Although a week from Friday will find the first floor of Straus Hall no longer a clearing-house for apartment seekers, the valuable activities of the University Housing Office will not slide suddenly to a halt. After that date Hunneman and Company, a local real estate firm, will handle the renting of apartments to incoming student, and an office in the Phillips Brooks House will take care of negotiations for the temporary quarters that may be lying unoccupied around the Square.

But even though the office is not permanently pulling up states, it seems a fitting time now to bestow a laurel or two on this group for fourteen months of a job well done. Since January of last year, well over three thousand assorted housing problems have been solved in one way or another; and the greatest crisis of all was successfully passed last September when a small army of veterans and their dependents moved en mass upon Cambridge. Moving with singular rapidity, the University promptly filled in the imminent breach by reconverting a deserted army camp and a hotel in downtown Boston, and adding them to its string of temporary projects on the old tennis courts and across the Charles.

Certainly no one will insist that the hastily constructed developments and the quarters in the Hotel Brunswick are the most palatial of residences, and no one will deny that Harvardevens Village is pretty far away, but at least there is the satisfaction that no one is going homeless--in fact, at this date the Housing Office has more vacancies than it has applications. Anyone who has noticed the Quonset huts and trailer camps which seem to cluster about most colleges this year can heave a thankful sigh of relief.