8 ms·

If the Tuition Doesn’t Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will

68 points by johnny313 7y ago

Spooky23 7y ago
Definitely a thing. In my midsized city, between new dorms at the state university and new private luxury dorms, the old student ghetto neighborhoods are declining further. Lots of abandoned buildings, as they don’t meet standards for subsidized housing.
imagin8or 7y ago
Take control of the means of accommodation
cbanek 7y ago
> From 2000 to 2017, Austin’s population climbed about 45%, according to the Census Bureau and the City of Austin, as demand for housing contributed to a 72% surge in average rents. West Campus median gross rents outpaced the city as a whole, rising more than 87% in the same period. As someone who went to a good school in the middle of nowhere, where rent was cheap and we were surrounded by farmland for 50 miles in every direction, I wonder if that's not the more sustainable way to do it. Like computer science, having a college in a town doesn't require a lot from its location. It doesn't need to be near a river, oil or mineral deposits, etc. People travel there all the time to simply be there. Going to college in an already large city, many of which have housing affordability problems already, seems to compound the issue. They aren't making any more land for housing near UCLA. While it can be nice to have lots of cultural and interesting things to do in the town where you go to school, I'm not sure it's really required. I wonder if this means that schools in smaller "college towns" will be more appealing... although it seems like reputation is everything, and everyone still wants to go to an expensive school thinking it will make a difference in their life, as opposed to getting a similar education with less name recognition, as shown by the article: > “But I clicked ‘accept’ on my admission anyway,” she says, figuring that attending UT Austin’s lauded journalism school would lead to more internship opportunities and, ultimately, a job after she graduated. Although maybe this is all just naive thinking. Perhaps this would just end up with the system con-ing them somewhere else. We always find a reason and a way to extract more money from students.
- lettergram 7y ago
  Makes me think you went to UIUC, Purdue or one of the other “near by” universities (I’m near UIUC now). I have an 8 minute commute to campus, where my wife is a grad student. I work near by (similar 8 minute commute). Even on campus rent for a 1 bedroom is $400-$500 Honestly, it’s not just universities... everyone should consider if they really need to be in a large city. While there are some drawbacks (childcare), generally my quality of life is higher and the cost of living is affordable.
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    Thai food? 2 hour drive for me.
    - meowface 7y ago
      It's stuff like that that keeps me away from small towns (except for vacations). Indian and Thai food is too much for me to give up.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        The Thai government supports Thai restaurants. Lots of small towns have them. Really. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paxadz/the-surprising-rea...
        dillonmckay 7y ago
        I was hoping to find a form to signup my area.
    - justinator 7y ago
      You can make thai food at home. It's fun!
      - 7y ago
H8crilA 7y ago
Ugh I was always under the impression that Texas has lower real estate prices than California due to more liberal building permits. But it is very bad in both places in big cities: Austin: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q San Francisco: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS06075A https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS06075A
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Texas doesn't have onerous zoning, it just has onerous building requirements (that apply everywhere). Setbacks and so on.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  austin is the california of texas
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    That would explain the prices.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    What's Marfa?
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      Berkely
- ummonk 7y ago
  I don't think that is very meaningful? First link is Austin rents today relative to to 1995, and second link is SF rents today relative to 2000. Both have gone up a ton relative to where they were, but one of them started out a lot lower than the other...
  - H8crilA 7y ago
maxerickson 7y ago
Here's one of the companies Ann Arbor properties: https://www.americancampus.com/student-apartments/mi/ann-arbor https://www.americancampus.com/student-apartments/mi/ann-arb... Their cheapest rates (~$1000...) are for double occupancy studio apartments that are about 550 square feet. They are nicely furnished (at least, that's what it says on the sticker, who knows how well the furnishing are kept up).
- mgoblu3 7y ago
