Fitch House will be unavailable in the upcoming general housing lottery because it has been set aside for use as overflow first-year housing in the 2024-2025 academic year. Thompson Hall, which was closed for renovations last spring and this fall, and Hubbell House, which is set to close due to structural issues, will return to use as upperclass residence halls. Lambert House, a co-op building that closed in February 2023 due to water damage from a burst pipe, will remain closed as the College assesses options for its future use.
Fitch House will be reserved as overflow for first-year housing should the incoming class be unusually large. In the past, the Office of Campus Life (OCL) has used Lehman Hall as overflow for first-year housing, but this year, it decided to use Fitch due to its balance of single and double rooms, leaving additional single rooms available to upperclass students.
Currently, 69 percent of first-year housing is made up of singles, compared to 56 percent of upperclass housing, according to Assistant Director of Housing Operations Heather McCarthy. Using Fitch rather than Lehman as first-year housing is intended to ensure more equitable availability of singles to first-year and upperclass students.
“We want to make sure that we’re maintaining access [to single rooms] for every class, just as much as first years,” McCarthy told the Record. “A huge portion of my role is to make sure that, if we do have to break from our norm, we’re doing both groups justice.”
Thompson will return to the upperclass housing stock next year after undergoing renovations during last fall. The renovations on Thompson were completed ahead of the spring semester, but OCL elected not to open the building after no students chose to live there in the mid-year housing lottery, which is held in November for students returning from study away programs.
Even without opening Thompson for this spring, plenty of single rooms remained available. “I was confident that anyone … returning to campus from a leave of absence would be able to attain a single,” McCarthy said. When Hubbell residents needed to be relocated following the building’s closure, they were each placed in either a single room or alone in a double, she added. Residents were individually placed in alternate buildings according to their preferences.
OCL told the Record that it is planning to reopen Hubbell at the start of the Fall 2024 semester once it fixes the issues affecting the chimney and water heating system which it identified in the building.
Lambert will not reopen next year following its closure due to water damage in February 2023. “There have been no decisions made with regard to the future of Lambert as of yet,” Project Manager Julie Sniezek wrote in an email to the Record. “We are still working with the insurance company to reach a settlement agreement that allows us to move forward with determining the highest and best use of that property.”
Next year, Parsons House will continue to be used as a co-op in place of Lambert, rather than as a standard upperclass residence hall.
The overall number of beds available on campus will remain roughly the same as this year, McCarthy said, as the floorspace cutoffs for designating rooms as singles, flex rooms, and doubles have not changed.
