Destroying Housing to Make Housing

Graphic by Anika Dua

Hey Jerks. I don’t know if you guys have heard the news but recently, Syracuse University announced that they will be demolishing Marion and Kimmel halls to create new and better housing on campus. This is a move made in order to tackle the student housing crisis that has been a problem for at least a couple of years for the current juniors and sophomores here. 

Last semester, they announced that the Marshall and the Sheraton will be converted into student housing for the Fall of 2024. Not only are these decisions coming in so fast that we can barely wrap our heads around it, we are obviously all worried about the financial effects that we may feel as a result of these new moves.

I don’t know about anyone else but I have never seen a day where SU is not under construction. Thinking back on the 2023-2024 tuition price increase, it was obvious that this was because of the ongoing construction on the JMA dome (real ones know that it was the MA dome at one point). All this eagerness to construct new things here and there only leads to worries over SU’s current quick solution to alleviate the housing crisis – demolish housing to build housing. 

Not only is this going to take two plus years to accomplish, but the obvious repercussions of this construction on students will be tuition increases again. But hey, the ends justify the means right? However, not only are there going to be financial effects, but only time will tell if this solution of destroying everything in order to reconstruct buildings for the same purpose will even be effective or if it will just add onto the many inconveniences posed to current students and incoming ones. 

Anyways, I’m just gonna leave this off here with advice. Take it or not. Maybe a better, more sustainable solution than finding every building around campus and demolishing it would be to focus on not the actual root of this problem– stop over admitting students that you cannot house or really prioritize during their years at SU. Just a thought.