Flagstaff,AZ By:Stella Carr
When I arrived to Northern Arizona University in 2013, the campus had a comfortable feel to it. I remember talking with upperclassmen who were shocked by the number of freshman that came during my freshman year. Apparently we were the record breaker for largest freshman class in NAU history. Well, the records have continued breaking each year since I began, and I don’t see an end in sight. Those who came before me knew NAU as the smaller of Arizona’s three universities, and enjoyed escaping the crowds at Arizona State University, or University of Arizona by attending school in Flagstaff. With each year I feel the campus growing and becoming more crowded. The campus energy is no longer the same.
This growth is noticeable, in the classroom with sizes increasing, in the housing situation on and off campus, and in the overall ebb and flow of the town. These are just a few of the effects the growth is having here. Flagstaff is a college town, which means the growth of the school directly affects the growth of the community, they are interconnected like a river’s levels and the subflow beneath. Sometime this growth can be beneficial, for example the economy benefits from increases in population, but for a community that is not meant to hold its projected capacity, resource availability becomes a growing issue of discontent. Concerned citizens are beginning to feel as if the long term residents resources such as water, are being threatened by the influx of college students. The part time residency held by students in Flagstaff, a city with an already threatened water supply, increase the longevity of the cities supply, as does any continued and exponential growth of the area.