Once completed in January of 2020, sophomores will be able to live in the new Brookside apartments for the spring semester. Photo by James McIntosh.
The University of Rhode Island’s Office of Housing and Residential Life (HRL) is finalizing their plans regarding how they plan to move students into the Brookside Apartment Complex in January 2020.
Last week, the University announced that the Brookside Apartment Complex would not open on time for the fall 2019 semester and would instead open in January, which is in the middle of the academic year.
The Director of HRL, Frankie Minor, said that during the fall 2019 semester, students living on-campus will be able to sign up for housing in Brookside for the spring semester. This will be done using the traditional system where students with the most credits will be able to sign up for housing first.
“[Students] will sign up for wherever they want to live for the fall through our normal procedures, and then in the fall semester we will hold a seperate room sign up process for students who want to move to Brookside,” Minor said.
However, Minor said HRL does not think many juniors or seniors will move to Brookside from the residential buildings they are in during the fall semester. He said this is because most juniors and seniors will already be living in an apartment style building and will not want to go through the effort of moving all of their belongings.
This means that sophomores will likely be able to move into the Brookside Apartment Complex for the spring 2020 semester, Minor explained. Brookside was built with the intent of being used for mostly junior and senior housing, which means sophomores may take advantage of this opportunity to live in Brookside during its inaugural semester.
“[I think] it’s going to be a lot of our students who might not have qualified for Brookside, a lot of the sophomores, who are living in different facilities, who are saying ‘oh okay, if the juniors and seniors are going to sit tight, then I’ll move into Brookside,’” Minor said.
Rooms that open up in Garrahy Hall or Wiley Hall from juniors and seniors moving into Brookside will also be available for other students to move into, Minor said.
“We realize once that move occurs, we’re going to be dealing with a lot of room changes spring semester,” Minor said.
Freshman Erin Doyle said she may considering applying to move into Brookside next year as a sophomore, but she originally did not intend to apply to live in Brookside until her junior year.
“Maybe my junior year I’d be interested but I probably won’t move from wherever I am next [semester],” Doyle said.
As an incentive for students to move into Brookside, Minor said the University plans to allow any students who live in Brookside during the spring 2020 semester to be guaranteed a room in the apartment complex for the next academic year.
Minor said students may not want to move for one semester, but a guarantee to live in the building again the following year, if they so choose, could be enough of an incentive to move.
The guarantee to live in the Brookside Apartments for the 2020-2021 academic year, will be regardless of how many credits a student has, so long as they lived in Brookside during the spring 2020 semester.
“If you sign up for Brookside to live in January 2020, you’ll have kind of the first right of refusal, if you want to come back to Brookside in the fall, you’d be guaranteed that,” Minor said. “It’s conceivable at that point that if you’re just a sophomore and some senior might potentially have a higher priority they could boot you out, but in this situation what we’re strongly considering is offering students priority to come back a second year to Brookside should they choose to do so.”
Minor said that this plan is not official yet, but it is very likely the University decides to offer this option.
However, Minor said that if this option is exercised, Brookside spring 2020 residents would not be able to select suitemates who did not live in the building and guarantee them access to a room.
“Under that scenario they wouldn’t be able to pull in other friends, it would just be for them and anybody else who lived in Brookside,” Minor said.
Doyle said that moving in the middle of the school year would be “kind of weird,” which may discourage some students. However, she said that if HRL guarantees a room for the next full academic year, she may be more likely to apply to live in Brookside for the spring 2020 semester.
“If you were guaranteed a spot, I’d probably [apply],” she said.
Minor said that even with this guarantee of a room for returning residents, HRL still thinks that there will likely be enough rooms available during the 2020-2021 academic year for other students who would traditionally be expected to live in Brookside.
“We think there’s a small risk but we think still there’s still going to be enough opportunities for juniors and seniors to live in Brookside, and if nothing else there is still going to be even more opportunities for apartment style [living] because we still have Gateway, Garrahy and Wiley,” Minor said.
HRL will also assist students in some capacity in moving from their fall semester residential hall to Brookside.
“We will offer some moving assistance, we just don’t know what kind [yet],” Minor said.
Doyle said any moving assistance provided by HRL will make her, and likely other students, more willing to move. She said the easier HRL makes it to move, the more willing she would be to move.
HRL will be sending students an email within the next week about general room sign ups. After spring break, Minor said they will send out another email with more specific information pertaining moving into Brookside.