For three years, the pressure-cooker of overcrowded student housing has been steaming at Saint Louis University. This week, it began to boil over.

After sign-up appointments concluded on Saturday, March 29, 219 SLU students were wait-listed for housing. They were instructed to regularly call the Department of Housing and Residence Life in order to try and snag anticipated openings for the fall. Even then, demand will likely outweigh supply.

This housing shortage is no new problem-in fact, it has happened before. Last year, 261 students were waitlisted, although the University found a place for all of them.

But a larger problem is looming on the horizon, one that Housing and Residence Life has done nothing about. If they don’t act soon, SLU officials and students will be left to stew in the consequences of their inaction.

In 2005, Housing and Residence Life officials had a brilliant idea. Determined to increase retention, selectivity, rankings and quality of campus life, they ruled that $2,000 of each merit-based scholarship (except for the Presidential Scholarship) be allocated toward on-campus housing. This would increase population density, encourage on-campus socialization and evaporate SLU’s former reputation as a commuter school.

The plan worked-too well. Attached by a $2,000 string, more students opted for SLU housing, instead of transferring or moving off campus. Now, more bodies than will fit want to sleep on campus this fall-and there’s nowhere to put them.

Housing and Residence Life has been dishearteningly irresponsible in dealing with this debacle. As early as December 2005, an observant student, Matthew Lehner, identified this very same problem in a commentary for The University News.

He noticed that, as classes with the new scholarship move through the system, there would be an increase in the number of students wanting and needing to live on campus.

Yet, we heard nothing about it until the following September, when Housing and Residence Life sent an errant e-mail to all on-campus residents, which admitted to a 107 percent occupancy rate. How, one must ask, is that even possible? What rate of occupancy will SLU grapple with if they reach their reputed admissions goal of 1,800 students for the class of 2012?

The University compounded the problem in the fall of 2006 by demolishing housing in Grand Forest to make space for the new Chaifetz Arena. Though the arena is spacious and luxurious, it won’t be sheltering students who need a place to live. The decision to increase student admission and retention, while simultaneously demolishing student housing, has a clear consequence: increased population density and miserable housing conditions.

In November 2006, Housing and Residence Life claimed that its goal was to achieve 100 percent occupancy-filling every bed and turning no one away. Optimistic administrators may admit that their ambitious housing-scholarship allocation has achieved this goal and, if anything, been too successful.

But in our estimation, it has failed.

That failure has consequences-namely, the hardship felt by SLU students uncertain about where they’ll sleep next year, faced with the option of abandoning scholarship money to move off campus or dangling at the mercy of SLU’s folly, waiting for a bed and 200 square feet or dorm room.

We are running out of options and are simply out of housing space. Tension is bubbling to the surface. Housing and Residence Life must vent the steam from this predicament before it finds itself in a scalding mess, one we’ve seen rumbling into a slow-motion boil since its conception.