Opinion | Dear Chapman, where can I live?

Daniel Pearson, Staff Photographer

Now that the pandemic is coming to an end (knock on wood), where did Chapman leave its students with its housing crisis? In an email sent out by the Office of Residence Life and First Year Experience (RLYFE) last May 4, RLYFE Director Dave Sundby revealed that housing availability was dependent on students voluntarily living off campus, effectively suspending the two-year dorm mandate. This Chapman requirement was introduced two years ago in order to provide guaranteed on-campus housing for all freshmen and sophomores.

Now that students have adapted to a COVID-19 lifestyle, does the university really want to go back to cramming students together in apartment complexes scattered across town? If Chapman doesn’t want more students living on campus again, is there even any available local real estate off-campus? No. That’s a funny joke.

I will be entering my junior year in the fall and can say I have only lived in Chapman housing for one semester and a month. Then the pandemic hit hard. On-campus housing was reserved for mostly international students and freshmen, as it should have been. But this just left me to spend months hopelessly scouring local real estate for anything the average student could afford, even having to look as far into the random suburbia of Tustin and Garden Grove. My roommate and I couldn’t find anywhere to live near campus, resulting in me taking a gap semester in fall 2020, as I’m sure many others also did.

Chapman’s two-year dorm requirement isn’t common among other American universities, except for certain major-specific programs. This requirement was upheld for only about a year before the pandemic began, but we could be on the brink of going back to it.

Chapman’s reasoning for the mandate is that students living in a campus environment are proven to be more successful in their studies. Well, what if “on-campus” is actually an assortment of buildings scattered between two different cities, miles apart from each other? If their solution to accommodate more people “on-campus” is to build another type of Chapman Grand (who knows, this time maybe a random apartment complex in South Coast Plaza) then they need to simply drop the two-year requirement for good. Grand is not even remotely close to campus and sits next to Interstate 5 and a strip club. Not sure it’s a very “educational environment” that will increase my academic drive.

I understand that Chapman expanding has always been an issue of controversy between the university and Old Towne Orange residents. Up to this year, Chapman expansions have created disjointed campus environments in a strictly protected, historical city. Hardly a solution to either of Orange’s problems, Chapman’s two-year mandate attempts to solve a housing crisis for future college renters yet fails to provide actual convenience for a highly-funded, private university.

Anyone who attends Chapman chose it because it isn’t a University of Southern California or University of California, Los Angeles. Let’s try not to be one and instead focus on keeping Chapman close together, unified and unique.