  As a UofM grad and still an Ann Arbor resident, Ann Arbor has significant housing supply issues and a city council elected to effectively keep it that way. That said, there’s definitely more the university and others could do despite the opposition, and it’s getting more attention. Even as a student splitting a house with 6-8 other people, I was paying at least $800/month. Ann Arbor is not the easiest place to be a commuter into, so students have very few options.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    The 5 bedroom I lived in, a few blocks north of central campus, is apparently ~$3100. I think I paid ~$450 for one of the smaller rooms. Certainly not much more than that. It's even been remodeled.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Willowtree there is ~$1150 for a 2br, unfurnished. Location (north of north campus) kinda sucks for non-engineering students, but not much worse than Northwoods.
tracer4201 7y ago
My younger sibling is in college now in her senior year. She was living with my other sibling, who just moved away after graduating from her residency program. My parents don’t have a lot and my younger sibling was going to take loans this year for housing and food. I’m helping her out with that. My own controversial thoughts are that higher education in this country is an epic scam. I had degrees in CS and Finance. Aside from 2-3 main courses in each program (algorithms, operating systems, and networks in CS, maybe linear algebra, stat, and diff eq) nothing else prepared me at all for my career. So many courses required to get a number of credits that were a waste of time in hindsight. Then didn’t help me become a better learner. They didn’t help me evolve past my prejudices. All of that change happened in my career, and all my success with learning skills while I was working. My degree programs may serve some people, but they were too abstract. My professors generally didn’t care. They existed to do research. Most courses were taught by TAs. I remember in 2010 a finance professor going on about Amazons business model and how it was a company doomed to failure. Most of these educators never worked a day at a company outside of education.
- xwdv 7y ago
  Why did you carry so much prejudice well into your career??
rovyko 7y ago
Rent definitely affected my choice of school. With identical offers, I opted for a smaller tech-oriented university over the University of Toronto, which is either the top or one of the top schools in the country. I don't regret it, because rent in Toronto was insane and it's only getting worse. I'd have to commute 90 minutes to my parents' house with no time for a social life, and I'm super lucky to know that I even had that option. And now rents in the small town are growing. Subdivided houses are torn down for luxury apartments, and with recent cuts to government loans, it might not be affordable for some low-income students.
- eigenvector 7y ago
  It sounds like you're describing Waterloo. And as a U of T grad I agree, for many years it was a far more affordable option that was every bit as good (arguably better) for engineering and CS. Sadly Waterloo is suffering from the same insane housing cost inflation as the rest of Southern Ontario now.
  - rovyko 7y ago
    You got it. I was lucky to start when it was affordable. The residence fees this year are completely insane. $1000/mo for a single dorm room and even more for a room in a 3-4 bedroom apt. Off-campus housing isn't much better.
rovyko 7y ago
I lived in university-run student residence and in student-oriented rentals. The amount of wasted space was unbelievable considering everybody spent the vast majority of their time on campus. We didn't need an 86sqft living room, it just filled up with garbage. I couldn't find an apartment with just bedrooms, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom. What I really wanted was one of these tiny apartments [0]. Build a whole apartment of these near campus, students only sleep at home anyway, and sometimes not even that. My univeristy is building a new residence and it has the same 3-5 bedrooms to a giant apartment with a living room. I wonder what's the main barrier to building a lot of tiny single student apartments. Is it the municipal regulations, are they not economical or did research show that students actually want living rooms? EDIT: Just look at the size of these living rooms. I've been in so many of these apartments and they're almost always full of boxes and trash. - http://www.rez-one.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MG_6020.jpg http://www.rez-one.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MG_6020.jpg - http://www.rez-one.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MG_5991.jpg http://www.rez-one.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MG_5991.jpg - https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/uploads/images/uwp-8.jpg https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/uploads/... - https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/styles/image_gallery_standard/public/uploads/images/mkv-10.jpg?itok=bu-x3tXm https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/styles/i... - https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/styles/image_gallery_standard/public/uploads/images/clvs-8.jpg https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/styles/i... - https://static.wixstatic.com/media/29eef9_c0378e178fda4f0b847b82c9aa296456~mv2_d_4032_3024_s_4_2.jpg https://static.wixstatic.com/media/29eef9_c0378e178fda4f0b84... 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYVJbupG3Xg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYVJbupG3Xg
