Students looking to move off campus have a plethora of options for housing, most of which cluster students together in all-student neighborhoods.
Options include Clover Ridge, Irish Crossings and Irish Row and the wide variety of Kramer Properties rentals.
The amenities offered at these complexes vary.
Clover Ridge provides its 300 residents with a swimming pool, exercise room, tennis court, tanning bed and courts for tennis, basketball and sand volleyball. Free cable, internet, water utility and parking are included.
Kristie Nozykowski, property manager for Clover Ridge, said, "The thing that students really like about Clover Ridge is that we try to put them near their friends. They can get off-campus living but still have friends close by."
Irish Crossings, with 84 residents, and Irish Row, with 185, are the newest of the properties. They include all utilities except gas and electric, and offer full furnishings with each unit.
Karie Miller, property manager for Irish Crossings and Row, said, "Our location is great. We're just one block east of the Notre Dame sports field."
The Kramer properties, which serve 850 student residents, include apartments, townhomes and houses in all sizes and at varying distances from campus. Kramer-owned Lafayette apartments provide water utility, but most Kramer properties, the houses specifically, leave residents responsible for their own utilities, Kramer said.
Mark Kramer, owner of Kramer Properties, said, "What's unique to Kramer Properties are the houses. Not many have the options we have, with the number of houses and the different sizes available."
One feature all the rental companies share is that students in these properties will only have other students as neighbors.
"Our properties allow students to cluster together and have their own neighborhood. Our townhomes and apartments are 100 percent student occupied," Kramer said.
The reasons for this are obvious, Kramer said.
"Students typically study late, they stay up late, they party. That can be disturbing to residents that are not students," Kramer said. "There's less potential for problems if they're with like-minded people on the same schedule."
Junior Jacqueline Livaudais will live off campus next year with two of her friends. Instead of renting a unit in one of these complexes, however, she will live in an independently-owned house. Finances are a major reason for her decision to move off.
"It's significantly cheaper to live off campus. It's about half the price, at least for us," Livaudais said. "We also wanted to live in a house as opposed to an apartment."
Livaudais and her friends found the house through a friend who lived there last year.
Sophomore Octavia Ratiu has already begun looking at housing options for her senior year.
"I think living off campus can give a little taste of what it's like to live in the real world," Ratiu said. "The Notre Dame campus is a bubble, and while that is nice in some respects, it fosters a disconnect from reality that makes the transition to life after college more jarring than it should be. I'm not saying that living on campus senior year would be a mistake, but it's an experience I want to try."
