Editorial | A fairer housing process

Students applying to live on campus next year will benefit from a newly improved housing-selection process. My Home at Penn — an online platform slated to launch next month — will introduce a number of changes to the application, the most welcome of which is the end of community living.

Community living was an arrangement by which students wanting to live on campus in groups of six to eight friends were given preference in choosing housing. Initially a program just for the high rises, it expanded to other college houses in the late 1990s in an attempt to — as its name suggests — foster a sense of community within residences.

But community living has been undesirable in practice. For Housing Services to give preference to a group of people simply by virtue of its size was arbitrary and unfair. Students would exploit the process, taking part in community living only to secure a spot in their residence of choice. They would often include acquaintances rather than friends in their living arrangements just to complete the large group.

My Home at Penn makes the housing-selection process fairer in a number of ways. Students can apply alone or in groups of up to four people, but the system still accommodates students who wish to live in larger groups. The new process will allow different groups that want to live in proximity to one another the ability to coordinate room selection. The meritocratic point system that governed the order of selection preference has been standardized across the college houses. The ability of a resident of a certain college house applying to live there again to pull in other friends will be limited; each current resident will be able to bring just one other friend into the house, closing a loophole in the process. And, best of all, My Home at Penn will allow students to select the specific rooms in which they wish to live.

The so-called “community living” program may have been abolished, but Housing Services is on the right track to establish actual community living on campus.

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