Is Off-Campus Really Cheaper?
By J.p. Lawrence
It was two weeks before the start of school, and sophomore Sofia Salinas had no idea where she was going to live. So when Salinas saw a cheap sublet for in Tivoli, she took a leap of faith. She didn’t know her housemates but looked forward to living off-campus and having a room all to her own.
When the utilities bill skyrocketed to $300 a month to cover winter heating costs, however, she began to second guess. Nobody in their right mind, Salinas argued, could believe five girls were cold enough to incur a $1500 heating bill. As a subletter, however, she wasn’t legally in the contract, she had no contact with the landlord, and she had no way to determine if the price jump was legal. She had no choice but to move out.
Jenna Hope Goldstein, a senior at Bard, has heard many stories like Salinas’s. Goldstein is head of the Bard Off-Campus Student Coalition, a TLS project that hopes to provide a support system for off-campus students.
Living off-campus is a choice that comes with many responsibilities and complications, but many students think they can simply move into an apartment and have everything fall into place. “It doesn’t work that way,” said Goldstein, who has lived in Germantown, Tivoli and Red Hook. “If you live off campus, you have to assume you’re an adult now.”
A quarter of Bard’s student body now lives off-campus, and many of these students, Goldstein says, have problems with issues of money, housemates, landlords and leases.
Goldstein has been working with Gretchen Perry, Dean of Campus Life, over the last two years to help students find quality, safe, housing. Goldstein maintains a website and has held community forums on off-campus living. Both Goldstein and Perry have spoken to students about the importance of having a good landlord, a reasonable lease and a strong understanding of how to live in neighboring communities.
Perry said she helps off-campus students with their problems, but she just began working with off-campus students last semester. Perry reached out to the off-campus student population to find how they found their housing, how much they paid and how they feel about their landlord, but she’s received little feedback.
The problem is that information about off-campus living is often fragmentary—rumors and myths learned through anecdotes or learned through experience. Students often ask about where to find off-campus housing, for example, but right now, Perry can only tell students to ask around and use the grapevine.
Sophomore Silas Bartels, for example, went through the entire house-hunting process without dealing with a realtor until the very end - he and his friends simply asked around. “You learn it as you do it,” Bartels said.
Some students are fine just figuring things out. Goldstein, however, said she is exasperated with students who believe they don’t need to learn about living off-campus, with students who are surprised when landlords are not responsive to their angry emails, who think they can get out of their lease whenever they want, who want to illegally sublet.
She wonders why some students seem to think the rules don’t apply to them, as if the choices students make don’t affect the lives of everyone around them.
“We’ve got families who have lived here for generations who are looking to move out because they live next to a rental that has unfortunately become a flophouse,” Bryan Cranna, mayor of Tivoli, said. “They’ve got garbage everywhere and beer cans and people urinating and yelling and screaming and with music blasting through the walls.”
These are the minority of students, and for Cranna, it’s very important that students see Tivoli as their home. After all, students are a significant portion of the town. Depending on the figures, Bardians constitute 10% to 25% of Tivoli’s population - and student interest in the town is only increasing.
More first-years than ever are interested in moving off-campus, according to Tracy Dobler, managing broker at Gary DiMauro Real Estate’s Tivoli Branch. Dobler, who’s been working in the area 13 years, said she once could expect Bard College students to begin looking for off-campus housing at the end of February or in the beginning of March.
This year, however, Dobler rented out three properties before the new year, and almost all of her 70 properties were rented out by the end of February.
The rush off campus, Goldstein said, occurs for a host of different reasons: a desire for more space, more freedom, or more fun. Even with all the responsibilities, student often find themselves pleasantly surprised by how much freedom they have off-campus.
“When you’re living off-campus, of course you have more responsibilities, because you have to figure out how to get your own food, pay for your expenses, but you have more freedom,” Salinas said, adding she plans to move off-campus again, this time with friends and with better planning.
Goldstein and Perry hope to make the move off-campus as stress-free as possible. They said they want to set up a database where students can find all the spaces open off-campus with details of how much each space costs and what the current occupants think of the landlord. Such a system, they said, would reward good landlords. Perry has also floated ideas like Bard-approved housing or having local lawyers help students look at leases.
All these ideas are up in the air, for now, but officials in Tivoli, Redhook and Bard have all said they are hoping to work with Bard students on issues related to living off-campus.
“We’re so new at giving support to off-campus students that it’s going to be just small baby steps until we have more students on campus or we have a more solid support system for students off-campus,” Perry said.
“We can all work together to make it a better situation,” said Goldstein, “for everyone. For residents. For students. For the landlords. For renters. For your neighbors. It’s just a thing people should know about.”