This Housing Day, Quad Every Sophomore — Seriously

Last year, we lost the housing lottery. Maybe everyone should.

We are two blockmates living in Cabot House. After the release of housing transfer results last month, one of us will move to Lowell House and one of us will remain in Cabot for now.

The Crimson has spilt a lot of ink on housing at Harvard — blocking groups, linking groups, transfer applications, and the general discontent that accompanies it — and every spring semester is dominated by the stress and excitement of Housing Day. The primary peril, of course, is getting quadded.

We want to put an end to this existential dread. A better Harvard would equalize housing. Just as the Yard is the home for freshmen, the Quad should house every sophomore.

Unfortunately, it’s an unavoidable product of geography that some students have it easier than others. Harvard’s current randomization model stokes fear about being “quadded,” or placed in one of the three houses located a little less than a mile from Harvard’s main campus. This problem will only get worse when River house renovations are complete, and Quad houses lose their claim to being the sole escape valve from rats and crumbling plaster.

Our solution? Two Housing Days. The first, for freshmen, would determine which Quad house they are placed into. On the second, students would discover which River house they will live in as juniors and seniors.

Consider the social benefits of equalizing the experiences of Quad and River students. No longer would Quad residents, tracking Harvard shuttles after a night out, have to look on with envy at their River peers walking home. The Quad would become a shared experience: another Harvard Yard, but off Garden Street.

This new system would also alleviate the stress of choosing a blocking group just a few months into freshman year. Right now, if you don’t block with someone, they may be placed as far as a 30 minute walk away. Our proposal lowers that ceiling to a few minutes at most between sophomores.

Moreover, students would have the chance to choose a second blocking group for the latter half of their college experience — an opportunity that we are confident many students would appreciate considering a recent Sidechat poll that showed that a sizable portion of juniors and seniors no longer seem to live with their freshman year blockmates.

Two Housing Days, two blocking groups, and twice the fun.

By sharing the Quad experience amongst all sophomores, we also suspect that accommodation requests, which have burdened the College and contributed to the end of linking groups, would decline. With the social burden of the Quad lessened, students will not seek River housing so desperately.

We can already anticipate some of the administration’s concerns.

For one, some might worry that the Quad simply isn’t big enough to accommodate all sophomores. However, some individuals will inevitably require housing closer to the River, and Harvard would have the extra space there for those who need it.

Administrators might also hesitate to separate sophomores from juniors and seniors. But this is essentially how the Houses already function.

Official community-building events often boil down to drinking a lot of bubble tea in a dining hall. For us, Houses are more horizontally integrated — sophomores socializing with other sophomores — than vertically integrated between classes. In our experience, any community that crosses class years usually arises from shared courses or extracurriculars, not from shared housing. Assigning sophomores to live together in the Quad while juniors and seniors occupy the River would strengthen community rather than weaken it.

Right now, the Quad feels like purgatory: On Housing Day, we already began looking at transfer options. The off-ramp of transfer applications only makes things worse, reducing buy-in from the start of sophomore year while splitting blocking groups by the end.

Yes, there are steps that Harvard could take to make the Quad more appealing without overhauling the whole system, such as increasing shuttle frequency, expanding hot breakfast, or renovating housing.

But the true divide between the Quad and the River is not a matter of amenities but geography. The time has come for Harvard to rethink housing. It has the opportunity to build a stronger community and a fairer living experience for its students. The University should lean into what it does best: burdening us — equally.

Frankly, we don’t hate the Quad, and we’ve enjoyed our year there. But we want to have our transfer-application-cake and eat it too. Require a year in the Quad, and then give us the River.

Catherine E.F. Previn ’27, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Cabot House. S. Mac Healey ’27, a Crimson Editorial comper, is a Social Studies concentrator moving from Cabot House to Lowell House.