‘Loses the Magic’: Cabot Students Frustrated at Decrease in N+1 Housing

Cabot House students expressed frustration at this year’s upperclassmen housing lottery after extra beds were added to suites due to limited capacity.

Thirty suites were modified to accommodate an extra bed, 20 of them being four-person suites converted for five residents, according to a document sent to students. A total of 12 four-person rooms remain, eight of which are “N+1” housing — suites with a bedroom for each person and a shared common room.

Several Cabot suites will be turned into administrative offices over the summer so that administrators are “accessible to all students,” according to an April 2 email to residents from Cabot House administrator Palmer A. Berry obtained by The Crimson.

“Unfortunately, even with Cabot’s swing housing (I can’t speak for other Houses), we still don’t have enough bed spaces for all of the students with a fall room reservation,” Berry’s email said.

Berry’s email also stated that Cabot will have to “return” some “borrowed” swing housing in the Cronkhite Center to its neighboring Quad Houses, Currier and Pforzheimer.

While the three Quad Houses are about a 15 minute walk from the nine River Houses, they have traditionally boasted larger rooms and more N+1 housing.

“It kind of loses the magic of being in the quad,” Khanh Le ’25 said. “A very well advertised perk of being in the quad is having N+1”.

“Now we feel like we live in Kirkland or Eliot or something,” Le added.

Pema Choedon ’25 said she was initially in “disbelief” when she realized she might not get N+1 housing as a senior.

“I was just really sad,” added Choedon, a Crimson Design editor. “Cabot, we’re known for really nice suites, but we got to the point of looking at hallway singles.”

“I was just really shocked that we had to look at singles instead of suites,” she added.

While Choedon and her roommates had N+1 housing this past year as juniors, they will have an “N” suite with three bedrooms and a common room for four people as seniors.

“Next year, one of us will be sleeping in the common room — since we are not going to be sharing the double — so we are not going to have a common room anymore,” she said. “I think it’s really going to affect our social lives.”

Nina S. Janmyr ’26 — a rising junior in Cabot — said she has heard a lot of students complaining in a Cabot-wide GroupMe chat about the decline in N+1 rooms this year.

“I think what you expect in the upperclassmen houses is that it gets better each year,” she said. “The room that we’re getting now is the same that we got our sophomore year.”

Students speculated that the cause of the limited capacity is due to the inflated size of the rising senior class. Some attributed it to renovations at River Houses increasing the number of rising sophomores in the Quad.

According to the Cabot housing lottery spreadsheet, 119 beds — 24 singles in overflow housing and 19 five-person rooms, all of which were originally intended to be four-person rooms — remain for the rising sophomores.

Some students expressed concerns about housing for Cabot’s incoming sophomore class, who will be forced to choose between singles and five-person suites, rather than the historically more common four-person suites.

“Now, the incoming sophomores will more likely be randomized together so that they will probably have random roommates in a group of five,” Le said.

Many students said they were frustrated by the lack of information provided in advance of the lottery, the results of which took away a “perk” of living in the quad.

“This is all being taken away relatively shortly without clear communication,” Le said of N+1 housing.

Thomas S. Smyers ’25 said student frustration stems from a perception that administrators “either don’t know what’s going on, or aren’t really able to do anything about it.”

“It seems like for students — especially for seniors — who are frustrated with their living arrangements, that there’s no recourse and there’s no plan for anything that we could do,” Smyers added.

A College spokesperson wrote in a statement that the housing lottery process can be “stressful” for students, “particularly in this moment given our expanded population of undergraduate students and the use of multiple swing buildings after the COVID years and during House Renewal work.”

“Many departments coordinate together to support the residential communities, including the College Housing Office, the Dean of Students Office and the House staff, and we deeply appreciate the patience of our students as we navigate these factors together,” the spokesperson wrote.

—Staff writer Madeleine A. Hung can be reached at madeleine.hung@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Azusa M. Lippit can be reached at azusa.lippit@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @azusalippit or on Threads @azusalippit.