Dunster To See More Singles

Starting with this spring’s rooming lottery, Dunster House will rezone its most cramped quarters to relieve what some residents have called its “foreboding” living arrangements.

In order to decrease the number of students per suite, fewer rising sophomores will be admitted to the House over the next several years, according to Dunster HoCo co-chair Jeffrey C. Holder ’09.

Although official numbers have not yet been released, Holder said the House’s smallest doubles will become singles and its tightest triples will become doubles.

“The housing administration is currently going through the floor plans to pick rooms that really need reshuffling,” Holder said.

The most dire conditions will be alleviated regardless of residents’ class years, he added.

Dunster housing officials have been giving high-ranking College administrators walking tours of the residence’s most overcrowded spaces for years in hopes of convincing them to decrease the number of students assigned to the House, according to the HoCo co-chair.

Current Dunster residents expressed enthusiasm for the change.

“I live in the closet,” said Dunster resident Julia M. Anoshechkina ’10. “I have a slanted ceiling, and the windows are so small it’s dark even during the day. It’s really bad.”

Anoshechkina says that as a freshman she started “screaming and crying” on housing day when she found out she would be spending her remaining Harvard years in a House many refer to as “Dumpster.”

“I knew how small the rooms are because my friend lived there and he was a senior,” she said. “He had a small room—it was a single, but it was smaller than my freshman single.”

Anoshechkina said she hopes that the House’s rezoning will reduce the number of “screaming and crying” freshmen the morning housing letters are delivered, but added that she doubts the initiative will have much of an effect.

“I think Dunster has a pretty bad reputation,” she said.

Molly E. Moses ’11, who currently lives in Wigglesworth, said her view of Dunster did not change upon hearing news of its rezoning plan.

“I would prefer not to have a single anyway,” she said.

But according to the House’s HoCo co-chair, if admitted to Dunster, Moses would still have little to worry about.

–Staff writer Charles J. Wells can be reached at wells2@fas.harvard.edu.