As the Boston City Council continues to call for the enforcement of its ‘No More Than Four’ off-campus student housing ordinance and considers expanding the code’s reach, students and college officials said they question the law’s effectiveness.
Sept. 1 marked the end of the 2008 law’s grace period for students with noncompliant leases, signed prior to the law, to alter their living situations. The current zoning code prohibits five or more undergraduate students from living together off-campus.
But now Council President Mike Ross (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Mission Hill), who originally proposed the ‘No More Than Four’ ordinance, is looking to increase the law’s oversight of off campus student living.’ Public and private schools currently must only release a report each semester breaking down numbers of off-campus students by Boston zip code, but Ross is now attempting to secure an amendment that would require schools to report any off-campus student addresses that may be in violation of the ordinance to the city’s Inspectional Services Department.
Though Amy Derjue, spokeswoman for Ross, said the city expects schools to keep accurate address records, schools said they question the accuracy of their student-reported data.
‘Not all of our students update their addresses,’ Emerson College’s Assistant Off-Campus Student Services Director Elin Riggs said.
She, along with Boston University officials, said the amendment could also violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law dictating how institutions may release student records.
‘Students have FERPA protection,’ BU spokesman Colin Riley said. ‘That limits the information we can make [available].’
The entire code aims both to protect students from landlords who would rent them substandard dwellings and residential neighborhoods from the potential disturbances a high student population can, according to Ross, sometimes cause.’ It is not intended to force students out of residential neighborhoods, Derjue said, but rather to create a good quality of life for all residents.
‘Students bring a vitality to the city,’ she said. ‘We want students to be able live together and have affordable housing while they’re here, and we want people to live in safe neighborhoods where their children can sleep.’
ISD spokeswoman Lisa Timberlake said in August that her office has not received a single official complaint of a code violation.
Students and officials said though they are concerned about some of the law’s tenets, they did not expect it to be effective.
College of Arts and Sciences senior Katy Goodrich, who lives with four others in Brookline, said BU would be ‘punishing’ its off-campus students financially if it released student addresses.
‘If they’re ratting [students] out to the police, it seems like the only option they’re giving them is to spend the money to live where they deem fit to put them,’ she said.
Riggs said if landlords do not continue to rent to more than four students, she expects they will raise rent to make up for lost income.
Chris Caravanos, a senior in Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, lives in Allston with a total of six students, five of whom are undergraduates. Caravanos said their realtor told them many units had been leased to five or more, and he and his roommates would be able to ‘bypass that policy.”
He said he does not think the law is effective.’
‘I think there’s a lot to do before people really start abiding by it,’ he said. ‘The realtors don’t want to turn kids away who are looking for places.’
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