re: Coming to a tire store near you

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Housing

For most of the early history of Auburn, boarding houses and barracks made up most of the student housing. Even into the 1970s, boarding houses were still available in the community. It wasn't until the great depression that Auburn began to construct the first buildings on campus that were "dorms" in the modern sense of the word. As the university gradually shifted away from agricultural and military instruction to more of an academic institution, more and more dorms began to replace the barracks and boarding houses.
Auburn's first dorms were hardly luxurious. Magnolia Dormatory, built in the 1950's and demolished in 1987, was once used by the state of Alabama in its defense against a lawsuit brought by state prison inmates. The inmates claimed that housing two men in a cell of particularly small dimensions constituted 'cruel and unusal punishment.' The state argued in court that students at Auburn actually paid to live in even smaller living spaces--at Magnolia Dorm. The inmates lost the case.
One quirk of Auburn's student housing that for almost fifty years made it unique in the country was the high percentage of Auburn students living in mobile homes located off campus. This trend began in the late 1940s as a result of massive housing shortages due to returning soldiers taking advantage of the GI Bill. Trailers provided an economical, readily available source of housing with the additional bonus of providing privacy not found in a dormatory. Often a student would live in the same trailer that his or her siblings or other family relatives had lived in during their years at Auburn.
In the last twenty years, the city of Auburn has experienced a rapid growth in the number of apartment complexes constructed, and the number of students living in trailers has rapidly declined. However, even today there are large trailer parks located off Wire and Webster roads southwest of Auburn where many students live
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