Busting at the seams

There are currently 27,000 students enrolled at UB this fall according to the Office of Institutional Analysis.

Be it a dorm room, dining hall, parking lot, or even a hotel, many UB students this semester are feeling a little less like students and a lot more like sardines.

Despite sixteen residence halls and five apartment complexes, many living on campus are feeling the housing crunch. For some residents, living in the Comfort Inn or Hampton Inn is proof enough that UB is taking in far more students than can be accommodated.

Allison Paster, junior accounting major, feels that the benefits of a private bathroom, air conditioning and a bigger bed in a hotel do not compensate for the constant possibility of being moved, without much notice, into the dorms.

"I feel like I was just thrown into the hotel," she said.

For other students, there was no fourth-floor-suite luxary. Ashley Crandall, a junior English major, was the fourth addition to a triple dorm room - without a desk, closet or any other storage.

"(My bed was) a cot like you find in jail," she said. "It was a foot off the floor and I couldn't even fit my suitcase under it... I felt like it wasn't my room, it was their room."

About 150 on-campus students are still living in hotel rooms, according to Joseph Krakowiak, director of University Residence Halls and Apartments.

"We did everything we could possibly do," Krakowiak said. "We on May 1 not only filled our residence halls, but were over 1,000 students over... this has never happened to us before."

The university guarantees housing to students who apply by May 1, and has only needed to place students in hotels two times before - 2003 and 2004 - because of the large 2003 freshmen class.

According to Krakowiak, all students hotel-bound by the boom in housing demand should be back on campus by January.

"There was a lot of retention and there was a lot of interest," Krakowiak said, "worst case scenario is the end of the fall semester."

On-campus housing isn't the only kind of space students are vying for this fall.

While parking availability has always been a topic of debate, the statistics are hard to ignore. Every year the university distributes about 20,000 student-parking permits and 7,500 faculty/staff permits, according to transportation officials. With only approximately 16,000 available parking spots on campus, parking is a real concern for some students.

According to Chris Austin, adjudication and transportation coordinator for Parking and Transportation Services, the problem is not the lack of parking spaces, but rather that most drivers are vying for the same spots.

"The issue with parking each year is location, location, location," he said. "Everyone wants to park in the closest lots possible."

As for the issue of overcrowded buses, Austin said that passenger loads are continually monitored on twenty shuttles, so that service levels can be adjusted as demand increases. There is now also a shuttle that travels directly between Flint Loop and the hotels to enable faster transportation for those living there.

"I do not feel that UB is overcrowded," said Austin. "There are parking spaces available on each campus, and seats available on buses throughout each day and evening."

In his ten years working with transportation services, Austin has also observed more available spaces in Ellicott, Stadium and Alumni lots this fall than in many previous semesters. He also encourages students to take advantage of the Park and Ride lots, which may be further from campus, but provide shuttles every ten minutes.

Once a student has slithered into a space and made it to class, the issue of finding a bite to eat remains. UB veterans also know that finding a dining hall with a minimum wait at any time in the evening is an acquired skill.

Even though dining hall servers keep the food coming as students take it away, long lines seem impossible to quell. This is also true for other campus restaurants like Putnam's or Starbucks.

"The Starbucks line sucks," said Kelly Neenan, junior finance major. "It's busy all hours of the day."

The mass of students entering UB each year presents the growing responsibility to accommodate the student body, an issue that will persist with each incoming class.

Additional reporting by Robert Pape, editor in chief.