Living on campus can be fun for the first few semesters, but after your sophomore year, you’ll want to get your own place. Students tend to rent out houses with three, four, or even five of their closest friends and split the rent rather than getting their own apartment. You might think to disregard this section because you know you will never have a car during college, thus making it impossible for you to have you own place off campus. However, the reality is most students live within a mile of Tulane, so many walk or bike to campus each day (which makes things a lot easier because parking is a nightmare). Many upperclassmen have houses on the small side streets that branch off of Broadway, the street predominately occupied by fraternity and sorority houses. Very few stray from Uptown because neighborhoods in the surrounding area are poor and filled with crime.
It’s best to ask around with older classmates if an area has been crime-free in years past before moving in. It can be pretty dangerous, so it’s best to be careful. The farthest students will live is in Metairie, a glorified suburb that’s about 20 to 30 minutes away from campus. Metairie does have its advantages, with its giant Target, a commercial movie theater, and all that suburbia has to offer. However, the traffic tends to build up during rush hour, and the drive can get tedious to make every day.
There’s more responsibility with having your own place, and it seems harder to get up in the morning for 9 a.m. classes when you live off campus than when you lived on campus in a building that was 30 steps away from your classroom. However, the incentives of having all out parties and even owning a pet make off campus housing the way to go for the upperclassmen years.