- lumost 7y ago
  Kitchens and bathrooms are expensive components to an apartment. Arranging the living space so that those are shared significantly drives down the cost of construction. dorm rooms with a shared floor wide bathroom probably achieve the same space efficiency as a 5 bedroom shared apartment with a bathroom and living room, with the added benefit that it will be easier to sell the building as apartments in the future should the need arise.
  - 7y ago
ARandomerDude 7y ago
I went to UT Austin and for me the solution to this problem was: - buy a cheap, 10-year old car - live in a pretty decent apartment about 20 miles from campus - get up at 4:30 AM, drive to campus before rush hour, and do my work in the library - pack "hiking food" (trail mix, etc.) in my backpack and eat for real at night It worked out well and my living space was much cheaper and nicer than what was available near campus. Audiobooks for the commute were a plus.
buss 7y ago
> But the dramatic rise in rents also coincides with national developers starting to eye the areas around public universities as a growth market. Real estate companies bulldoze aging buildings to put up the kinds of amenity-rich, luxury apartments that might appeal to upper-middle-class parents looking for a safe, comfortable place for their student to live but which students from lower-income families such as Martinez’s couldn’t possibly afford. This fundamentally misunderstands how the market works. Consider the counter-factual: had the developers not come in and redeveloped aging structures into modern buildings, those old structures would be just as expensive as the new ones due to a shortage. Yet another piece that demonizes people who actually build homes while not considering what happens when we _dont_ build homes. Just look at SF for what the reality of not building looks like.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Even more so when the new 10+ story luxury apartment complex replaces a single-digit number of existing units, which I'm pretty sure was the case in Ann Arbor. So yes, the new units are luxury units - but there's a lot more of them than before.
cryptozeus 7y ago
During my undergrad I bunked with 5 other guys and the rent was $100 per person. I think if you can manage for 1-2 years like this then you can organize your life better once you have some money saved up.
- CameronNemo 7y ago
  I spent $400 / month for a bed in a living room.
woopwoop 7y ago
I live in Austin. I find it completely baffling that the increase in rent is blamed on dense development in the area west of campus, and not on population growth coupled with the complete lack of any development at all in the area north of campus. Seriously, there is an enormous golf course with tons of one story, single family detached homes within walking distance of 1400$ a month studio apartments. I don't think it's the apartments that are the problem, I think it's the golf course. Of course, all of these single family detached homes had signs telling you to vote against the most recent proposed change in the city's land development code.
- word-reader 7y ago
  Just imagine how bad the rent would be (for everyone, student or no) if they hadn’t built up West Campus. It is easily the densest neighborhood in Texas, comparable to Queens in terms of population density. The student loan credit supply definitely bumps up rents around any campus, but please.
- CameronNemo 7y ago
  There is a similar phenomenon at the ucsd campus, which has huge on campus apartment buildings pushed up against multimillion dollar single family homes (on La Jolla Farms Rd).
word-reader 7y ago
To put this in perspective, the key “problem” example in this article is that median rent in a safe, popular neighborhood with relatively new housing stock, in one of the country’s fastest growing cities, is a whopping $916 a month. (And you can still make it less than that if you live with a roommate in a slightly older building)
DuskStar 7y ago
I went to school at UofM during the described time period (Graduated in 2017, they describe rent increases in 2010-2016) and the question I'd love to see answered is what happened to rents in existing properties when the luxury towers sprouted up. Because of course the new luxury towers are more expensive than an apartment from the 70s - but if the alternative supply hasn't gone up in price or disappeared, it's a bit odd to complain. And I paid less than $1000 for a 2br adjacent to north campus (split with a roommate, so really $500) that was 5 a minute walk from some dorms, 15 minutes to the campus itself - and that's if you ignored the (pretty frequent) buses. Which makes me even more skeptical of the "no one can afford to live there" narrative...

