The summer before the fall 2025 semester, Residence Life alerted upper-division students to a new off-campus housing opportunity: Level 10 Management, a property management company based in Minneapolis, had 36 open spots in apartments on Grand Avenue, and were partaking in a joint lease with the university. However, an email sent to students on Dec. 10 explained that while limited on-campus spots would be open for upper-division students for the 2026-27 year, the university would not be continuing its lease with Level 10.
Rylee Johnson, a second-year student living in one of the joint lease apartments, transferred to St. Thomas at the beginning of this academic year. With limited space for transfer students and the desire to have her own room, Johnson wasn’t sure she could get housing without the joint lease and didn’t want to drive the hour-long commute from her hometown.
The purpose of the joint lease was so that second-years who are required to live on campus had enough bedspaces available to them. It also created an easy option for upper-division students who needed to move off-campus; the housing agreement would be with St. Thomas, Residence Life would assign a space and rent would be charged to students’ St. Thomas account.
When she found out that the joint lease was no longer an option, Johnson was “really annoyed.”
“I would’ve preferred to just stay there,” Johnson said. “All of my housing was covered by scholarship money, so now it’s put me in this position where, if I wanted to stay there, it would be off-campus housing, officially, so it’s up in the air of whether my scholarship money would be reduced and could cover it or not.”
Johnson said that the university initially quoted her around $750 per month for the Level 10 apartment, with Level 10 itself saying the rate would stay the same if she chose to stay after the joint lease ended. Later, Johnson found out that monthly rent would add up to around $1,100.
When asked to comment on rent prices and Residence Life’s decision to end the joint lease, Level 10 Management declined, saying that without receiving questions ahead of time, they would not commit to an interview.
Johnson has housing lined up for next year, but not with St. Thomas or with Level 10.
“It kind of fell into my lap, honestly, because (my roommates) were looking for another roommate, so it worked out for me,” Johnson said. “But I don’t know what I would’ve done if they didn’t approach me and ask me about it.”
Johnson said it was weird that Residence Life didn’t give a “why” for ending the joint lease.
“They haven’t made new housing, so do they think suddenly they’re going to have more spots this year compared to last year? Maybe I don’t understand the numbers, but it seems silly to me why they wouldn’t continue the lease,” Johnson said.
Aaron Macke, associate dean of students and director of Residence Life, said that Level 10’s newer facilities were owned by a former St. Thomas student, part of the reason Residence Life approached them to ask if they had any open leases.
“We know that students who choose to live with us in part like living with us because it’s easy from a billing standpoint,” Macke said. “It all goes on your student account, your student account gets paid off by you and it helps with your loans, or your grants, or your parents, or you, or however you’re paying your bills.”
Macke said the joint lease was “convenient” for students, but that “it’s not a long-term thing.”
“When you sign a lease, you’re on for all 12 months of it, every single day, and of course we didn’t have students moving over right on the lease, so we were paying lease funds when students weren’t in there yet, so there’s a cost to it,” Macke said. “So this is a thing that cost us money to do it, plus there’s a lot of administrative work in doing it; negotiating the leases, sending out the bills, all that kind of stuff.”
Macke said that St. Thomas typically has the bed spaces for students, so Residence Life knew the joint lease would be a short-term plan.
In addition to discontinuing the joint lease with Level 10, Residence Life is altering the way students sign up for on-campus housing; namely, the students won’t be the ones signing up at all.
“Historically, we do assignments for first-years and then we have opened up a housing portal system for second, third, fourth-year students to go in and pick their hall, pick their bed, pick their roommates, everything like that,” Macke said. “And there’s some parts about that are very user-friendly, and there are some parts about that are very anxiety-creating for our students.”
According to Macke, when the original process started, first-year classes were smaller and the two-year on-campus requirement didn’t exist. But with the requirement came tension and complications, particularly with roommates.
Residence Life built a “more robust preference process” similar to what first-years fill out, but now for second, third and fourth-year students. This form will allow Residence Life to create housing assignments for students.
Part of the new process includes the ability to choose roommates, something students were always able to do. But in an email sent on Feb. 24 to upper-division students, Residence Life stated a stipulation: Students could only indicate other upper-division students as roommates.
“That always kind of was the case, sort of, because we did them as different parts of the process before, so rising second-years didn’t know,” Macke said.
Because all students will now complete the housing process at the same time, Residence Life needed to explicitly state that information. Macke said that Residence Life needed a way to guarantee bed space for second-years — who are required to live on campus — and letting upper-division students live with second-years makes it possible for other second-years to be left without housing.
Even with this caveat, the plan is to eliminate roommate stress during housing selection.
“Our hope is that we’re going to be able to keep roommate groups more intact,” Macke said.
The new preference process will allow Residence Life to have more control, and to view students with medical accommodations, those with scholarships that include housing, Air Force ROTC students and second-years in Living Learning Communities. It will also eliminate the anxiety that the housing selection day used to have, according to Macke.
Macke said that Residence Life has always liked the student choice aspect of the housing process, but not the chaos, tears and frustrations. He said that if Residence Life does a “really good job” of collecting preference information and honoring roommate groupings and housing types, they will have better success.
“I think people will be happier if they’re not having to deal with all the messy part(s) of it,” Macke said. “Let us deal with the mess.”
Bridget Schmid can be reached at schm1520@stthomas.edu.
