Rumors are swirling regarding junior housing for the upcoming 2025-26 year. Many students have heard that City Vista apartments will be going solely to seniors, which means that rising juniors in their third year of the campus housing requirement will be in dorm-style living.
While the rumors are not confirmed, they are also not completely baseless. Tour guide Denae French, sophomore business analytics and technology and accounting double-major, was informed by Trinity Admissions to begin referring to CV as senior housing rather than upper division housing.
“As a tour guide here, we talk a lot about the three-year residence requirement, and then we used to say that juniors and seniors had the option to live in City Vista,” French said. “However, in our meeting last month, Admissions said that we are no longer supposed to say that juniors can live in City Vista because they’re transitioning into mainly seniors living there.”
However, Residential Life has established that rumors of City Vista being solely for seniors are unfounded. Housing selections for the 2025-26 academic year will not be decided until February; because Residential Life does not know the number of students who need housing or where students will live in the coming year. Rachel Boaz Toppel, director of Residential Life, discussed the recent rumors with the Trinitonian.
“We’re still waiting on the numbers that will even tell us how many seniors we can have on campus. And so this is where it’s just really premature to talk about specific numbers because we just don’t know yet,” Boaz Toppel said.
Boaz Toppel said that seniors receive housing only after enough housing, in both dorms and City Vista, has been guaranteed for juniors. She described the process as it occurred in years past.
“Last year seniors went first for City Vista and then juniors went. And the true silver lining in that was we were able to house more juniors in City Vista than we had planned because of seniors going first; we could see what seniors hadn’t filled up and open those beds for juniors. So it was actually a boon to the junior experience that the seniors went first,” Boaz Toppel said.
In regards to the new language that tour guides were told to use, Boaz Toppel said it is more about semantics than a change in housing policy.
“It’s not only senior housing. It’s just senior priority housing, and that’s it. And that’s just language to help manage some expectations because we had some upset juniors this year,” Boaz Toppel said.
While Trinity guarantees junior housing, some current juniors expressed anger with the housing selection process. Aiden Marlow, junior business and communication double-major, lives on fourth floor Verna McLean Hall, a dorm primarily housing first-years.
He expressed frustration with both last year’s selection process and the on campus living requirement for juniors, which limited him and his roommate to living in McLean.
“This year I was registering for housing, and I was the second to last registration time. And the only housing that was open was an open bed in a double in Susannah and McLean,s,” Marlow said. “I could easily live at home or get an apartment, but [Trinity does] it all for the money. If people aren’t living on campus, they’re not getting paid for it.”
While he was guaranteed on-campus housing, Marlow expressed it was drastically subpar to what he would have preferred. Marlow’s anger at the university housing system means he will be looking for off-campus housing next year in order to save his money. Marlow expressed his distaste for on-campus housing in his interview.
“Now I’m a 21 year old junior that lives in San Antonio having to live in a freshman dorm. … I think it’s absolutely ridiculous,” Marlow said.
