Rising Housing Crisis For UMN Students

How the rise in luxury apartments around campus affects students looking for off-campus housing

By Alessandra Benitez

Exactly three and a half weeks after I moved into my new house in Dinkytown, the leasing company sent us an email saying we had to renew our lease by the first week of October. Otherwise, it would go to the first people to sign. As if the start of the midterm season wasn’t enough stress, I now had to add figuring out housing to it, for yet another year. The email got me thinking about the process I went through around October of last year looking for housing, which was stressful, to say the least. I’m sure many can agree that housing near campus is difficult to figure out for a number of reasons. Finding a relatively nice, relatively close, and relatively cheap place is all most of us students can ask for. But unfortunately, leasing companies around the U of M make it hard.

Minnesota's weather is unforgiving, steaming hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter, and so damp the rest of the year. Additionally, many students don’t have cars and rely on school buses, public transportation, and good old walking as means of transportation. I know one major component when I was looking for a house was making sure I wouldn’t have to walk a long way to get to class (sorry to those who live in Como), so my roommates and I decided Dinkytown was our best option: close to school and to the fun. Because we knew it’d take a while, we started looking for a place for this year around mid-October last year. We looked everywhere: apartments, houses, duplexes, you name it. We toured at Uncommon, which was great, except it didn’t list any prices on the website (we would soon find out that’s how you know it’s going to be expensive). We toured a couple of houses in Dinkytown which were kind of breaking down and still too expensive, and even some apartment buildings (they all had that smell). Even when we did find a couple of places that checked our boxes, they always got taken by some other group literally a day or two before we told the company we’d like that unit. Seriously, it happened like three times.

These difficulties in finding affordable housing are felt all throughout the U of M’s student body. The Wake conducted a poll to see how students are feeling the effects of expensive housing, in which over 50% of the participants reported living in an off-campus house or apartment. When asked to briefly describe what the process of finding said housing was like, the responses were all very similar: tedious, difficult, and annoying. Most students agree that in order to find something nice and reasonably priced, you have to start looking very early into the school year. Many recounted looking for housing as early as October of the previous year by utilizing Facebook pages, apartment databases, social media, and word of mouth. Most of the time this research resulted in touring multiple places without avail, sometimes for months on end due to the state of the unit, the size, the price, and so on. There are a lot of things that students resent about leasing companies around campus, but chief among them is pricing. Many simply cannot keep up with the rising prices in housing around school, and some students even stated that the high prices directly resulted in them having to live at home and commute to school.

Let’s face it: when it comes to student housing you don’t need it to be super nice— functional will do just fine. The problem is leasing companies around the school want to rent out almost functional units for extravagant prices. Just look at the luxury apartment buildings all around campus. The Hub in Stadium Village is a great example of this: stylishly furnished apartments, a pool, jacuzzi, gym, and super expensive rent. Though, if you’ve ever been inside one of The Hub apartments, you know they’re tiny. We're talking about almost no living room space and zero kitchen storage. But, of course, the amenities sure are nice.

More recently, these luxury-style buildings seem to be all the new rage in Dinkytown. Just this summer The Fieldhouse was finished and people started moving in. It has a pool, a huge gym, a clubhouse, a media room, a game room, study rooms, and any more rooms you can think of. Rent, of course, is egregiously high. If Identity is ever finished it will also be a luxury-style apartment building (word on the street is it might have a McDonald's), and Landmark Properties plans to build yet another luxury housing building by the fall of 2025.

But how do students feel about these “luxury” apartments? Most are not fans. Not surprising, considering that increased competition between housing companies has in turn raised the prices of housing overall, making it rather difficult or sometimes impossible for students to afford living near campus.

Regardless of popularity, these buildings seem to be popping up left and right, and leasing companies certainly don’t waste any time getting tenants and charging them rent, sometimes before they’re even finished building the complex. But for some, this greed blew up in their faces. Identity is still not finished, even though we’re more than five weeks into the semester. They left hundreds, if not thousands, of students stranded. For their grand solution, they offered every person who was supposed to move in two options. One: find alternative housing on your own and receive a $150 gift card per day until move-in; two: alternate housing provided by Identity and a $80 gift card per day until move-in. Except, if you took the first option, you’re stuck commuting to school and back every single day, which is pretty annoying if you were supposed to have housing near school. If you took the second option, you likely got put in some basic hotel room, which means no kitchen, paying for laundry, and more. The general opinion of our poll respondents is that these offers were not nearly enough to make up for the inconvenience and stress that Identity put them through.

Most people chose option one, which meant they had to scramble to find a place to stay. What many people had to do was try to find short leases while the property was finished building or new housing altogether. Short-term leases were preferred since Identity won’t let them get out of their leases. Identity’s behavior towards its tenants during this situation was considered predatory by a lot of students. As if this wasn’t stressful enough for students, they might not even be able to move in at all this semester. The projected move-in date was supposed to be September 29 for some floors and early October for others. However, Identity did not have a permit to have people actually live there yet, as the residents were informed. They ended up getting the permit last minute and people can now move in… right as midterm season is starting.

Dissatisfaction with off-campus housing has grown exponentially due to the rise of luxury apartments as well as blatant shows of disrespect from leasing companies. The delay in building Identity is just one example of how landlords continue to take advantage of students around campus and get away with it, since they’re the only companies near school. The prices keep going up, yet the quality of the residences keeps declining steadily. If these trends continue, there's a very real possibility that students will eventually get priced out of living near campus, as some already have.

Sources:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/landmark-properties-to-expand-into-minnesota-with-luxury-high-rise-student-housing-community-in-minneapolis-301734920.html

https://mnrepublic.com/9400/news/apartment-lease-lawsuit-students-stuck-finding-alternate-housing-amid-building-delays/

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/identity-dinkytown-remains-unfinished-unsent-paperwork-may-cause-more-move-in-delays/