On-campus housing attracts upperclassmen

On-campus housing is an increasingly attractive option for upperclassmen. In the last four years, many more undergraduates have requested to live on campus.

Rick Bradley, assistant director of the Department of Housing and Residential Education, attributes much of the increased demand to the new apartment-style units of Ram and Odum villages.

Ram Village has 920 private bedrooms organized around a living room area and kitchen.

Odum Village has a similar layout, although Bradley said the apartments are slightly bigger. Ram was built in 2006, 40 years after Odum.

“The reason we built Ram Village and converted Odum from student family housing to apartments was to attract and meet the needs of upperclassmen students,” Bradley said.

“It had the impact we expected: when looking at peer institutions, we have more upperclassmen on campus and that number has increased significantly and continues to increase since the early 2000’s, when we started the renovations. There has definitely been an increase in demand.”

Bradley said that in 2006, 7721 undergraduates lived on campus. In 2010 that number was 8562, an increase of more than 10 percent.

Since Ram and Odum villages’ conversion, Baity Hill Apartments provide student family housing. Each of Baity’s 400 units includes two bedrooms, a living room and a newly renovated kitchen. Most of the residents are graduate students, but Bradley said a few undergraduates who have families also make Baity their home.

The housing department will continue making renovations on existing buildings this summer. Two-thirds of the residence halls have gone through renovations since the early 2000’s.

Bradley said Craige and Ehringhaus Residence Halls will be getting brand-new sprinkler systems. Ehringhaus will no longer be the only residence hall on campus without air conditioning.

Buildings are not the only things changing this year. The housing sign-up process will continue evolving.

“It seems like we’re always doing something different,” Bradley said. “The [sign-up] process is being tweaked to streamline it and make it more efficient. This year we have the ability to pull people in with fewer pages and fewer forms, to make it a leaner process.”

Freshman Amberly Nardo currently lives in Hinton James Residence Hall. She said the sign-up process could definitely be made easier.

“One of the hardest parts, especially as a freshman, was having to list my preferences for which community I wanted to live in,” Nardo said.

“The housing website didn’t really have pictures of rooms so, without taking location into account, picking where I wanted to live was pretty much a shot in the dark.”

Bradley said that, in addition to almost all first-year students, 70 percent of sophomores, 35 percent of juniors and 18 to 20 percent of seniors also make their home in a residence hall or apartment-style communities.

Granville Towers is now within the UNC on-campus community. It was purchased by the UNC-Chapel Hill Foundation in the summer of 2009. The Foundation is a privately owned company within the University; it handles investments to bring in money to UNC.

Since it is still owned by a private company, Erin Angel, director of sales and marking for Granville Towers, said that the applications are separate from on-campus housing applications.

“The housing department came in to run our resident life program,” Angel said. “So they hire our RA’s- they are employed through the University- and they run programs for our residents.

“We’re definitely partners with the University, but we are still private housing,” Angel said.

Contact the University Editor at university@dailytarheel.com.