College Towns Get New Housing, but It’s Decidedly Not Dorms
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Near college campuses around the country, developers have begun building luxury housing for the staff, not the students. Tapping into a desire among some younger workers to live in walkable, urban communities, these developers have discovered that a college neighborhood can fit that bill, as students are no longer the only ones who want to live near campus.
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A one-bedroom apartment on Market Street in Philadelphia, staged for viewing.
At $1,900 a month for 700 square feet, it is priced to discourage undergraduates.
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Developers use various strategies to keep undergraduates away from these new projects, including high rents that most students can’t afford. They time leasing to miss the start of the academic year, reject applicants who will rely on a guarantor to pay the rent and design spaces that are not ideal for young students. “The undergraduates get the message,” Mr. Downey said. …
The new development is having a ripple effect on the neighborhood. Last summer, Post Brothers Apartments, a local developer, began buying aging rental buildings with plans to renovate them. … The developers also plan to restore the historic lobby and renovate apartments as leases turn over, raising rent to $1,900 a month for a one-bedroom, from about $1,200 a month.
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Full New York Times story here.
… the ‘how many people can you fit on the head of a pin’-ification of cities takes a leap forward …
I went to an in-town university in a major American city at a time of great “gentrification” and I saw this in spades: thousands upon thousands of nearby lower income housing units renovated into new, chic apartments for the new urbanites wanting to be close to things. And what was the result? If what you cared about was the low-income housing count, the result was bad indeed. If what you cared about was the larger health of the city and the continuity of a safe walkable, vibrant civic landscape, it was an absolute godsend.
This was Boston in the early ’80s. The area was the Back Bay where it ran across Massachusetts Avenue, the street that connects Harvard and MIT with the downtown, right at the point where it meets the Berklee School of Music and Boston Symphony Hall, all at the confluence of major transit systems. The area had been languishing for decades and it was ultimately “resettled” largely by the newly out and affluent gay population, the only people it was said who were prepared to live with the social isolation of a not-yet-reconnected-to-the-city area while it was all under redevelopment. Go there now and you’d never know it hadn’t always been the thriving place it is today; you’ll even find lululemon, of course.
The problem then, just as it is now, was housing for people who couldn’t afford to live there any more. I was one of them but the solution for me was student housing. In other words, the university owned and rented housing at a reasonable rate. For others who weren’t so lucky to have a university landlord, there was no government agency or non-profit housing society to step in to pick up the slack.