This fall, UF is scheduled to demolish three undergraduate dorms — Graham, Simpson and Trusler Hall — to kick off a 10-year, $1.1 billion plan to boost on-campus housing availability.
The plan, discussed by university leaders at a Board of Trustees meeting March 27, will increase the undergraduate bed count from 9,316 to 12,493 by 2035. In addition to Graham, Simpson and Trusler, UF plans to raze Rawlings and Tolbert Hall by the end of 2029 to make way for new housing facilities.
According to a timeline shared at the meeting, four new housing units will be built. Beaty Towers, Mallory, Yulee and Reid Hall are slated for renovation within the next 10 years, adding 1,238 new beds.
A newly opened section of Honors Village will help make up for the loss of beds while replacement dorms are under construction.
Some students living in the soon-to-be demolished dorms welcomed the university’s planned housing overhaul, citing complaints of mold, insect infestations and bathroom floods.
Kaitlyn Koviack, a 19-year-old UF nutritional sciences freshman living at Graham Hall, once tested the dorm for mold as part of a microbiology lab assignment. She planted a plate of potato dextrose agar, a medium growing yeast and mold, on the counter in her floor’s communal bathroom.
After five hours of exposure, the plate showed a significant amount of mold growth, she said.
“That's kind of telling you what's being filtered through,” Koviack said. “If I only left it out for five hours, imagine what you could collect in a day.”
Koviack also said she’s experienced flooded bathrooms and power outages in Graham Hall.
“It does at times feel like survival of the fittest,” she said. “If you don't take precautions to be clean or if you yourself don't feel like you're particularly like a neat freak or clean freak person, I definitely think you would be more susceptible to having problems like bugs, like getting sick.”
Shaylyn Lyons, a 19-year-old UF art freshman also living in Graham Hall, said she and her roommate were sick alot Fall semester. After months of experiencing brain fog, a sore throat and a runny nose, Lyons said she believes the culprit for her semester cold is mold.
“I remember us looking through the handbook,” she said. “There's information [in the student handbook] about having safe livable spaces — that is a promise,” she said. “Mold would not be a safe livable space.”
Lyons said Graham lost power for a few hours in the middle of this semester. One of her room’s outlets stopped working shortly after. Sleeping without air conditioning was a struggle, she said, and she had to hope the food in her dorm fridge wouldn’t spoil.
Despite the issues, Lyons said Graham’s location is convenient for her as someone who doesn’t have a car, and she enjoys having the Reitz Union and the dorm’s food market nearby.
Fabiana Gorre, a 19-year-old UF pre-nursing freshman, said she has a love-hate relationship with her dorm, Rawlings Hall.
Although she has dealt with cockroaches and strange brown liquid dripping from her ceiling, Gorre said she’ll be sad when the building is demolished because she met her closest friends there.
“[Rawlings] is super social,” Gorre said. “We’re all super close, and a lot closer than most other dorms at UF.”
Another Rawlings resident, 19-year-old UF applied physiology and kinesiology freshman Sasha Crowe, said the dorm’s location is convenient for her. If she had to, she said she would live in Rawlings again.
“Nobody is a fan of communal bathrooms, but honestly, I have my best conversations at the sink in the morning washing my face, debriefing with my friends and roommates,” Crowe said. “We kind of just all suffer together and laugh through it.”
Contact Sofia Meyers at smeyers@alligator.org. Follow her on X @SofiaMeyer84496
Sofia Meyers is a second-year journalism major and the university general assignment reporter. When she is not reporting, she enjoys taking walks, reading books and playing pickle ball.
