Gone may be the days where students are forced to pay exorbitant rents for off-campus housing, displacing local residents.
Boston students may soon have the option to live in a privately run housing development from British firm Scape. The firm has one site locked down in the city, a building that will house 600 beds, and is planning to construct five of these structures in total.
In Boston, 36,000 undergraduate and graduate students live in off-campus apartments. These students drive an increasing pressure upon the housing market in the city. The more students who move into off-campus dorms, the fewer units are available to a struggling population of lower- and middle-class residents.
Private dorms could free up housing currently used by students for short-term use, making space for Boston residents who need affordable long-term housing. Students pay high prices to rent units for a single year — they are able to split the cost of rent for a single housing unit, while a working-class family has to make ends meet alone.
And because students are renting for a short amount of time, landlords may have less incentive to keep up the condition of their units. College students — who, for the most part, move in in September and leave in May — are willing to live in conditions that families cannot.
But still, living off-campus isn’t cheap. Boston University made HomeUnion’s list of colleges with highest off-campus rates in 2017. Median rent in Back Bay is $3,198 a month. Students pay 24 percent above the market rate to rent housing within two miles of BU’s campus.
Scape is giving students a way to live off-campus while paying potentially less than they would for a BU dorm. Prices for one of Scape’s rooms will start at about $290 a week for a shared twin room, according to Scape Executive Chairman Nigel Taee. For a full year, that’s approximately $15,080.
Compare that to the cost of living at BU. Expenses range from $15,720 — for a dorm room that requires a meal plan — to $18,250.
It’s understandable why students would choose to move off campus in favor of a private dorm. Why pay more to live in a rundown university building for eight months than you would for a sleek, new unit that you can lease during the summer?
Scape couldn’t have picked a better city to base its company in the United States — Boston is known as a college town, and, college enrollment has increased by approximately 21 percent in the Greater Boston area between 1995 and 2010. This growth isn’t stopping anytime soon, and the City needs a way to cope with an increasing population.
With these new buildings, people who want to live there will have to verify that they are students. The hope is that freeing up space in gentrified neighborhoods will give locals a chance to move back into affordable housing units they’ve been displaced from. But in reality, this project is still prioritizing students over locals.
If the first building frees up 600 units of off-campus housing, how can we know those will be affordable units? The only way to guarantee affordable housing for Boston residents is to specifically designate them as such. The spaces students leave behind when they move into Scape buildings may simply be filled by more students.
Only time will tell whether this project will help locals or maintain the status quo. Though it’s no solution to the housing crisis, students need off-campus housing that’s safe, sanitary and affordable. But the City isn’t off the hook because a foreign company stepped in with a new idea.
