Existing residential units on the University Of Nevada, Reno campus are housing twice the number of students they were designed for but, Kiley Diesner thinks she was lucky to get anything.
“So, I was stuck in Manzanita, which it was built in like the 1800s and there is no AC and it was kind of my last choice so it kind of sucked,” said Diesner.
UNR Student life services says demand has increased as more students have come from Las Vegas and California. Parents want their kids to live on campus because they are more likely to succeed if they do.
The university is demolishing old buildings and putting up new ones as fast as it can. Five hundred units opened last year, 350 are scheduled this year, with still more to come in 2017. UNR Associate Vice President for Student Life Services Jerry Marczynski says the University is running out of room.
“We won’t have anywhere else to build, we will have built just about everywhere we could. Then the university master plan talks about public private housing,” says Marczynski.
Private housing is already the only alternative for hundreds of students like UNR Freshman, William McCready-White.
“They told me they didn’t have enough room. And so they could put me on a waiting list, but that waiting list was also full.”
Even though 1,200 new off-campus student units opened last year, White still had to commute about an hour every day for two months until he could find an apartment. UNR is now trying to acquire more land to satisfy the increasing need for student housing.
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