Dead Geese, Questionable Food and Faulty Elevators: What Are UNR Dorm Students Paying For?
Reynolds Sandbox reporters, including Sam Berg and Jack Sabin, take a close look at the housing situation at UNR to share the perspectives of both students and professional staff. With dorms increasing rent in the fall, some students believe they aren’t getting their money’s worth.
What is that smell?
Last year, during Jada Barbon’s second year living in Juniper Hall, a dorm on UNR’s campus, she and other residents began to notice the smell of death filling their hallways, bathrooms and even dorm rooms.
“It got to the point where whenever we would get out of the elevator and we were walking in the hallway, we would place masks over our face or hold our breath and run through,” Barbon, a senior sociology major, said.
During a maintenance request that her and her roommate put in to fix their sink, they offhandedly asked the worker about the smell.
“They said, ‘Yeah, once a summer we put a snake through the drain to get all of the stuff out that gets stuck there’–and that it was dead animals,” Barbon recounted. “Like dead geese. They said there was no other smell like that.”
Barbon and some of the other residents confronted the Residential Life staff about this, as they were concerned and the smell was overwhelming. However, their concerns were dismissed.
“All of the higher ups at the building, at least to us, their excuse was it’s just an old building,” said Barbon. “Then we had to say, ‘Hey, a maintenance person told us different,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh well, we’ll have to look into that.’”
When confronted with this incident for this article, Dean Kennedy, the Executive Director of Residential Life, Housing, and Food Services at UNR, responded via email clearly denying the worker’s account. “We have never had a goose enter a building; nor die in a building,” Kennedy responded.
While this doesn’t address that the geese were inside the pipes, not the building itself, he continued: “In some buildings, occasionally a foul smell will emerge when drainage pipes are dry. For example, if residents don’t run their sinks or showers for a while, the water in the p-trap dries up and then stagnant water lower in the pipes emits a smell. Our staff remind residents to run their water, showers and sinks, regularly, as this eliminates odor issues.”
However, a simple Google search reveals that it usually takes a month or more for the p-trap pipes to dry out. In Juniper Hall, where Barbon and the other residents noticed this smell, the bathrooms are communal, where it is almost guaranteed that the sinks and showers will be used continuously, unless certain appliances are out of order.
In the dorm rooms, there are individual sinks as well, where residents are also almost sure to be using these. In the event a room is empty and the sinks are not in use, it should then be up to the ResLife staff to routinely check these sinks to ensure there is no smell–especially since it would supposedly take months for this smell to form.
Overall, it appears that there are discrepancies in what the maintenance staff told Barbon, what the staff told her last year and Kennedy’s email. It raises questions such as: Why would someone on the maintenance staff lie? If there were no animals which have died, why would they say a snake was needed to clear out the pipes? If the smell was from stale water, why was it allowed to become so overwhelming that residents were wearing masks inside?
When will this be fixed?
Even without a strange smell to worry about, residents in other dorms do not feel any more satisfied. A current, and recurring problem, are the elevators in the residence halls, and how often they break.
In Peavine Hall, there have been several issues. “For most of the fall semester one of the elevators was broken down for months without ever being fixed,” said Taylor Spurk, a freshman psychology major who lives in the dorm. “It worked for the first month but then the entire rest of the semester it didn’t.”
Unfortunately, because of issues like this, sometimes residents find themselves stuck inside. Foreign exchange student Charlotte Italiano, who resided in Nye Hall, was one of them. As she was heading down to breakfast, the elevator stopped.
“It had two buttons, one was the alarm and the other was to the receiver for something like security and they hung up on me,” Italiano said. “So I was just stuck in an elevator on the fourth floor for two minutes until I got to the basement floor. I was like, no one’s going to hear me and I’m going to be stuck in the basement. Finally I pressed one and it went up and stopped for five minutes with the alarms ringing.”
After finally getting out, Italiano said that the student worker at the front desk could hear her the entire time.
“He was like, ‘Yeah, that happened to me at 3 a.m. this morning when I was going down for my shift but I was on the eighth floor.’ So I was like, ‘Oh okay, are you going to tell somebody?’ He went, ‘Yeah, maybe,’ and I was like ‘okay, cool, thanks.’”
During a campus-wide power outage on February 4th, a handful of residents were trapped in elevators in both Peavine and Canada Hall, resulting in the fire department being called to rescue them.
However, the elevators are apparently not the only maintenance problem these dorms have.
“Someone broke a little handheld mirror or something once in the bathroom, in the showers, and then it was just not cleaned up for weeks,” Barbon said about Juniper Hall. “[For] one shower [it] was just like, ‘don’t use this one,’ until eventually I’m pretty sure me and someone else picked it up ourselves.”
“My window has been broken since October and my roommate and I have made at least two or three maintenance requests and it’s still broken. We still have the screws that are missing from it,” said Spurk. “I have to make another request soon before we move out because we could get fined for it even though it wasn’t our fault.”
In some cases, not even the water is safe to drink. In Peavine Hall, the water bottle stations have been at a red or level filter status for weeks, leaving residents without easy access to guaranteed clean drinking water.
“The communal bathrooms were absolutely disgusting and the shower stalls had broken locks, latches, and terrible drainage so you had to step through a puddle of the previous person’s shower water to get in,” said Reddit user Ryoloth2006, who lived in Nye Hall for a year.
Holes litter the walls on Spurk’s floor and because there are no cameras, the residents are all being charged collectively because housing can’t prove who caused them. It appears that students like Spurk who never caused any damage are ultimately having to pay for their irresponsible peers.
