2125 Franklin is a student housing complex located on Franklin Blvd. Individual bedrooms are priced anywhere from $800 to $2,000 per month. (Henry Ward/Emerald)
When students apply to college, they often consider how good the academics of their prospective university are, the school spirit, scholarships granted to students and what dorm they might live in. However, the cost of living in their college town after dorm living can sometimes slip potential students’ minds. That is, until the time for independent student living comes back around after their first year with a price point higher than they had prepared for.
For students who are financially independent or take out student loans, finding affordable housing can be a crucial factor in being able to afford to go to the University of Oregon. Some undergraduate and graduate students feel overwhelmed by the lack of affordable housing options in Eugene.
According to Forbes magazine, a good rule of thumb is to spend less than 30% of one’s total income on housing. But for students in Eugene, this is rarely achievable.
In Eugene, the average cost of living in an apartment is roughly $1,531 per month and the average cost of gas is $4.18 per gallon. For students living on their own, this price point may be more than they are willing or able to spend, therefore taking a large toll on their mental and physical well-being.
The Undergraduate Battle
Students like Margo Cumming, a UO junior, have struggled to find affordable housing and have grown to recognize the privilege many of her fellow students have.
“I applied to be in an [academic residential community], so I didn’t think about off-campus housing,” Cumming said regarding the Media and Social Action ARC she was in her freshman year. Incoming freshmen at UO are required to live in student housing during their first year. Few receive ample resources or information on what happens after the freshman year.
Cumming is from the Bay Area, where she says the rent is already quite high. According to the same article from Forbes, the average rent in San Francisco is $3,734, a difference of over $2,000 a month from Eugene.
“Honestly, the prices have gone up to live in Eugene off campus so much that it’s not even that big of a difference,” Cumming said about living in the two cities.
Cumming said that UO fails to advertise affordable off-campus housing options for freshmen during their first year. This can leave students scrambling to find affordable housing in a safe location until the last minute, often leading to them settling for a high price point or unsafe rentals.
Resources for off-campus housing from the UO can be found on its website with rental listings from all around the Eugene off-campus area. It lists some of the apartment units that are close to campus such as The 515, 2125 Franklin, Union on Broadway and many more. However, at the bottom of the page, two entire paragraphs state that the UO does not inspect or endorse any of the listings above, and that they rely on the rental property owners to report information fairly and accurately about their units to them.
Many rental listings on the website are over $1,000 per person per month. Some are over $2,000.
Oftentimes, apartments advertise themselves as student housing when actually they offer housing to both students and non-students, which can cause safety concerns for some. Property owners at 2125 Franklin said they do this, but claim they are not directly partnered with the UO. They do, however, advertise at various sporting events by handing out rally towels at football games or goodie bags at first-year orientations.
This form of advertising can often lead first-year students to believe these are among the best and only options for off-campus housing.
Safety vs. Affordability
Destiny Martinez, a junior at UO, took matters into her own hands to find affordable housing.
“To find inexpensive housing I went to roomies.com and I found my new roommates and there were better deals,” she said.
Martinez added that this low price came with it being in a “sketchier” area than the property’s counterparts, such as The 515 and 2125 Franklin.
“A lot of students still live in this area; it’s just sketchy,” she said.
When asked if she would have felt safer if she had paid extra to be in a more luxurious apartment or in one closer to campus, Martinez said “Definitely.”
The high rent prices through competing properties can often separate the more privileged students from those with lower incomes.
“I have to work full time to be able to support myself financially and working full time and going to school full time [where’s] my social life?” Martinez said.
She said balancing the two limits her to socialize with the people in her classes and those she works with.
“I try to squeeze in some fun,” she said. “My mental health last winter term honestly was pretty bad.”
This term she will be working a lot more and taking more classes and said she is worried about how that will affect her mental health.
“I just have to learn how to balance everything, I guess,” she said.
For a lot of UO students, balancing “everything” is the only solution if they want to graduate.
Graduate Students Struggle
The affordable housing issues don’t end at the undergraduate level. They often extend to the graduate educators at the school.
Allison LaSalvia is a GE in the chemistry program and a part of the bargaining team for the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation at UO. After moving from Illinois to Oregon for the chemistry Ph.D. program, it took her months to find housing that was within her price range after moving across the country.
“I ended up having to live a little bit further away in Springfield, so it was a good 15 to 20-minute commute every day to get to the university,” LaSalvia said. “Luckily I have a car, but I know for a lot of people within my cohort, not having that transportation option, they couldn’t choose that.”
She said that living far away made going back home more inconvenient, causing her to stay on campus all day and oftentimes overworking herself.
“Just the additional financial toll of having to pay for gas and having to pay for parking,” LaSalvia said.
Like undergraduate students, the resources given for affordable housing are few and far between for GEs.
“The only thing that they offered was the chemistry department sent out a spreadsheet of ‘Here are people looking for housing’ and that was useful to find roommates but there wasn’t really any other information,” LaSalvia said.
Having just moved to Oregon, LaSalvia had to navigate finding housing alone.
“I was not made aware of [graduate housing] until I got to orientation,” she said. “That was something that was not publicly talked about and even then they were like, ‘Oh yeah you could apply for next year.’”
LaSalvia said that the application process includes a long waitlist, and the people in charge don’t inform applicants where they are on the list.
“You could potentially not hear back for months and then if there’s an opening you pretty much immediately move in,” she said.
LaSalvia said that applicants who already have a lease have to decide if they want to pay double rent since the process is so unpredictable.
What comes next?
LaSalvia said that there has been a lot of discourse about housing options in the wake of COVID-19. During the pandemic, she said the university kicked out GEs to use the space for quarantine rooms. With the increase in the student body with incoming freshmen classes, there are worries amongst GEs that this will happen again if the UO runs out of space in the on-campus dorms.
“UO is one of the largest employers in the state, let alone in Eugene, so they’re bringing all these people here and then they’re having a negative impact on their employees’ livelihood while also being one of the biggest real estate owners in the city as well,” LaSalvia said.
She said GTFF is using its collective power to bargain with UO to address this long-overdue issue of housing options for GEs.
“It is [UO’s] problem when you’re over-enrolling undergrads, therefore you have to buy more land which takes away other land and housing opportunities for other people,” LaSalvia said. “And there are more undergrads who are trying to find housing and community as well.”
While taking on a second job is not often talked about amongst GEs, LaSalvia said it’s something a lot of them have to do to be able to support themselves in Eugene while also studying and working at UO.
With the continuous yearly increase in UO’s freshmen class, housing options could become more and more competitive for undergraduate and graduate students. GTFF continues to bargain for higher salaries to supplement the rise in the housing market, but LaSalvia says that change in the accessibility of affordable housing might be after her time at the university.
“It seems like having these conversations would be the first step but having something like, what if our salary was based on the average cost of housing? That would be a way to directly make the UO care about what housing costs,” she said. “Hopefully, this will continue and we can be better stewards of our community as a whole.”
Are you curious about how this article was written? Check out this week’s “How It’s Reported” with Alicia Santiago.
