Those of you who are living in the dorms have no doubt begun to look forward to a time when you can get the hell out of there.
Your relationship with your roommate is slowly deteriorating, the stoners in your hall are steadfastly continuing to hotbox the shower, and come the first big heat wave of spring term you’ll learn that the dorms start to smell twice as bad when the temperature rises. These are only some of the reasons why nearly all University students opt to find off-campus housing rather than return to the residence halls for a second year. Unfortunately, things do not improve once you get off campus.
There’s always the option of living across the river in Duck’s Village, Chase Village or Stadium Park, but while the units over there are luxurious and generally affordable, they are also a 30-minute walk from campus. If you don’t have a car, this puts you entirely at the mercy of LTD, which offers essentially no service to and from campus on the weekends or between 7 and 10 p.m. on weekdays. I was reluctant to put myself in this position, so I searched for and found an apartment close to campus. The results have been disappointing, to say the least.
Real estate close to campus is an interesting game – a few lending companies own nearly all the property in the area, and as there is a steady supply of students flowing into Eugene with a constant need for cheap housing, they don’t have to work hard to attract business. As a result, housing conditions are generally subpar and management is less than competent or courteous.
When I first arrived in my apartment this year, which cost extra as it had been remodeled over the summer, I found floors covered in drywall, electrical sockets installed upside-down, and the doorjamb splintered where somebody had attempted to kick the door in. Our furnished dinner table is so unsteady that eating with one’s elbows on it is a recipe for disaster. We had to haggle with management for weeks to get a fourth chair so our fourth roommate could eat at the wobbly table with us, and when the furnished TV we’d been promised finally arrived (10 weeks late) we were not surprised to find that the picture would go fuzzy if somebody so much as coughed anywhere near it. To cap it all off, my roommate’s bedroom is not level – there’s a 3-inch incline from the north end of the room to the south end. This is especially frustrating to my roommate, an architecture major, who now goes home after a hard day of designing structurally sound buildings to a room where walking eight feet results in a drop in altitude.
These incidents are not unique to my lending company. Residents in units owned by other companies have had similar experiences. Many tenants complain that it’s nearly impossible to recover a security deposit from either company, and in one case a former resident related that his rental company charged him for six hours’ worth of cleaning in his recently vacated apartment, despite the fact that he’d left it spotless. Repairs for broken utilities are said to come slowly or not at all.
For students leaving the dorms who want to live close to campus, there really is no “good” option – as the majority of the properties close to campus are owned by these three companies, oftentimes the best one can do is find the lesser of three evils. I’m tempted to use the term “slumlord” to describe them – but wait, as a tenant, wouldn’t that make me a slumdog?
It’s interesting that only a mile or two away from campus, one can find similarly priced housing that is in significantly better shape. It seems the real estate companies understand that because their primary customers are students, most of whom lack financial independence and are transient from one year to the next, they can provide poor quality housing and still never face a shortage of business. But the fact that the majority of residents in the campus area haven’t lived on their own before is all the more reason their first apartment shouldn’t be in shoddy-bordering-on-dangerous condition.
Area landlords argue that they are reluctant to provide exquisite housing or return deposits because students are less reliable tenants than ordinary renters, due to our propensity toward frequent wild parties and drunken antics, which can spell disaster for carpets, walls or any other surface that can be vomited upon.
In a comment on the Daily Emerald’s Web site, a Eugene landlord who claims to have spent 30 years renting to students pointed out that landlords have their own fair share of horror stories about young tenants who trashed their units and were completely uncooperative with management. By his report, out of hundreds of students he had rented to, only two had ever left their apartments as clean as they’d found them. The consensus among landlords seems to be that student government ought to interface with lending companies in order to “address issues of mutual concern.”
Economics teaches us that companies respond to incentives, so perhaps whoever wins the upcoming ASUO election ought to work with the companies as well as better educate students on rental housing laws to foster better tenant-landlord relations and hopefully improve students’ living conditions. If we show our willingness to take responsibility for our actions and keep our units in better condition, perhaps our landlords will start leasing us units that don’t slope 3 inches south.