Campus Housing Crisis: The Waitlist, Residence Life, & the Mistake that Launched a Thousand Zillow Searches

At 9 p.m. on Friday, February 28th, around 600 sophomores and juniors received an email informing them that they had been placed on a waitlist for on-campus housing for the next academic year. The email from Residence Life advised waitlisted students that they could not be guaranteed on-campus housing and directed them to resources for finding off-campus housing.

ZACHARY LUTZKY // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE

With Residence Life and all the other college administrative offices closed for the weekend, waitlisted students began a stampede toward the few off-campus residences still available.

“We became aware that something was amiss when we began receiving emails and phone calls on a Friday night and all through the weekend,” said local realtor Angela Bailey. “We had hundreds of phone calls, text messages, and emails, and only had 18 available properties for rent.”

One week after the announcement of the waitlist, Residence Life announced that it would delay the planned closure and renovation of One Tribe Place by one year; initially, there were still 230 people remaining on the waitlist even after the beds in OTP were added to the school’s total residential capacity. As waitlisted students secured off-campus housing or canceled their contracts for other reasons, the size of the waitlist dwindled; according to Maggie Evans, Associate Vice President for Campus Living, as of late April, the housing waitlist contained just 19 students.

Still, much of the drop in waitlisted students happened because they were forced, at least for a time, to seek residential accommodations wherever they could find them. “There were many students who were forced to live off campus, and further away from campus, than they wanted,” said Bailey.

Harriet Kandell, the Director of Housing and Residence Life, said that the announcement about OTP was made as quickly as was feasible.

 “Once we realized the unexpectedly higher demand for housing, we began exploring the possibility of delaying the work in One Tribe Place. This entailed taking time to consult with the firms under contract for the project to determine if we could negotiate delaying the work. We announced the decision to bring OTP back into the inventory for 2022-23 as soon as we confirmed it was a viable option.”

The extent to which the demand for on-campus housing outstripped supply came as a shock to the administration, said Evans. 

“There had been a steady decline in student interest for housing on campus from 2012 until this past year,” she said. “And the pandemic just sort of threw out all of our markers in terms of ability to project interest.”

Harriet Kandell, W&M’s Director of Housing and Residence Life, attributed the spike in demand to the lingering effects of Covid-19 on the students’ sense of community. 

“We learned that due to the disruption from the pandemic, the residential connections of campus were more strongly missed than we realized,” she said in an email. “Upperclassman requests for on-campus housing for Fall 2022 far exceeded even what students had indicated in early December.”

Kandell said that the data obtained from a student survey conducted in December 2021 had turned out to be unrepresentative of the student body’s actual housing plans.

“The responses did not indicate interest to live on campus would be as high as it turned out. However, moving forward we think conducting that survey earlier can facilitate the planning process for both students and the university.”

Throughout the development of the waitlist situation, both Residence Life and the Administration have maintained that a waitlist is normal and expected, with the only surprise this year being its unprecedented size.

“There has always been a wait list of some number,” said Vice President for Student Affairs Ginger Ambler. “The question for us is what is a manageable number. So we are comfortable with managing a waitlist. The reason we brought OTP back online is that we saw unprecedented demand this year that even surveys didn't suggest we would see.”

“We typically have a waitlist for housing,” Kandell echoed. “What was different this year was the size of that waitlist and the high variance in applications for campus housing from the responses we received to our annual survey.”

However, Bailey said that a waitlist shock like this year was not something she had encountered before.

 “We have not had to deal with a waitlist previously,” she said. “The demand for off-campus rentals is always high, but this year it was condensed into a very short period of time and people were frantic to secure housing.”

 Similarly, a current RA who spoke to the Flat Hat Magazine said that the notion that a waitlist was unavoidable rang hollow. 

