Too many students, too little housing at Clark Atlanta University

By Charles Edwards

Atlanta, GA – Frustrated students and their families are desperately looking for housing on Clark Atlanta University's campus.

About 400 more students than officials expected are trying to enroll in the historically black school.

Seeing your kids off to their first year of college can be difficult. There's separation anxiety and parents want to make sure that everything is taking care of.

But what parents at Clark Atlanta University did not expect when they showed up for orientation this week is for their children not to have anywhere to stay. That's what almost happened to Julian Peoples and his mother.

Outside the school's library Julian, a freshman from Fort Worth, Texas, says he and his mother are breathing easy today. But Thursday was a totally different story.

PEOPLES: We got here about 3 o clock. We sat in line for 2 hours waiting on the vice president to come in actually talk to us. We ended up waiting in line for 2 more hours so my mom got mad. She actually went to the President's office. We finally got a call from the vice president saying we had housing at like 11:30 pm.

But many of the 12 hundred freshmen on campus for orientation this week fear their story will have an unhappy ending. They're afraid they'll have to find another school or go back home because of Clark Atlanta's housing crunch. The head of CAU's enrollment services, Darren Rankin, says not only are there more students than anticipated there are fewer dorm rooms than normal.

RANKIN: We have four residential halls that are currently being looked at for renovation. That caused a shortfall in terms of spaces for housing.

To offset that, CAU got a midtown apartment complex to provide off campus housing, which helped but didn't completely solve the problem.

The remaining roomless students don't have much time to find housing. Classes start on August 27th.