Students voice concerns over housing access, transportation improvements at SA town hall
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During the Student Association’s Tuesday evening town hall meeting at Schine Student Center, SA President David Bruen outlined two potential university projects to expand on-campus housing as part of Syracuse University’s Campus Framework Plan to expand residential space.
Students identified ongoing problems at SU like housing access, transportation deficiencies and campus safety issues at the town hall. Bruen and SA Associate Comptroller Dylan France moderated the event, the first since October 2022, in preparation to submit a final report outlining the student experience at SU to the university’s Board of Trustees.
SU is considering building a new residence hall adjacent to Shaw Hall and expanding Kimmel Hall upward to increase capacity, Bruen said. The new residence hall near Shaw would house around 300 SU students. In 2019, SU demolished nine buildings on the 700 block of Ostrom Avenue to make room for expansion opportunities.
SU has not publicly announced specific next steps for either of the two expansion projects Bruen mentioned, but a diagram in the Campus Framework plan shows a mock-up of potential residence hall construction on the 700 block of Ostrom Avenue labeled “Campus Building Opportunities.”
Although students in attendance said they approved of SU’s current two-year on-campus housing requirement, several students including France emphasized that the university should prioritize undergraduate housing that is affordable to students.
“Over-enrollment encouraged the expansion of a couple new buildings… which is great, but they’re also unaffordable,” France said. “All of the new spaces that are available for students to live in are just as, if not more, expensive than the Marshall, which for the majority of students just isn’t something that they can deal with financially.”
Prior to the beginning of the 2022-2023 academic year, around 200 returning SU students committed to live in Dellplain Hall were reassigned to the Sheraton Hotel, 206 Walnut Avenue and other locations as a result of SU’s over-enrollment of the class of 2026.
In response to grievances surrounding transportation, Bruen said the university could work with the city of Syracuse to improve safety by enhancing community roads and creating more bike lanes, especially with the popularity of scooters from Veo, a rental transportation system seeking a potential partnership with SU.
Bruen also said SA has previously talked with the university about implementing electric trolleys and buses as an effort to promote environmental sustainability. Undergraduate students from SU and SUNY ESF can vote in this year’s SA election on a referendum expressing support for SU to move its goal to achieve carbon neutrality to 2030, as outlined in SA’s December Sustainability Report.
In the wake of complaints from students and peer advisors on the content and execution of SU’s FYS 101, a single-credit course required for all first-year students, France said revamping the course’s curriculum will be an important step in mitigating bias incidents at SU.
“There’s a lot of different things that we’re working on in terms of reframing the First Year Seminar, because we all know that it’s problematic,” France said.
Bruen and France will submit the spring 2023 semester report to the Board of Trustees by April 12 for review in May. The report will be publicly available on SA’s website.