“When we had our staff meeting to discuss it, it seemed like my area director had to phrase it in a way that wasn’t going against Reslife because she was like, ‘Look, there was always a possibility of the waitlist, we always made it known that there was this possibility,’” she said. “And you know, in 2017 there was another waitlist and then in 2012 or something, and [the area director] was like, ‘it's happened before.’ And we were all like, ‘Well, it's actually not clear because obviously [in] the past three years … everyone has gotten their housing.’ And you’d think if there was going to be a waitlist and you'd figure that out earlier in the semester so people would have time to get off-campus housing.”

The RA also described Residence Life as hobbled by a lack of transparency and communication and said that it was unsurprising that Residence Life and the administration misapprehended the reality on the ground in terms of what students wanted for housing.

“Among the other RAs, our reaction was like, ‘Wow, Reslife has been really incompetent at handling this,’” she said. “That kind of makes sense given our interactions with how Reslife has been handling our positions or different things like that. But we were obviously very frustrated.”

The two RAs that the magazine spoke with, both of whom asked to remain anonymous, described the problems of the waitlist and the housing crisis as products of deep-seated issues within Residence Life, which they attributed to short-staffing, a lack of transparency and communication, and an overly prescriptive departmental culture.

“I think one of the biggest causes of the problems Reslife has been having is the bureaucracy separating RAs, area directors, higher-ups at Reslife, and then even further than that the William and Mary administration themselves,” said the first RA. “I think it also has to do with the William and Mary administration being focused on making more money for the school, which comes into play with the housing crisis, since they chose to admit more people.”

She also said that the news of the waitlist came as a surprise even to lower-level Residence Life employees.

“My area director was talking to us about what happened. And she was like, ‘Yeah, I really had no control over this. I had no idea this was happening,’” she said. “And honestly, the way she framed it in the meeting was that the people higher up in Reslife didn’t have control over what was happening either, because they were handed down decisions from even higher, from William and Mary admin. It was the same thing when the mask mandate was changed all of a sudden. My area director had a meeting that night and she was like, ‘I did not know this was happening. I don’t really know what to tell you guys about enforcing this or what this means for the fact that you’ve enforced this for so long.’”

The RA said that breakdowns in communication were endemic in the department at multiple levels.

“It seems like there's a pretty big divide between people like my area director and the people above her, where if she gets complaints from us as RAs, those complaints don't really go back to the people who are actually in charge,” she said. “And then at the end of last semester, we filled out a survey, talking about what we would want to improve about the job. They made it seem like things would change and that we would be listened to. But then, we came back the next semester and my area director said, 'Well, I saw all of your concerns, but they go against the rules that we already have. So actually, I can't listen to them at all.’”

The other RA I spoke with echoed the sentiment, saying that dealing with the opaque bureaucracy of Residence Life resembles living and working in a Catch-22.

“I feel like there have been absolutely no official channels for RAs to talk to higher-ups about their job experience or about changes that should be made within the job,” she said.

Both pointed to staffing shortages at all levels of the department as causes of some of its ailments.

“They've had a number of area director vacancies,” said the first RA. “For example, last semester my area director was spread over my area and then part of someone else's area who had left the position.”

The second RA expressed frustration about her hardships that have come from attrition among RAs.

“Someone on my staff quit at the start of the semester,” she said. “And so now I have to go and check on their residents as well and make sure that that whole other floor is doing OK, which essentially doubles my workload. And I was already doing a double workload because there are supposed to be two RAs on my floor, but I'm the only one. So I essentially have quadruple what Reslife says I should be doing, but I'm not being compensated any more for that.”

She also discussed what she saw as problems with the overall departmental culture.

“Throughout various issues that I've seen with Reslife, I feel like the professional staff's response is consistently to try and pretend like nothing is wrong rather than admitting like there is an issue and they need to work extra to fix that issue. And I feel like to an extent that’s also the way RAs are taught to operate.”

In her email, Harriet Kandell said that Residence Life already maintains adequate communication channels with its student employees.

“Residence Life conducts weekly meetings with both full-time and student/RA/HA staff,” she said. “Updates and information are routinely shared back and forth in these meetings. Questions and concerns from RAs are shared with the area directors, and addressed as needed.”