68 points by johnny313 7y ago

Definitely a thing. In my midsized city, between new dorms at the state university and new private luxury dorms, the old student ghetto neighborhoods are declining further. Lots of abandoned buildings, as they don’t meet standards for subsidized housing.

imagin8or 7y ago

Take control of the means of accommodation

cbanek 7y ago

> From 2000 to 2017, Austin’s population climbed about 45%, according to the Census Bureau and the City of Austin, as demand for housing contributed to a 72% surge in average rents. West Campus median gross rents outpaced the city as a whole, rising more than 87% in the same period. As someone who went to a good school in the middle of nowhere, where rent was cheap and we were surrounded by farmland for 50 miles in every direction, I wonder if that's not the more sustainable way to do it. Like computer science, having a college in a town doesn't require a lot from its location. It doesn't need to be near a river, oil or mineral deposits, etc. People travel there all the time to simply be there. Going to college in an already large city, many of which have housing affordability problems already, seems to compound the issue. They aren't making any more land for housing near UCLA. While it can be nice to have lots of cultural and interesting things to do in the town where you go to school, I'm not sure it's really required. I wonder if this means that schools in smaller "college towns" will be more appealing... although it seems like reputation is everything, and everyone still wants to go to an expensive school thinking it will make a difference in their life, as opposed to getting a similar education with less name recognition, as shown by the article: > “But I clicked ‘accept’ on my admission anyway,” she says, figuring that attending UT Austin’s lauded journalism school would lead to more internship opportunities and, ultimately, a job after she graduated. Although maybe this is all just naive thinking. Perhaps this would just end up with the system con-ing them somewhere else. We always find a reason and a way to extract more money from students.

lettergram 7y ago
Makes me think you went to UIUC, Purdue or one of the other “near by” universities (I’m near UIUC now). I have an 8 minute commute to campus, where my wife is a grad student. I work near by (similar 8 minute commute). Even on campus rent for a 1 bedroom is $400-$500 Honestly, it’s not just universities... everyone should consider if they really need to be in a large city. While there are some drawbacks (childcare), generally my quality of life is higher and the cost of living is affordable.
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  Thai food? 2 hour drive for me.
  - meowface 7y ago
    It's stuff like that that keeps me away from small towns (except for vacations). Indian and Thai food is too much for me to give up.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      The Thai government supports Thai restaurants. Lots of small towns have them. Really. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paxadz/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paxadz/the-surprising-rea...
      - dillonmckay 7y ago
        I was hoping to find a form to signup my area.
  - justinator 7y ago
    You can make thai food at home. It's fun!
    - 7y ago

H8crilA 7y ago

Ugh I was always under the impression that Texas has lower real estate prices than California due to more liberal building permits. But it is very bad in both places in big cities: Austin: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q San Francisco: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS06075A https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS06075A

maxerickson 7y ago
Texas doesn't have onerous zoning, it just has onerous building requirements (that apply everywhere). Setbacks and so on.
nyolfen 7y ago
austin is the california of texas
- H8crilA 7y ago
  That would explain the prices.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  What's Marfa?
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    Berkely
ummonk 7y ago
I don't think that is very meaningful? First link is Austin rents today relative to to 1995, and second link is SF rents today relative to 2000. Both have gone up a ton relative to where they were, but one of them started out a lot lower than the other...
- H8crilA 7y ago

maxerickson 7y ago

Here's one of the companies Ann Arbor properties: https://www.americancampus.com/student-apartments/mi/ann-arbor https://www.americancampus.com/student-apartments/mi/ann-arb... Their cheapest rates (~$1000...) are for double occupancy studio apartments that are about 550 square feet. They are nicely furnished (at least, that's what it says on the sticker, who knows how well the furnishing are kept up).

