Every morning, hundreds of students stroll through the Sasaki Garden on their morning commutes down University Place. Filled with cherry blossom trees and quaint flower beds, the green space is surrounded by four massive 17-story apartment buildings, making up the faculty housing complex known as Washington Square Village. One block further, on their way to the Paulson Center for class, students pass the Silver Towers — three brutalist behemoths overlooking Bleecker Street to the north and Soho to the south.

During their time at the university, these students will collectively enter dozens of NYU buildings around the city. But these two “faculty dorms,” as residents call them, are a world to which students are rarely privy.

Faculty housing, which NYU manages through a partnership with realtor Cushman & Wakefield, is a substantial investment. In fact, for many faculty members, the program is the university’s biggest draw. It offers over a thousand apartments in Washington Square Village and the Silver Towers combined, along with additional options in the Paulson Center and Washington Mews, all within minutes of campus — at roughly half of Greenwich Village’s median rent, according to some residents.

Behind the selection

Before moving in, tenure-track faculty are able to tour university apartments to inform their selections — but the process can often feel opaque.

“They say, ‘We have two available. Do you want this one or this one?’” CAS assistant professor Alex Barnard, who lives in the Silver Towers, told WSN. “You have no idea why those two were presented to you. Someone else is presented a totally different one.”

Access to housing plays a key role in recruiting professors to NYU — but because the process often occurs virtually, professors are sometimes left without knowing what exactly they will receive.

“They will not put it in writing that you are guaranteed faculty housing,” Barnard said. “But the understanding is that anyone who comes as a tenure-track person will be placed in some kind of housing.”

Settling in

Inside the lobby of the Silver Towers, young kids bounce off the walls while parents lug strollers not too far behind. In the summer months, New Yorkers skate, play soccer and host picnics in the cul-de-sac that serves as the entrance to the complex.

“One nice thing is that because people are NYU, it does help with trusting people and forming a community,” CAS assistant professor Christine Vogel, who lives in Washington Square Village, told WSN. “You’re all from the same background. It is maybe as close to a dorm as you can get at this point of your life.”

The complex retains traces of its pre-NYU past. When the university purchased Washington Square Village for $25 million in 1963, those already living there were allowed to stay. Today, those grandfathered tenants live alongside faculty — who, like the original residents, are getting a bargain.

“We truly feel like we live in a village, because we actually live right next to our friends,” Barnard said. “My kid can take the elevator to go see his friend just a few apartments down.”

Though rent prices for faculty apartments are not publicly available, WSN obtained and reviewed emails in which professors offered their apartments for subletting. Residents are permitted to raise their subletting price up to 10% above their rent — but even then, prices are 20 to 50% cheaper than the neighborhood’s median rent. This represents an average savings ranging from $1,000 to over $2,000 per month for eligible faculty.

“It’s maybe $6,000 or more to live in this area,” Tisch professor cari ann shim sham*, one of few contract faculty members that reside in NYU-provided housing, said of monthly rent. “For me, it’s $1,600.”

What proximity buys

Besides the savings, the location of NYU’s faculty housing buildings plays a large role in its desirability. For CAS assistant professor Dean Chahim, the biggest benefit of living in Washington Square Village is being within a quick walk of his son’s kindergarten.

“If he has a short day at school, I can come back and forth,” Chahim said. “If he’s sick, my wife and I can take turns taking care of him.”

Almost half of higher education faculty across the United States have children under the age of 18, per a 2020 Harvard study. Barnard, who lives with his wife and three children, said the time savings compound daily.

“I spend more time with my kids — more than that, I spend more time working,” Barnard said. “I get another hour and a half a day more than a lot of people, and that’s a humongous privilege.”

Not everyone gets those benefits. LS contract professor Tamuira Reid and her son have moved 15 times in nearly a decade, navigating a city where housing costs about 411% more than the national average. Even professors with stable housing see the disparity as untenable.

“It is a massive source of inequality between faculty,” Barnard said. “Does anyone really know what the difference between a clinical assistant professor and an assistant professor is? Not really, but one difference between them is that one of those people lives in really sweet, subsidized housing right next campus, and the other person has to commute who knows how long to get here.”

Faculty unable to find housing in the city often navigate multi-step commutes and pay the associated costs. LS contract professor Kaia Shivers lives in Philadelphia, nearly 100 miles from campus. Her journey can take more than three hours each way, and at peak hours, can cost up to $100 — forcing her to wake at 3:45 a.m. to catch cheaper trains. These obstacles limit her ability to interact with other members of the NYU community, including the extent to which she can stay after class to help her students.

“There is a wear and tear that definitely happens on the body,” Shivers told WSN. “As a faculty member, we have things like happy hours and faculty gatherings and poetry readings. I don’t go to any of that — it shrinks the community that I want to be in as a faculty member.”

Unfinished business

NYU rarely offers faculty housing to contract and adjunct faculty, even though it provides apartments in Washington Square Village for graduate students. Though the university operated programs that granted housing to contract faculty members in the early aughts, three professors said they are no longer active — a gap that Contract Faculty United, the union representing full-time faculty on campus, has tried to address in recent negotiations with NYU.

Last August, CFU bargaining committee members proposed that the university “provide contract faculty members with faculty housing on the same terms offered to tenured and tenure-track faculty.” NYU did not respond, and housing was excluded from the final agreement reached last month after a two-day strike.

“The university has limited available housing for faculty,” NYU spokesperson Wiley Norvell wrote to WSN in a statement. “Housing was not a mandatory subject of bargaining in our contract faculty negotiations. We sought to address cost of living in these contract negotiations through meaningful increases in compensation.”

Contract faculty will have another chance to push for access to the housing programs in four years, when the contract comes up for renewal. Until then, the divide persists.

“You revisit, you renegotiate and we’ll be back at the table bargaining in a few years,” Reid, a member of CFU, said. “That’s something that’s going to be central — that housing part.”