What is safe to eat and when?
At the beginning of the 2022–2023 academic school year, the university reopened the Downunder, its main dining hall, after a long hiatus, caused by two explosions in July 2019, which resulted in severe structural damage to Argenta and Nye Halls.
After only two months of being reopened, however, photos were posted of raw chicken that had been served to students. It took until the Reno Gazette Journal ran an article about the findings for things to change.
When asked about this incident, Kennedy said, “To clarify, there was one instance of raw chicken being served and once reported, the situation was addressed and there have not been any instances since.”
Before this incident, students were upset with more than just the chicken.
“There was some questionable meat or things that I knew had been sitting out for a little bit longer,” said Barbon. “I just hung out at the dining hall and like, hey, that mac and cheese has been out there for just a bit too long, and I would mostly avoid it. I just heard so many horror stories and it got to a point where people just weren’t going there, weren’t using the food bucks because it wasn’t even worth it.”
Kennedy informed us of the improvements they’ve made since. “Our department has implemented the following strategies: all chicken received by Nevada Dining is pre-cooked, changes to the management team for Nevada Dining, increases in staff training and staff accountability, additional protocols in the back-of-house related to food preparation, our department hired two additional staff members to oversee the Nevada Dining experience, and the University receives a weekly report of feedback that is addressed immediately,” Kennedy wrote.
Students have certainly noticed these changes, but feel as though these improvements are only noticeable when prospective students are touring campus. Nevada Bound, the main event where families with a child interested in attending UNR can receive more information, includes lunch in the Downunder.
“They make it extra good when Nevada Bound is here because those are the kids they’re trying to get to come to the school,” Spurk said. “Everyone knows that.”
“The days they would have Nevada Bound or tour groups come in, everything would be pristine or the food would be plentiful and giving off the impression that they provided better food than they actually did,” said Barbon. “Everyone would look forward to those days.”
With meal plans also increasing in price for the 2023–2024 academic year, students are hoping the extra money they are paying will go towards improving the food for everyone, everyday. The cheapest meal plan, which is only available to return and transfer students, is being raised by $201 while the most expensive plan is being raised by $301.
Is apartment living any better?
With all of these concerns in question, many students are left to wonder if living off campus would be better for them. But even new and close-by off-campus apartments have caused concern for residents.
For example, Canyon Flats has caused problems for residents despite the rent being over $900. “Canyon Flats had two giant blue dumpsters on the side of the building for people to put their trash while moving in. They left those dumpsters on the side of the building for about 2 months,” said Reddit user Almondmilk1111.
“A few weeks after I moved in I started to notice a fruit fly/gnat infestation in my room. It was disgusting. I killed around 50+ in my room every single day. I couldn’t stay in my room for weeks. I was essentially paying rent monthly for a place I couldn’t even be in.”
When asked for a comment, Canyon Flats did not respond. There have been similar complaints at other apartment locations near campus, from unresponsive staff to maintenance barging into rooms unannounced, to litter, graffiti and broken glass on premises making renters uncomfortable.
Despite these instances in off-campus living situations, many students who have lived both on and off-campus living have preferred living in non-UNR affiliated apartments.
Even former employees of resident student living have been frustrated after seeing what residents’ rent money is used for, including Reddit user BakingAspen.
“Res life charges exorbitant costs for what students actually get- and a huge amount of that money goes toward materials that RAs use for events they are forced to put on that residents don’t attend. If a lot of residential life events simply did not happen or had lower budgets, housing could be far cheaper and RAs could work fewer hours per week,” BakingAspen wrote in a follow up message after commenting on our Reddit query.
Some residents have even noticed a lack of compliance when it comes to resolving issues with dorms, leading some to recommend living elsewhere.
“Frankly if you have the option to and you value your privacy and comfort, it is 1000% worth it to just do an apartment lease instead,” Reddit user Ryoloth2006 said.
Numerous bad experiences have left residents with grudges against ResLife, with some even going as far as to say it ruined a fundamental part of their time living on campus.
What happens next?
Since complaints are being vocalized by multiple dorm residents, it is not that surprising why students choose to live in off-campus apartments as opposed to dorms. Though this doesn’t mean that the living situation for these students will never improve.
UNR’s housing department does make changes, and it is currently in the middle of developing and carrying out a plan to oversee better maintenance care.
“Our department created a 10-year capital plan three years ago to help us plan for repair and maintenance needs,” Kennedy said. “Based on health and safety needs, building age, infrastructure, last updates, etc., we update buildings to the best of our ability with limited resources. Because this plan is relatively new, we are still working to update buildings that have not been updated for several years.”
Updating buildings is not the same as upkeeping things that are broken, however. There is still hope but it could be pricey for students, since rent for living at the dorms will be increasing by $200–300 for the next academic year, which Kennedy says is going towards the improvement of the dorms in several different areas.
“This money addresses significant increases in 1) utilities, 2) external contractors working on buildings for repair/maintenance issues, 3) staffing costs, and 4) large scale capital projects to help residents have a better experience (updating elevators, WiFi access/coverage, building systems, etc.),” Kennedy wrote in his email response.
If ResLife was simply lacking funds, this should allow for timely and overall fixes, as damage in communal spaces should be regularly looked after and kept up by the dorm itself.
Despite these changes, students are worried that their money won’t be put to good use, as they felt it wasn’t in the past.
“It gave me a space to stay on campus that was close to all my classes, “ Barbon concluded, “but looking back on it, I’m like, how did I pay that much money to be surrounded by something that was probably a health hazard?”
