Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

Yesterday we saw that Boston, whose mayor I’ve alternately tweaked and applauded, has now decided that while four or fewer students living together are all right, five or more are right out:

 

In the Real World, will three of you have to move out?

 

Continuing from the Boston Globe story, we discover that the principal sponsor is claiming his law is legal:

 

Councilor Michael Ross, who sponsored the regulation, said that other municipalities - including Newark, Del., Bloomsburg, Penn., and Bowling Green, Ohio - had adopted similar zoning restrictions targeting college students and that courts have upheld the restrictions.

 

If I have time – or if a helpful reader will send them to me – I’ll research those statutes, and see whether they are in fact similar, and whether they’re enforceable.

 

The new law returns the city’s policy on off-campus student housing to the provision in effect in 2003, when a Boston court overturned a similar restriction.

 

I wonder what’s different from the previous ordinance.  We can be sure there will be something, because even local politicians know they have to vary, lest the new law be thrown out.\\

 

Hey, we changed the wording!

 

The new law is designed to discourage landlords from turning single- and two-family dwellings into high-rent, multi-bedroom apartments for large numbers of students, Ross and other supporters said.

 

Actually, Councilor Ross, that’s just what owners will do to evade your ordinance, if it survives legal challenge.  Dividing the house into separate-entry flats will make it into apartments, and then a group of four can live in it. 

 

“You can’t let profit dominate the public debate,” he said.

 

Nor can you eliminate profit just because you think it’s debatable.

 

He estimated that at least 5,000 housing units would be affected in Boston.

 

All but guaranteeing immediate litigation.

 

As is, right now, daddy-O

 

Opponents, many of them property owners and college students, said the occupancy limit violates their property rights and, by focusing just on students and not other large groups of renters, unfairly singles out specific people.

 

“This is a back-door form of rent control,” said Stephen Greenbaum, a Boston lawyer specializing in real estate and land use, who spoke against the proposal at yesterday’s hearing. “You can’t simply single out a particular group and say they can’t live together.“

 

Imagine the hubbub if a city ordinance precluded four or more blacks, Asians, or women from living together.  You think the ACLU would be on the case?

 

“If you took out the phrase college student and insert [an ethnic group], it would be a clear civil rights violation,” said Jon Phoenix, a Northeastern University freshman. “There shouldn’t be anything wrong with five friends wanting to live together.”

 

Northeastern University student Jon Phoenix spoke on the off-campus occupancy limit yesterday, as a large crowd thronged the Zoning Commission hearing.

 

Some property owners denounced the plan as unenforceable and said it would backfire by deepening a housing shortage that would drive up rents.

 

Yes, but what use is logic if you’re a landlord?

 

I’m from the neighborhood and I vote

 

They urged the city to focus on enforcing other occupancy codes and on cracking down on absentee landlords, rather than restricting their property rights and ability to turn a profit.

 

“If you reduce my five-bedroom to four, I’ll just raise the rent to what I would have gotten,” said Greg Hummel, a Brighton property owner.

 

Nice threat, Mr. Hummel, but just because you raise the rent doesn’t mean you’ll get it, any more than Owen Glendower could call spirits from the vasty deep.

 

“And if students can’t afford it, do you think the Starbucks crowd will pay any less?”

 

Now that you mention it, I do – that’s how markets work, different people paying different things.

 

The measure changes how the zoning code defines a family, to prevent five or more unrelated, full-time students from living together. Larger groups can live together, as long as they are not students.

 

This is too hilarious.  Does that mean that students who sleep together count as one unit, but students who are mutually celibate don’t?

 

The same city that prides itself on tolerance, that embraces every other form of personal rights, feel it has the ability and the justification to define what constitutes a family – and whatever a family it, a student group house isn’t it.

 

Nope, you’re not living in the Real World, either

 

At yesterday’s hearing, Boston police Captain William Evans said he had seen how large groups of students living together often hurt residents’ quality of life.

 

“We dread September and October in the Fenway and Allston-Brighton area,” he said. “It’s a tremendous drain on our resources.”

 

This will be true regardless of the housing requirement; it’s the people, not the units, that creates the congestion.

 

“Nothing bothers me more than hearing people are fed up and fleeing the city.”

 

They’re probably not fleeing Allston-Brighton or Fenway.  Anyone who’s been through either knows those neighborhoods are college central.

 

Allston-Brighton’s that boxy polyp south of Harvard, east of BC, west of BU

 

Several college officials said the move would help combat the growing problem of students in groups as large as 12 living in housing poorly maintained by absentee landlords.

 

If your problem is that the housing is poor quality, enforce the building codes.

 

“It’s a disgrace, and it’s very dangerous,” said Sandra Pascal, associate vice president of community affairs at Wentworth Institute of Technology.

 

Jeffrey Doggett - director of government relations and community affairs at Northeastern University, which is building a 1,200-student dormitory at Ruggles and Tremont streets - said the proliferation of students living together in large numbers on residential streets has reached a tipping point.

 

It started out so small, and look how it’s grown

 

“We think it’s critical this happen now,” he said. “We’ve waited too long for this, and it’s in the best interests of both the neighborhood and the students.”

 

 

Students said that the restriction infringed on their rights and that they needed many roommates to afford to live in an expensive city.

 

(A sampling of colleges in Boston - including Boston, Northeastern, and Suffolk universities, Boston and Emerson colleges, and Wentworth Institute of Technology - found room and board typically costs at least $10,000 this academic year. In Boston, four-bedroom apartments can be found for under $3,000 a month.)

 

That parenthetical mixes two different numbers, housing only versus housing plus food, so let’s make them equivalent.

 

If we assume four roommates, $3,000/ 4 = $750 x 8 months (September to April) = $6,000 per academic year for housing, leaving $4,000 per academic year (say, 225 days) for food, or about $18 per day. 

 

In other words, dorm living costs about as much as living off campus — and given those facts, many students would prefer to live off campus, especially when off-campus is right in student-friendly bar-dotted Boston, giving credence to the owners’ theory:

 

Property owners said they believed that colleges supported the plan in order to steer students toward their dormitories.

 

Certainly possible – once you’ve built the dorm, you really want the students to live in it.  Universities that  have built dorms thus have a mercantilist interest in joining forces with NIMBYite neighbors to keep the students down on the farm.

 

Some students, such as Allison Pyburn, a recent Suffolk graduate who just signed a lease to live with four Simmons undergraduates in the Fenway, said the new law would make it harder for students to make ends meet.

 

Unless they shift their family configuration along with their housing configuration and bunk up together – and we know what more bedrooms mean, don’t we?

 

“It’s almost impossible to afford to live here already,” she said.

 

I’ll give you a break on the rent

 

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