 dorms. According to data from UC Berkeley admin over 25 percent of the fall 2023 undergraduate class account live in them, with over 80 percent of those students being freshmen and new transfers. For the 2023-2024 school year, students paid anywhere from over $10,000 to over $17,000 to live in one of Berkeley's five residence halls for the year. Living in the dorms is often seen as a cornerstone of the so-called college experience, but what are dorms at Berkeley actually like? There's like mold here and the ceiling's also falling down on some floors. So like one of our like our showers just don't have hot water and also one of our showers has been broken since like the beginning of the year. So are the heaters in my room and like in my apartment they don't work? If living in the dorms is part of the college experience then complaining about them is too, but students with on-campus housing account insist that their problems aren't just minor annoyances. Rather these small issues sometimes morph into bigger problems largely because they never get fixed. We submitted a maintenance request like the custodians did, but nothing's happened since. So I filed a maintenance request except nothing was fixed. My first shower I took at UC Berkeley was freezing cold and so obviously as soon as I took that shower I filed a maintenance request because that's what I had been told to do. There was no response. For her part on the administrative side of things, Campus Fire Marshal Amy Chen says that admin is receptive to student concerns regarding the dorms. We do the best we can with our annual inspections of trying to keep on top of infrastructure maintenance and all those things, but since we are not there all the time if there's something like that that we wouldn't know about we would like to hear about it from from the folks that are there. As for admin's perspective on the state of the dorms themselves, fire prevention specialist William Kleiver confirms that the dorms which were last inspected in April 2023 are safe and up to code. If it's the heating or the hot water runs out or something that's not something that we can control but the fire and life safety systems are maintained pretty well. Not having hot water is unfortunate but that doesn't impact the sprinkler system, doesn't impact the fire alarm, doesn't impact your ability to get out. I will say in my experience though the units specifically are kept in pretty good condition. You know there are things that are sort of outside of my control like the room's always too hot or it's too cold these kinds of things. It's a challenge to get those made a priority. From my experience admin hasn't been helpful makes me upset because I feel like my concerns aren't heard and I don't feel like they care because I know this isn't the first time that they've heard about it. They always act when I email them all looking to this and I never get a response. Sophomore Susan Reese who lived in the dorms last year says that she encountered so many issues from her heater to molding the showers to having no hot water that she called in an independent city inspector to come look at her room. Since nobody had answered my issues I've really felt like I needed some outside authority to hold them accountable. I just went on to the city of Berkeley website. I requested a city inspector come like a tenant request for inspection. Ultimately I believe he found 18 violations most of which were on all eight floors of my building. I was really happy that he had documented this because I hope that there would be some other accountable party. With many students believing that their maintenance requests are falling on deaf ears some have taken measures into their own hands. For some families that meant taking a Berkeley's many parent groups on Facebook. For Susan and Isabella that meant founding the University Housing Rights Organization in 2023. Kind of by the end of my time in the dorms I realized that like everybody always says we only live here for a year so like it's fine we'll just deal with it and then I realized the only reason I suffered the entire year is because that's what everybody before me had also said. Us and then a couple other people took the initiative to officially register the org with the you know official mission being to make sure that students who live in on-campus housing have the basic needs they need. We want to see a clear plan of response from the school. We want to see like how are you going to make this situation better for the students who are living there right now. You know we as students we have a lot of other stuff going on like we're just trying to acclimate to college life this is one of the last things that's really on our mind. We need more attention to be brought to these issues we need maintenance requests to be responded to and we need students to feel like they're heard and that their concerns are heard because the more people who report these concerns the more that those who receive them on the other end will know that it is an issue. We're at Berkeley right one of the best the best number one public university in the world and so I worked really hard to get into here I pay a lot of money to be here if we're not even able to have our basic needs we can't achieve and we can't do what we came to the school to do. To check out the university housing rights organization go to unihousingrights.org or go to at uni housing rights on instagram reporting for cal tv news i'm bella lu