HousingStudent Housing
Our student enrollments, along with our SATs, have risen dramatically over the past decade, and so has the number of housing units available. A decade ago there were empty beds, but since the residence halls have been renovated and new apartment buildings completed, we have not been able to keep up with demand.
There are two inherent problems that impinge on expansion of campus housing: first, by State law, the housing budget is self-support; i.e., the students who live in the residence halls must not only pay for operating costs but also pay off the bonds. (It is important to note that no part of the housing fees paid by students goes to any other purpose than the residence halls.) Empty rooms mean larger fees for students living on campus, so it is hard to build with the mere hope that "they will come." We rely on trends in housing and enrollment planning over a five-year period. Second, once the need is perceived, as it certainly has been in recent years, bonding and building new residence halls takes approximately four years. Campus recognition of the growing need has led to the large number of new apartments that have been built on campus recently or are being built now.
Unfortunately, these two factors have created a serious but temporary problem. The tripling in the fall has always in the past dissipated by spring, so, as undesirable as it is, in times of growth it has provided a safety valve. Obviously one important objective is to get rid of the need to triple for any period of time, even a short one. All the temporary solutions are bad: One year we rented rooms on another campus and bussed students to campus, but that was difficult for the students; this year we tried to forge an agreement with a hotel, but could not bring the price down sufficiently for student use. Tripling, bad as it is, seems as good a stop-gap as any other. But of course the point is to have permanent solutions, not stop-gap measures.
Relief is on the way: By next fall, a new facility, housing 172 students, will be completed, and by fall 2009, another housing complex for another 604 students will be ready.
At many major research universities, residence halls are built by private owners in close proximity to the campus. Given the price of real estate here, this has been an elusive solution. But were such apartments to become available, they would certainly provide more availability and greater choice for students.
There is a plan to increase enrollments over time to a total of 27,000 students at Stony Brook and Stony Brook Southampton. Of the additional students, only 500 will be undergraduates on the Stony Brook campus. But housing is not a problem for undergraduates alone. Graduate students, particularly doctoral students, come from all over the country and all over the world. The Master Plan includes an increase of 400 doctoral students in five years. They will need affordable graduate student housing. A task force on Graduate and Professional Student Housing will report soon.
None of these problems can be solved overnight, but they are all necessarily front-burner issues.
Faculty Housing
For new faculty who come to Stony Brook from graduate school or areas that are less expensive than Long Island, housing costs can be a shock. Many new faculty, particularly the newly minted PhDs, need rental units available until they have settled in, had time to look for housing, and improved their financial situations. Post-docs and hospital residents and interns also need rental units. Some new faculty buy homes immediately but the financial strain can be intense. For faculty and other professionals, four initiatives are underway:
Housing is one of those knotty top-priority problems that we must resolve. It is not easy or fast. We need to be both flexible and creative. Please let me know any suggestions you have.