A tangle of procedural, financial, and spatial issues may have contributed to a Village resident’s decision to fake a hate crime in order to get a room change.

Allison Jackson, 21, admitted to the campus police that she had written “Black Bitches” across her own door in the B building in the Village. Two police reports detail the escalating crisis she and her roommates were experiencing with each other, a crisis severe enough for one roommate to say she developed stress-related illnesses.

The report goes on to say that Jackson faked the hate crime in order to produce an issue serious enough to warrant a room change.

“Basically I was told you had to do something really extravagant to get out of there,” Jackson was quoted as saying in the report.

In an e-mail response, Gina Leachman, Village Property Manager said, “Allison (Jackson) was given the option of moving; however, she expressed interest in staying in the apartment.”

Jackson declined to comment, but Village residents paint a picture of the difficulties she faced in getting a room change.

Miranda Linden, a resident at the Village, said that what happens in the Village is people are thrown together at random with few options to escape.

“It’s like impossible to get a room change,” she said.

Linden, 22, said she knew four people in the A and B buildings of the Village who had gotten into major conflicts with roommates – shouting matches, name-calling, arguments – that continued to escalate without the Village giving a room change. The English major said that one of her new neighbors had only received a change because the police became involved.

Linden also mentioned the $100 fee the Village charges to change apartments and the $50 charge to change rooms.

Linden said the way the Village mediates conflict is also ineffective – name-calling and shouting were allowed during meetings to resolve problems.

“The residents here are completely neglected as far as our ability to get along,” she said.

Stan Prather, community director at the Village who was mediating Jackson and her roommates’ dispute, could not be reached for comment.

Linden’s account is reminiscent of a campus police report of Jackson’s relationship with her roommates before she tried to get a room change. Jackson’s roommates filed a report on Sept. 12, and the text details incident after incident of yelling, name-calling, and confrontation that had grown intense enough to cause one roommate to say she became physically ill.

Yamina Washington, 22, a roommate of Linden, has been to several mediation meetings in support of friends. The impression she received is that unless one person has put his or her hand on another, the Village is not likely to grant a room change.

Kevin Bard, head of a tenants’ group called the Village Association, said several things were going on at the Village that may have prevented Jackson from getting the room change as fast as she might have liked.

Near the beginning of the semester, the Village wanted everyone to wait a few weeks before submitting room change requests because the staff was turning over and couldn’t process the requests quickly, he said.

Bard also said the Village has a harder time processing room changes for women, which is much more difficult because more women than men tend to ask for single rooms instead of double rooms. But since the Village does not allow mixed housing, a woman or man has to move into a single room in an apartment with others of the same sex. The number of single rooms available for women is therefore slim, Bard said.

Mike Murphy, general manager of the Village, said he doesn’t know the statistics of how many women versus men request single rooms. Since there are more women than men at the Village, it would follow that more women request single rooms than men, he said.

The 180 single rooms are not designated as to whether they are going to be male or female rooms. It depends on the applicants every semester, Murphy said.