Evans, the Associate Vice President for Campus Living, said in an email that Residence Life, like many employers around the country, is currently struggling to fill vacancies. 

“Similar to most industries right now, including higher education, Residence Life has vacant positions. We are in the process of filling a few open spots. Supporting our current residents and staff is a top priority,” she said.

As of May 1, five positions in Residence Life’s online staff directory — two of them for area directors — were listed as vacant.

 Kandell also said that Reslife was hoping to improve how it communicates with students and RAs.

 “We have been considering and planning for the development of a committee for Head Staff and Resident Assistants to gather and share direct feedback with Residence Life leadership,” she said. “Once we are fully staffed we will be able to make additional progress on this initiative.”

On April 21st, the Administration announced its ambitious 10-year plan to demolish or conduct major renovations on 80% of the College’s residential capacity. The way the renovation is currently estimated to proceed, the lowest point the College will reach in terms of bed capacity will be 4,500 beds, 200 fewer than are currently in use this year, said Amy Sebring, W&M’s Chief Operating Officer.

According to Ambler, one of the core motivations for the housing development plan is the positive impact that on-campus housing has on students.

“Nationally, there's a lot of data that supports positive educational outcomes for students who live in residence halls,” she said. “They tend to graduate in less time and seek more advanced degrees. Overall, they are more satisfied with their educational experience and have stronger relationships, both with peers and also with faculty and staff.”

Strikingly, however, the plan does not entail any expansion of the College’s total dorm capacity.

“This [plan] isn't an expansion of either our housing or dining facilities,” said Sebring. “It really is intended to be a replacement and revitalization of those spaces.”

According to Evans, this year’s housing crisis has not changed the administration’s ultimate assessment that there is no need to increase the number of on-campus beds.

“In the longer term, our consultants are under the impression with the information they have that development will continue off campus,” Evans said. “So there will likely be more off campus growth, whether that’s small apartment complexes or larger ones. And we also have the enrollment cliff that we're heading toward nationally. The demographics for traditional college-age students will take a dip beginning in 2025. That's directly related to the recession in 2008.”

Sebring said that there is still some uncertainty regarding the current and future supply of off-campus residences.

“The remaining wild card for us is the local real estate market,” she said. “There's so little supply right now for housing that we have people in short term rental property that normally would be student-occupied. I think all of the economic forecasts say that there's going to be restricted supply for probably the next 18 to 36 months. And so that was part of the thinking in terms of pushing out the renovation of One Tribe Place. If for some reason we end up in a sustained period of lack of supply in the community or if something changes with some of the developments off campus that we're thinking may come to fruition, then the plan is intended to allow us to kind of ebb and flow as we need to. But we feel pretty good given what we know today.”

Sebring also noted that some flexibility in terms of the final bed count is baked into the plan.

“When we get into phase two and phase three of the plan, there are actually places in the plan where we can scale up or down,” she said.

Ambler said the resurgent demand for on-campus housing is an encouraging sign as the College attempts to revitalize the experience of living at William and Mary.

“I think the pandemic reinforced for our students and for all of us the real value of being together on campus,” she said. “And the residential experience is really at the heart of the student experience, and so our goal through this project is that on campus living will continue to be attractive, the place where students want to be, and that we're offering modern, great, comfortable, equitable facilities across campus.”

For the time being, Bailey, the local realtor,  said that the demand for off-campus housing next year still hasn’t abated.

“We are still receiving phone calls, text messages, and emails from people who are looking for off-campus housing,” she said. “While it has been a privilege to help so many students in need due to being put on a waitlist, it has been heart-wrenching to turn away so many due to lack of inventory.”

Meanwhile, both RAs said they don’t plan to stay on next year, citing their disillusionment with departmental leadership and culture.

“When I told my head resident that I did not reapply to be an RA, he was just like, ‘Yeah, I can't really blame you for that decision,’” said one.