By Some students in Beachside College have an extra roommate this year.
On Aug. 14, with less than a month left before the semester began, students planning to dorm in Beachside received an automated email from Director of Cal State Long Beach Housing and Residential Life Carol Roberts-Corb.
The email indicated that some Beachside rooms may be modified to sustain triple occupancy as a result of the overwhelming demand for on-campus housing.
“This isn’t the norm,” Roberts-Corb said. “We had hundreds of applications in May, but at that point we thought it would be manageable. Typically we have cancelations over the summer, but obviously that wasn’t the case this year.”
Roberts-Corb said Housing and Residential Life chose Beachside for triple-occupancy rooms because the rooms are larger, they have more storage space and fewer residents typically share a bathroom compared to those in Hillside College or Parkside College.
According to Roberts-Corb, Housing and Residential Life tripled approximately 100 rooms to accommodate 100 additional students.
On Aug. 21, some students planning to reside in Beachside received emails confirming that they had been assigned a third roommate, which left many returning residents, like senior accounting major Nick Zollo, unsure of what to expect.
Zollo, who planned to move into a two-bedroom room at Beachside, said he was shocked when he received the email saying that he and his roommate had been selected to move into a triple-occupancy room.
“It was pretty negative expectations. We didn’t know the third person coming in,” Zollo said. “We didn’t know how it was going to work out fitting three people in a room, and basically you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into because they put you with a random stranger.”
Other Beachside residents, however, said they hadn’t encountered problems in their triple-occupancy rooms.
“It’s kinda cool,” undeclared freshman Lucas Ramos said. “Even with three people here, I don’t have anything to complain about.”
Each resident in a tripled room is provided with a bed, desk and dresser. Two of the beds are combined as bunk beds, while the additional bed is lofted, with the third desk and dresser sitting under the lofted bed.
“It’s pretty cramped,” Zollo said. “I’m on the top bunk … I’m not really diggin’ the top bunk.”
According to Roberts-Corb, housing offered incentives through an email on Aug. 6 to any continuing residents at Beachside interested in canceling their housing contract.
The incentives included a refund for any housing fees that they had paid to date, a $275 Beach Club card, a parking pass for the year, priority registration for the spring and priority application status if they wanted to move back to the dorms in the spring. Only 14 people took up the offer.
Roberts-Corb said that Housing and Residential Life has not filled every dorm room available to students since 2009.
She also said it’s too early to say whether triple-occupancy rooms will become standard in CSULB housing.
“The most important thing is student success, that students have a place to live,” she said.
