With housing applicants for the residence halls reaching record highs this semester, the Department of Residential Life had to turn students away for the first time in the University’s history.Despite opening new residence halls and expecting an inflation in enrollment, ResLife was still unable to accept every application, said Steve Waller director of ResLife.”Over 200 people got turned away because the demand exceeded the capacity,” Waller said. “We stopped taking applications on June 5 to honor our commitment to those people.”To house as many residents as possible, ResLife offered temporary housing to the 26 male students who were the last to apply in lounges and other rooms in the residence halls, Waller said. ResLife found rooms for all female students who applied nearest to the deadline. The students will be moved into permanent housing in about a week in reverse application order. ResLife offers temporary housing in the residence halls to students every year during the first week of school. The department notifies students they have the option to live in temporary housing while ResLife finds permanent housing for them, Waller said. He said ResLife collects reports from each residence hall on which rooms have been claimed and moves students from temporary housing into the openings.Three students are living in a kitchen on the second floor of McVoy Hall, which has a stove top, microwave and no desks. The stove is deactivated while the students live there, and there is another designated area for McVoy residents to cook in the building, Waller said. Students are notified of their choice to live in temporary housing before the semester starts.ResLife re-opened Blake Hall, the Agriculture residential college, this semester and renovated current beds in the facilities, adding more than 400 beds to its inventory.”We figured we were in good shape even if there was a slight growth in enrollment,” Waller said. “We’ve never really had the demand that we had this year. We were expecting freshmen enrollment to be level.”Though ResLife historically housed about 60 percent of the freshman class, there has been about a 10 percent increase in the number of students on campus this year, Waller said.”It’s almost at 5,000 students,” Waller said. “[We typically house] about 4,600.”The LSU Board of Supervisors approved a first-year residency requirement in October to be effective fall 2009. The requirement was postponed to fall 2012 at a June meeting, according to a June 4 memo by      then-acting Chancellor William Jenkins. Jenkins cited enrollment growth and capacity, capture rate and focus on the first-year experience as reasons for the postponement.”The first-year residency requirement was based on stable enrollment growth of 4,600 first-year students,” Jenkins wrote. “A change in the University’s enrollment strategy has resulted in a growth in the first-year enrollment, and the growth is expected to continue.”And growth continued. The University is approaching the residency requirement’s goal of housing 70 percent of first-year students without forcing them to live on campus.”We’re looking this year, without a residency requirement, between 65 and 68 percent of the freshman class,” Waller said.Some may want to blame rising gas prices for persuading students to live on campus and walk to class. Waller said he has no way to prove what affected enrollment. Rather, new residence halls and renovations totaling about $12 million to facilities in the last 10 to 12 years are attracting more students, Waller said.Colorado Robertson, Student Government president, said attracting so many students to live on campus is a good sign.”Our facilities are improving,” Robertson said. “If you make it good enough, people will want to live here without a residency requirement.”But with more than 200 students being turned down in the summer, many were worried about where they were living during the summer.”I got some e-mails from international students earlier in the year before the semester started,” Robertson said of students looking for last-minute housing.Many international students had difficulty finding housing, according to Maureen Hewitt, International Culture Member Center manager.”Usually the type of help we give regarding housing is very little,” she said. “We had an unusual amount of people to help this term.”The center helps international students transition to the University, including looking for housing, Hewitt said. She said ResLife did a great job assisting international students and offering temporary housing, but she ultimately had to find many new students a place to live.”We ended up getting them to live at some of the off-campus apartments near campus,” Hewitt said.—-Contact Ben Bourgeois at [email protected]