The Clark Atlanta University Fall '18 Housing Crisis
During the fall 2018 housing crisis at Clark Atlanta University approximately 150 students were left without housing.
The main cause for this crisis is that there is not enough beds for every student that needs on-campus housing.
“We do not have enough housing inventory to house everybody on campus as we would like. We do not have 3500 beds on campus. We have approximately 2100 beds,” Omar Torres, the Dean of Student Services and Campus Life, said.
Another cause is that students were purged from the housing system and lost their housing placement.
“We engaged in a purge for those students who had a housing assignment but did not pay their balance due —for that housing assignment or had a previous balance,” Torres said.
After the purge, there was still a significant amount of students that were left without housing. Jaylen Cockerham, a sophomore Criminal Justice major, was unsure if she wanted to return to the university without having a definite place to live.
“I wasn’t too sure where I wanted to go over the summer — like if I really wanted to come back to Clark — because it was like going to be a real hassle just to get a place and I was not sure where I was going to live when I came,” Cockerham said.
Many students have asked why the university has not repaired two dormitories that have been out of service since the early 2000’s, Bumstead and Ware.
“We have had a lot of students who come to us asking why we cannot have Bumstead and Ware rehabbed and I share with everybody that if we were to just do a blanket rehab to whatever it was originally, the university is looking at anywhere from 8 to 12 million dollars to rehab based off how long they have been offline,” Torres explained.
Torres explained that the university wants to do more than just repair the dormitories to their original state. The university wants to make them better, which would increase the investment to $20 million.
Dr. Christopher Bass, a psychology professor, made an attempt to rebuild the dormitories in 2014. His attempt was denied.
“CAU believed at the time that they didn’t want to have someone like me talking to the Arthur Blank Foundation because they believed that they could get more money out of him if they went through their people. They did not want a professor, or at that point a director, to start looking for money for the school,” Bass stated.
According to Dean Torres, there would not have been a housing crisis if Bumstead and Ware were open.
“Given the availability we have in both — because I think the combined availability in Bumstead and Ware gives us close to about 300 to 400 beds — with that in mind and knowing the extra cafeteria space. No, we would not have had the issues that we had,” Torres stated.
Clark Atlanta University students are calling for a better on-campus housing situation.
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