Lounge living still sweet for some

The dorm room that Pitt freshman Mark Cunliffe shares with three roommates sounds typical and… The dorm room that Pitt freshman Mark Cunliffe shares with three roommates sounds typical and maybe a bit cramped: There are four beds, desks and dressers, two mini-fridges, a TV, a full-size couch and even a small coffee table.

In fact, it’s neither typical nor crowded.

Cunliffe’s room is actually a spacious lounge in Lothrop hall that was converted into a living space. Cunliffe is one of 142 students who were placed in non-traditional rooms in the fall because the University overbooked residence halls for the second year in a row.

Every year, the University predicts how many accepted students will matriculate and estimates the demand for on-campus housing. Some years — such as this one — see an abundance of students and not enough rooms.

Nearly all of these 142 students are still in their non-traditional rooms because, “They were happy with these living arrangements and freshmen space limitations prohibited the move to more traditional rooms,” Pitt spokeswoman Patricia Lomando White said in an e-mail.

This year, because of the demand for housing, even some students who met the housing application deadline were placed in non-traditional rooms, White said. The University is looking to expand housing with an addition to the University-owned Bouquet Gardens apartments, the newest part of which is scheduled to be open by fall 2011. Pitt is also in the process of designing a new residence hall with a targeted opening of fall 2013.

The issue of overbooked residence halls is not unique to Pitt. Geoff Rushton, a Penn State University spokesman, said Penn State students have also been placed in converted lounges when residence halls are full. Fourteen thousand of the school’s 43,000 undergraduate students live on campus.

In 2006, Penn State had to deny housing contracts to students, meaning converted lounges still couldn’t accommodate the total number of students looking for on-campus housing, Rushton said. Like Pitt, Penn State also relies on number crunching and prediction in planning housing.

“It’s a science to some degree, but it’s an inexact science,” he said.

To Cunliffe, alternative housing at Pitt is almost a luxury. All the other rooms on his floor are singles.

“[The room] is a huge space. It’s not disappointing. If anything it’s kind of getting spoiled,” he said.

White said the University will continue to evaluate its housing on a year-by-year basis.

“If an overflow situation occurs in the future, we will analyze all possible solutions and make a decision based on the circumstances of that particular year,” she said.

White said that the admissions process should be more predictable in the future, since the economy has begun to stabilize. Though it’s too early to tell if this coming fall’s new students will all be housed in traditional rooms, White said they will be notified that they might not receive a traditional room if the University believes all rooms will be occupied.

Cunliffe believes he did not receive a traditional room because a friend whom he applied to live with handed his housing application in late. They ended up with a few extra roommates, but he said that it was no problem.

“If you apply to live with somebody anyway, I guess you’re not really worried about the roommate situation. If you were really worried about privacy, you would apply for a single,” he said.

Cunliffe and his roommates rearranged their lounge-room to maximize floor space. The beds originally sat bunked in the middle of the room, until the freshmen un-bunked them and positioned some against the walls to create more open space.

And for four students in one room, the place is quite clean. All the extra floor space is free of discarded dirty laundry and piles of pizza boxes.

Pitt freshman Nikola Boskovic, one of Cunliffe’s roommates, handed in his housing application late after an Internet-related mix-up. But he has also gotten used to the roomy interior, something that he’ll probably miss next year.

“Now that I have this much space, I don’t know how it’s going to be next year. Regardless of where I go, I know I’m not going to have this much space,” he said.