It was move in day Thursday - in the rain - for many local college students.

When everyone's finished, you might as well hang a no vacancy sign outside one GW residence hall, there's no extra room on campus.

"We are at 100 percent capacity, I have zero beds available," said GW Housing Director Seth Weinshel.

Across town at American, its even more cramped. Nearly 850 freshman living in 'temporary triples'- three to a room, instead of the usual two. While the number is dropping, that's 54 percent of this year's class.

"It's hard, there's not a lot of room and everybody has different class times so we all wake like really early because somebody always has an 8:30 class. It's not fair," said AU freshman Alicia Bianco.

"I feel like sometimes it's a little crowded, but its not all that bad," said Sharon Shih.

University leaders point to three reasons for the housing crunch, a larger than normal freshman class nationally, improving facilities on college campuses like the ones at American University and a tight rental market in the Washington D.C. area that's just too pricey for some college students.

In fact American had to put up 24 students in an apartment complex in Silver Spring, 48 students at a Georgetown hotel, and 98 Washington semester students are living on Capitol Hill. The university even offered upper classmen incentives to move off campus.

"Incentive programs and options that would catch their attention and give them options rather than force students into x,y or z choice that we are making for them," said Chris Moody of AU's housing office.

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