By Julian Leon

HOUSING at York College is one of many topics that needs to be addressed.

York College has more than 20 housing complexes to choose from. For students who live on campus, constant themes seem to arise within each residence halls such as no air conditioning, broken down hardware, lack of internet connection and overall not pleasing to the eye.

The school has slowly seen the breakdown of multiple housing buildings on campus, including the Country Club Apartments being 80 percent shut down, Penn dorms being shut down, Manor complex not having air conditioning and Little Run having pipe bursts. Housing is a main component for not only the current students on campus but for the college’s advertisement as well, and officials agree that something needs to be done. Based on discussions from various administrators and students, change is coming but will the needs of the students be met is the concern.

Rick Satterlee, the Dean of Student Development and Campus Life, talked about some plans to change housing on campus during a recent interview with members of The Spartan staff. “ We have a group designated to come up with a firm plan to create better living conditions for incoming students at YCP,” Satterlee said. “ We want to fix up all of the manors as they are a big marketing tool for us as we tour potential Spartans, but we also want to renovate the Penn and Beard living spaces as those have seen an unfortunate turn of events since COVID.”

To go along with those renovations to be made to freshman dorms, the consensus is that they would like to structure living situations similar to how they approached the newly Springettsbury Apartments, which feature comfortable living accommodations, state-of-the-art kitchen supplies, individual bathrooms and more common area spaces.

Along with Satterlee’s insight, Robbie Bacon also provided during an interview some important insight as to what could be coming to York in the upcoming years. Bacon is the Assistant Dean of Student Development and Campus Life. “We are working with a design company to create some options to share with students and get their feedback,” Bacon said. “We solicited feedback from students during the design phase for Springettsbury Apartments, so we plan to get student feedback as part of this process for the Manors and Penn/Beard.  We are in the early stages of this process and are exploring both renovating the buildings and building something new on the current site.”

This is good news to hear for new and current students at York College because it allows them to feel involved in the loop as to what’s to come for residence halls.  But even with the new renovations the plan for student housing and life on campus is to bring more action to the main campus.

 According to President Pamela Gunter- Smith, Bacon and Satterlee, surveys have been given out to determine what students would like to see come to Main Campus that could bring students together. As everyone knows the old tennis courts are up for construction and one of the ideas that has been proposed is building an outdoor recreation center that could see basketball courts, a pavilion, better tennis courts, lawn games, tables, pickleball and more put there.

According to both Gunter-Smith and Bacon these new amenities will be for everyone on campus. “The outdoor recreation space will be for everyone on campus, not just freshmen,” Bacon said.

Charlie Green, who has been Student Senate president for the past year, has also been a residential assistant for three years. He spoke to The Spartan on Friday about the importance of renovating freshman living spaces. “As an RA for three years and giving tours in housing it is difficult to try to market our freshman dorms when it looks bland inside, bathrooms are not up to date, AC doesn’t run,” Green said. “ It decreases the amount of students who stay fully in the dorms. Developing more pleasing living spaces would definitely increase the student incoming rate for York College.”

When talking to current students about how they would feel with these new changes to York’s on-campus living situations, the responses were all good. Junior Finance Major Grier Martin said, “I’ve lived on campus all three years I have been at York, and if these were changes done three years ago I would have been more ecstatic to come back to campus.” 

Sophomore Jude Marvel has only lived in two buildings in his time at York but due to those conditions he’ has decided to move off campus. “I’ve lived in the Manors and then Little Run Lodge. I was under the impression that moving to the West Campus would be better but it wasn’t,” Marvel said. “While these new changes would be awesome to see for incoming students, I’d prefer to move off-campus and not deal with it anymore.”

Julian Leon is a senior majoring in Sport Media.

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