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BUYAH: The perfect agent for change

For years, the city government has struggled with the soaring housing costs in Boston. The Allston-Brighton Community Development Council considers the situation a crisis because families and elderly residents are being displaced when they are unable to pay their steadily increasing rent.

The situation has only been getting worse. After losing rent control, the housing crunch has expanded. The proposal to build a new Fenway Park threatens to strip the area of critical lands, driving prices higher still.

Colleges are largely to blame for the local housing crunch. While schools like Boston University, Boston College and Northeastern certainly help drive the local economy with their massive spending power, they also spill out into the housing market, causing a two-fold problem.

First, students take up apartments that might otherwise go to families or to the elderly, leaving housing in shorter supply and causing rents to increase. Second, students are able to pay the exorbitant prices that landlords charge because four students in one apartment can afford a rent four times that of the average young family.

Fortunately, a group of BU students is taking action on the issue of the local housing crunch. The Boston University Youth Alliance for Housing should prove to be just the group needed to drive real change in the community.

BUYAH has attended community Task Force meetings to voice their concerns about the construction plans for the new Fenway Park. They also represent a student general legislative group that meets with the City Council and state legislators to advocate for increased funding for the creation of affordable housing units.

On the BU campus, the group will sponsor an event on April 21 called the “Walk for Housing.” Participants will travel around the city to several different stops to speak with legislators and learn about affordable housing issues. This event will be a collaborative effort between BU students and community members.

In addition, as a long-term goal, BUYAH will urge students to hold the University accountable to the community by understanding and responding to residents’ needs.

If colleges are a part of the problem, they are also part of the solution. Student activism might just be able to drive the administration into taking the steps necessary to make both on- and off-campus housing better for everyone.

The Student Village was built with the local housing market in mind; last year, the City Council encouraged BU and Boston College (which currently only guarantees three years of campus housing) to begin housing more students on campus. But BU had already been experiencing a housing crunch of its own. The Student Village was needed to alleviate our own overcrowding, and, while helpful, has obviously been an insufficient measure in rectifying the situation for the city.

BU needs to take an even more active role in making on-campus housing more affordable, attractive and available for its students, which starts with changing the guest policy. The major reason why students move off campus in such huge numbers is because the guest policy is so bizarre. If BU would simply change the guest policy in a small way — such as keeping the sign-in policy but eliminating the curfew, thus allowing overnight guests without the ridiculous requirement of prior paperwork — we would see herds of students return to campus.

But perhaps BU clings to its archaic guest policy for just this reason. Is the school unprepared to deal with the inevitable popularity of on-campus housing should they reform the guest policy? Is this why the school is so reluctant to reform? It’s true — campus housing is already so scarce that we certainly could not handle a new wave of on-campus residents.

So BU must build. Hopefully BUYAH will help the school take the necessary steps to create new demand for on-campus housing and to meet that demand once they create it.

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