housing Office itself warned incoming graduate students in last year's publication "Housing and the Cost of Living for Graduate Students" that "private off-campus housing in Princeton is in short supply." Anyone who's searched for housing in Princeton could confirm the rest of what the Housing Office had to say about the rental market: Rents are staggering, utility bills are high, and apartments within a graduate student's budget are almost always located far enough away to require a car and a commute. This would be terribly inconvenient, to say nothing of the parking dilemmas and pollution additional commuters would bring.
For the rental market to accommodate demand, there would have be a significant influx of inexpensive apartments in Princeton. But undeveloped land in the surrounding area is almost entirely owned by the University. And even if this property was made available, current zoning laws and skyrocketing property values make it unlikely private developers will pick up the slack: There's no money in constructing cheap apartments on expensive real estate.
Graduate students will bear the brunt of the new plan's bad effects. But there are other losers as well. Over time, the very nature of the University will change. Princeton prides itself on both the quality of students and faculty it can attract and a unique character that relies on a balanced ratio of undergraduates, graduate students and faculty, which currently hovers around 5:3:1. Each of these groups needs the other.
Under the new plan, the University will likely find it harder to attract the best and the brightest graduate students, which in turn will discourage both current and prospective faculty. Undergraduates, meanwhile, will find it more difficult to interact with preceptors who find it less convenient to come to campus every day. If the University does not create a housing plan that realistically addresses the problem we now face, Princeton's close-knit community will start to unravel. More housing, not less, is what we need.
Anne Twitty is a graduate student in the history department. She can be reached at atwitty@princeton.edu.
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