Crowding Eased In Most Houses

Overcrowding has become an uncomfortable fact of life at Harvard, and House office staffs are learning to live with it. One frustrated senior tutor threatened to "cut three inches off" each person in an effort to make them all fit, but most House secretaries agree that the squeeze won't be as tight this year as it was last year.

Only two Houses--Eliot and Kirkland--are more overcrowded than they were last year. The final figures on the number of students who will be living in Eliot House are not yet in, but it is certain that at least some sophomores will be sleeping in living rooms.

Kirkland House will be accommodating about 15 more students than it did last year, but the House secretary says she has found "a bed for every head" by turning doubles into triples and triples into quads.

The additional overcrowding in Eliot and Kirkland means less crowded conditions in some of the other Houses. Leverett House will exceed its optimal capacity by 20 students this year, but the House secretary called the situation a "significant improvement" over last year when there were 40 students too many. "Last year we bore the brunt of overcrowding," she said. "This year it seems to be more evenly spread around."

Quincy House will be "very full" this year, the House secretary said, but the crowding will be less severe than last year because of a reallocation of space. The living rooms of single suites assigned to seniors have been broken off and annexed to adjacent sophomore suites, ensuring that each person will have his own room.

At Mather House, there will be an extra person in every sophomore suite. The House secretary says she had "anticipated that it would be bad," but adds that the situation is better than last year because the total number of sophomores has decreased.

Winthrop House will not be so crowded as it was last year, but the House secretary says that there are "no extra spaces" and that some students who want to move back into the House after a leave of absence or a year off campus cannot be accommodated.

At Dunster House the overcrowding is "not going to be that bad." The House secretary there says that the overcrowded conditions will only affect sophomores and that she will be able to "squeeze in" a few more returning students.

"Adams House is not overcrowded," the House secretary said. "At the moment, we're just about even steven." But she cautions that the situation might change if the crowding in other Houses is so severe that more students are assigned to Adams.

The two cooperative houses affiliated with Dudley House, which have a total of about 35 spaces, will not be overcrowded this year either.

The Lowell House secretary claims that it would be impossible to assess the crowding situation there until the end of September.

At the Quad, freshmen will suffer most from overcrowding this coming year. But on the whole, the situations in North and South Houses will be better than they were last year. Both House secretaries were still juggling students and rooms last week, and said there would be many freshman in economy doubles--rooms that were originally meant to be singles. Although students are assigned to smokers in North House, they will probably be able to get regular rooms early in the year. South House, too, expects to be fairly comfortable eventually.

The situation in Currier is somewhat worse. Twenty more people than the House can comfortably accomodate will be living there, and the result will be a lot of freshman in economy doubles.

Freshman in the Yard should find their situation eased by the opening of Canaday Hall, although the 200 occupants of the new dormitory may experience some inconvenience until the building is finally completed later this fall.

The construction of Canaday Hall means that Claverly Hall, which was used to house freshmen last year, is now free to house upperclassmen. Upperclassmen living in Claverly will be affiliated with one of the River Houses, just as residents of the Continental on Garden St. are associated with one of the Quad Houses.

Canaday has alleviated the housing problem, but it cannot solve it. The overflow that still exists seems to have been distributed more evenly among the various Houses this year, and House secretaries have been gaining skill in juggling extra bodies, but the fact remains that there are too many people and too few rooms.