Georgetown University will have 40 vacant residence hall rooms next semester, according to the Office of Housing and Conference Services, a striking contrast to the housing crunch that created 123 forced triples in the Southwest Quad residence halls last year.

The vacancies will cost the university $600,000, depending on the university’s ability to fill the rooms with either one or two occupants, according to Julie Green Bataille, assistant vice president for communications.

Village C East, traditionally a freshman residence hall, will house sophomores, juniors and seniors with some double-occupancy rooms converted to singles. Darnall Hall, traditionally a sophomore residence hall, will house freshmen.

Bataille said that the university changed the class designations for the residence halls “in order to try to make the housing available as attractive as possible to students.”

Although the housing office had originally anticipated a vacancy rate of more than 100 rooms, steps by the university helped to close the gap, Bataille said. These included the notification of juniors and seniors about available housing as well as incentives for sophomores to live in residence halls and not apartments.

Rising sophomores who chose apartments in the housing lottery were e-mailed by the housing office and told that if they moved into the residence halls, they would be given housing preference for the next two years and free season tickets for the 2004-05 men’s basketball season.

When the 780-bed residence halls in the Southwest Quad opened last fall, the university told all students in Nov. 2002 that “there [would] be ample housing to accommodate all who want to live on campus.” This prompted a housing crunch the following spring when demand for housing exceeded available beds.

The crunch left nearly 200 rising juniors without housing in mid-March and prompted the university to add 123 beds to larger double-occupancy rooms in the new Southwest Quad. The rooms will not remain tripled next year.

This year, the housing office conducted an eligibility drawing for rising juniors and seniors to let them know if they would be able to apply for on-campus housing the following spring. Only 927 rising juniors opted to live on-campus, opening more apartment spaces for rising sophomores.

“University staff are still trying to assess the factors that led to these vacancy rates,” Bataille said. “One factor seems to be that a large number of sophomores selected apartments rather than residence halls, leaving residence halls less full, and upper-class students wanting to live off campus.”

Ed Shelleby (COL ’04), who sat on the Housing Advisory Council and chaired GUSA’s Housing and Facilities Advisory Committee, said that the opening of the Southwest Quad had also created some confusion about how to best anticipate student interest in on-campus housing.

“The thing that I think housing must struggle with is that they have basically enough for everyone to live on campus for 3 years, but not enough for 4 years,” he said. “Yet there are many students who will receive 4 years, but it’s unclear as to how to `work the lottery’ so to speak to optimize both years on campus and quality of housing during those years.”

Shelleby also said that the housing offices had been very receptive to student input.

“Both Karen [Frank, vice president for facilities and student housing] and Shirley [Menendez, director of housing services], as well as their offices, have been nothing but receptive to the concerns of students,” he said. “While the decision about all of this is ultimately theirs, students are certainly not cut out of the loop.”

Bataille said that the university would evaluate this year’s housing selection process in order to “ensure that all of our available on campus housing is filled.”