On Feb. 9, hundreds of students at the University of Massachusetts Boston were displaced from their residence hall after a pipe burst. Students have been allowed to return to retrieve belongings, but there is otherwise no timeline for when the university plans to reopen the building.

Now, some of those students are staying in Newton–at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s campus located at the former site of Mt. Ida College, known as the Charles River Campus.

The Charles River Campus is primarily used to allow UMass Amherst students to have access to summer internship and job opportunities in Boston, which is why they had extra space available for 144 of the over 600 displaced students.

UMass Boston Director of Communications DeWayne Lehman, however, told Mass Media, the student newspaper for UMass Boston, that many students declined the offer of housing on the Charles River Campus. That’s not surprising, considering that it can take 40 minutes to get from Newton to UMass Boston on a good day, and shuttles are only running once an hour. It’s also not within walking distance of much beyond cemeteries, so the university is paying for student Uber trips to University Place in Westwood.

While UMass Amherst and UMass Boston are part of the same state university system, they are only joined at the very top. When UMass Amherst purchased the Mt. Ida College property in 2018, representatives from UMass Boston were frustrated by this.

Arthur Mabbett, chairman emeritus of the UMass Boston Board of Visitors, told WBUR that it would further inequality between UMass Amherst and UMass Boston and introduce unnecessary competition between the two. The Charles River Campus being available to UMass Boston students shows that they are still part of one larger entity, but communication has not always been ideal. Mass Media reported that the staff at the Charles River Campus thought there would only be 50 students, and not nearly triple that number.

The students have overall been incredibly frustrated by the university response, with some students even prevented from initially returning to their dorm rooms to retrieve necessary medication. About 50 students’ rooms were severely flooded, and many had personal belongings that were damaged. Donations to help students replace items can be made here.