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Vying for new tenants
Off-campus housing scrambles for limited student market
By Geof Wollerman and David Pollan
gwollerm@mscd.edu • dpollan@mscd.edu

The Regency student housing is specifically targeting incoming UCD students, informing them of their options regarding housing and what they may or may not be able to get away with.

On the homepage of The Regency’s website, a link labeled “Attention UCD Students!” takes browsers to a page of frequently asked questions by prospective UCD students. At issue is whether or not these students are able to reside at the Regency despite UCD’s rules for incoming freshman.

Incoming freshman less than the age of 21 who are not living with parents are required by UCD to live at Campus Village Apartments. According to the university’s First Time Freshman Live-in Requirements, the purpose of the stipulations is to improve the quality of the undergraduate experience. Some exceptions to the rule are married students or veterans of the armed services.

“Will I be retroactively denied admission to UCD if I don’t meet their student live-in requirement?” reads one of the questions on The Regency’s page. The answer: “No. If you are an incoming freshman and do not satisfy UCD’s student live-in requirement you will not be retroactively denied admission to UCD.”

But when posed with the hypothetical situation of an incoming freshman being admitted to UCD and then being denied admission for not fulfilling the living requirement, UCD’s director of media relations, Danielle Zieg, said the university’s policy was official and that a student could be denied if he or she does not follow the live-in requirements.

“I’d have to assume that’s possible,” Zieg said.

Regarding The Regency’s assertions, she could only point out that The Regency is a business and can represent anything as fact.

“As a private institution, they can say whatever they want to,” Zieg said. “We do not have any kind of a relationship with The Regency.”

But The Regency’s general manager, Michael Francone, said the reason The Regency made this statement on its website was because it had been told by UCD officials that the requirement policy was not yet official.

“In reality we were told specifically by UCD that they would not retroactively deny admission to students who did not meet the student live-in requirement,” Francone said.

Francone referred The Metropolitan to a letter dated Apr. 28, 2006, sent from UCD’s Office of University Counsel to Dan Hawley, the general manager of Campus Village Apartments.
In the letter, deputy university counsel Daniel Wilkerson stated that the university had not developed any formal policies regarding the residency requirement.

“This was before we formalized our policy,” Zieg said. “We do have a residency requirement in place.”

The requirement was established sometime last year under the authority of the chancellor, Zieg said.

“The owners of The Regency are pressing those sorts of questions, and they have the right to do so,” she said.

In the event a student is denied admission to UCD after being admitted because of failure to meet UCD’s student housing requirement, The Regency offers prospective tenants a provision in their lease that would void the lease if the student were denied admission, according to the website.

“At this time we don’t have any comments about the situation or The Regency’s actions,” Hawley said.

Francone was unavailable for further comment as of press time.

“They have been marketing to this audience for the last two years, and they have a right to and they should because it’s a business,” Zieg said.

She did say it was unfortunate that marketing tactics had grown to the level they had because there is such a large population of students at Auraria.

“The hope is that every student has the option to weigh what is important to them,” she said.