mgoblu3 7y ago
As a UofM grad and still an Ann Arbor resident, Ann Arbor has significant housing supply issues and a city council elected to effectively keep it that way. That said, there’s definitely more the university and others could do despite the opposition, and it’s getting more attention. Even as a student splitting a house with 6-8 other people, I was paying at least $800/month. Ann Arbor is not the easiest place to be a commuter into, so students have very few options.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  The 5 bedroom I lived in, a few blocks north of central campus, is apparently ~$3100. I think I paid ~$450 for one of the smaller rooms. Certainly not much more than that. It's even been remodeled.
DuskStar 7y ago
Willowtree there is ~$1150 for a 2br, unfurnished. Location (north of north campus) kinda sucks for non-engineering students, but not much worse than Northwoods.

tracer4201 7y ago

My younger sibling is in college now in her senior year. She was living with my other sibling, who just moved away after graduating from her residency program. My parents don’t have a lot and my younger sibling was going to take loans this year for housing and food. I’m helping her out with that. My own controversial thoughts are that higher education in this country is an epic scam. I had degrees in CS and Finance. Aside from 2-3 main courses in each program (algorithms, operating systems, and networks in CS, maybe linear algebra, stat, and diff eq) nothing else prepared me at all for my career. So many courses required to get a number of credits that were a waste of time in hindsight. Then didn’t help me become a better learner. They didn’t help me evolve past my prejudices. All of that change happened in my career, and all my success with learning skills while I was working. My degree programs may serve some people, but they were too abstract. My professors generally didn’t care. They existed to do research. Most courses were taught by TAs. I remember in 2010 a finance professor going on about Amazons business model and how it was a company doomed to failure. Most of these educators never worked a day at a company outside of education.

xwdv 7y ago
Why did you carry so much prejudice well into your career??

rovyko 7y ago

Rent definitely affected my choice of school. With identical offers, I opted for a smaller tech-oriented university over the University of Toronto, which is either the top or one of the top schools in the country. I don't regret it, because rent in Toronto was insane and it's only getting worse. I'd have to commute 90 minutes to my parents' house with no time for a social life, and I'm super lucky to know that I even had that option. And now rents in the small town are growing. Subdivided houses are torn down for luxury apartments, and with recent cuts to government loans, it might not be affordable for some low-income students.

eigenvector 7y ago
It sounds like you're describing Waterloo. And as a U of T grad I agree, for many years it was a far more affordable option that was every bit as good (arguably better) for engineering and CS. Sadly Waterloo is suffering from the same insane housing cost inflation as the rest of Southern Ontario now.
- rovyko 7y ago
  You got it. I was lucky to start when it was affordable. The residence fees this year are completely insane. $1000/mo for a single dorm room and even more for a room in a 3-4 bedroom apt. Off-campus housing isn't much better.

rovyko 7y ago

I lived in university-run student residence and in student-oriented rentals. The amount of wasted space was unbelievable considering everybody spent the vast majority of their time on campus. We didn't need an 86sqft living room, it just filled up with garbage. I couldn't find an apartment with just bedrooms, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom. What I really wanted was one of these tiny apartments [0]. Build a whole apartment of these near campus, students only sleep at home anyway, and sometimes not even that. My univeristy is building a new residence and it has the same 3-5 bedrooms to a giant apartment with a living room. I wonder what's the main barrier to building a lot of tiny single student apartments. Is it the municipal regulations, are they not economical or did research show that students actually want living rooms? EDIT: Just look at the size of these living rooms. I've been in so many of these apartments and they're almost always full of boxes and trash. - http://www.rez-one.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MG_6020.jpg http://www.rez-one.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MG_6020.jpg - http://www.rez-one.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MG_5991.jpg http://www.rez-one.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MG_5991.jpg - https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/uploads/images/uwp-8.jpg https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/uploads/... - https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/styles/image_gallery_standard/public/uploads/images/mkv-10.jpg?itok=bu-x3tXm https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/styles/i... - https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/styles/image_gallery_standard/public/uploads/images/clvs-8.jpg https://uwaterloo.ca/housing/sites/ca.housing/files/styles/i... - https://static.wixstatic.com/media/29eef9_c0378e178fda4f0b847b82c9aa296456~mv2_d_4032_3024_s_4_2.jpg https://static.wixstatic.com/media/29eef9_c0378e178fda4f0b84... 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYVJbupG3Xg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYVJbupG3Xg

lumost 7y ago
Kitchens and bathrooms are expensive components to an apartment. Arranging the living space so that those are shared significantly drives down the cost of construction. dorm rooms with a shared floor wide bathroom probably achieve the same space efficiency as a 5 bedroom shared apartment with a bathroom and living room, with the added benefit that it will be easier to sell the building as apartments in the future should the need arise.
- 7y ago

