As most students know, Northeastern has a housing problem. Area residents agree; as they have many times before, Northeastern’s neighbors aired their complaints at a community meeting September 20. As I’ve mentioned in these pages, local residents have a right to be irked by the behavior of some students living off campus.

The university needs to do something to address these problems. But there’s more to the issue than building high rises and forcing freshmen and sophomores to live on campus. While there is an obvious necessity for more housing, to get to the core of the issue, Northeastern also needs to make on-campus housing a more attractive option than off-campus housing.

From the beginning to the end, living in Northeastern housing is a pain. I lived on campus for two years and I am currently living off campus. While there are definitely benefits of living on campus, I don’t think I could do it again – even if there was abundant housing.

The process of applying for upperclassmen housing (the one time I did it) was debatably my worst experience with this school to date (see Back Bay Blackout for the other consideration). When the housing process opened I got the impression that I would be picking the room in which I wanted to reside, and with whom I wanted to live; they offered tours of the buildings as if I had an option. I ended up in a building I had never heard of with a roommate I didn’t know. Friends from other schools were perplexed by the fact that as of mid-June, I didn’t have housing. Every time I told someone that I didn’t know my roommate, I got a funny look as if I had no friends at Northeastern. This wasn’t the case. I wasn’t put with friends because of a lack of trying, it was because Housing and Residential Life couldn’t accommodate my modest requests.

While I admittedly wound up having friends in my building and had a decent roommate experience, I swore I would never go through that process again. Last winter I signed the lease for an off–campus apartment. There was much less heartache involved.

Eating on campus is almost as bad. I had a kitchenette last year, but as the word “kitchenette” implies, it was small and unusable. I didn’t use the oven once because I didn’t have a pan that would fit in it. The dining halls I was forced to rely on are even worse. Chartwells’ food isn’t bad – for the first month. And God forbid you go at peak hours when it takes 20 minutes to get your dry piece of chicken only to find there are no tables at which you can eat said chicken.

There are the minor annoyances as well. Waiting in line to get into your own building while the proctor is signing in a plethora of guests. Putting money into a washing machine that won’t start. NUWave. Twice I have lived in a building that had a pool table but no cues or balls. Twice I have lived in a building with a broken vending machine. I have lived in a building that had a TV in the common room that didn’t get the Super Bowl. My freshman year the heat broke on one of the coldest nights of the year. My sophomore year I was kicked out of my building because the lights wouldn’t turn on.

I know these complaints are minor in the grand scheme of things, but the fact of the matter is that Northeastern is doing little to incentivize students to live on campus. I live off campus and I’ve stayed in dorms at other schools, I know the Northeastern dorm experience could be better than it is. I’ve had wonderful experiences with this school, but living on campus was not one of them.

-Nick Jacques can be reached at [email protected]