ARandomerDude 7y ago

I went to UT Austin and for me the solution to this problem was: - buy a cheap, 10-year old car - live in a pretty decent apartment about 20 miles from campus - get up at 4:30 AM, drive to campus before rush hour, and do my work in the library - pack "hiking food" (trail mix, etc.) in my backpack and eat for real at night It worked out well and my living space was much cheaper and nicer than what was available near campus. Audiobooks for the commute were a plus.

buss 7y ago

> But the dramatic rise in rents also coincides with national developers starting to eye the areas around public universities as a growth market. Real estate companies bulldoze aging buildings to put up the kinds of amenity-rich, luxury apartments that might appeal to upper-middle-class parents looking for a safe, comfortable place for their student to live but which students from lower-income families such as Martinez’s couldn’t possibly afford. This fundamentally misunderstands how the market works. Consider the counter-factual: had the developers not come in and redeveloped aging structures into modern buildings, those old structures would be just as expensive as the new ones due to a shortage. Yet another piece that demonizes people who actually build homes while not considering what happens when we _dont_ build homes. Just look at SF for what the reality of not building looks like.

DuskStar 7y ago
Even more so when the new 10+ story luxury apartment complex replaces a single-digit number of existing units, which I'm pretty sure was the case in Ann Arbor. So yes, the new units are luxury units - but there's a lot more of them than before.

cryptozeus 7y ago

During my undergrad I bunked with 5 other guys and the rent was $100 per person. I think if you can manage for 1-2 years like this then you can organize your life better once you have some money saved up.

CameronNemo 7y ago
I spent $400 / month for a bed in a living room.

woopwoop 7y ago

I live in Austin. I find it completely baffling that the increase in rent is blamed on dense development in the area west of campus, and not on population growth coupled with the complete lack of any development at all in the area north of campus. Seriously, there is an enormous golf course with tons of one story, single family detached homes within walking distance of 1400$ a month studio apartments. I don't think it's the apartments that are the problem, I think it's the golf course. Of course, all of these single family detached homes had signs telling you to vote against the most recent proposed change in the city's land development code.

word-reader 7y ago
Just imagine how bad the rent would be (for everyone, student or no) if they hadn’t built up West Campus. It is easily the densest neighborhood in Texas, comparable to Queens in terms of population density. The student loan credit supply definitely bumps up rents around any campus, but please.
CameronNemo 7y ago
There is a similar phenomenon at the ucsd campus, which has huge on campus apartment buildings pushed up against multimillion dollar single family homes (on La Jolla Farms Rd).

word-reader 7y ago

To put this in perspective, the key “problem” example in this article is that median rent in a safe, popular neighborhood with relatively new housing stock, in one of the country’s fastest growing cities, is a whopping $916 a month. (And you can still make it less than that if you live with a roommate in a slightly older building)

DuskStar 7y ago

I went to school at UofM during the described time period (Graduated in 2017, they describe rent increases in 2010-2016) and the question I'd love to see answered is what happened to rents in existing properties when the luxury towers sprouted up. Because of course the new luxury towers are more expensive than an apartment from the 70s - but if the alternative supply hasn't gone up in price or disappeared, it's a bit odd to complain. And I paid less than $1000 for a 2br adjacent to north campus (split with a roommate, so really $500) that was 5 a minute walk from some dorms, 15 minutes to the campus itself - and that's if you ignored the (pretty frequent) buses. Which makes me even more skeptical of the "no one can afford to live there" narrative...