When New Professors Need Housing, Colleges Are No Help

Congratulations, you’ve just landed a tenure-track faculty position halfway across the country. You’ve been to the campus once, for your interview, and now you have to find a place to live before classes start.

Moving expenses aside, your new institution probably won’t help you. Many freshly minted assistant professors end up relying on their own resources and tips from new colleagues when trying to get a feel for neighborhoods, school districts, and the local rental or real-estate market.

Rough landings aren’t a new problem, and these days, the privilege of a full-time academic job may diminish any sympathy. But the trouble isn’t going away, and with escalating rental and home prices, things may get worse. Yet most colleges offer no financial assistance or guidance, even in booming markets.

“This is a problem that’s kind of slipping through the cracks,” says John Barnshaw, senior higher-education researcher at the American Association of University Professors. Benefits as a percentage of total compensation for full-time faculty members have grown marginally, on average, over the past five years, according to the AAUP. But institutions generally put those increases toward keeping up with health-care or retirement costs, Mr. Barnshaw says. Formal programs to help new hires relocate remain rare.

Only a small share of employers, about 5 percent of those surveyed this year by the Society for Human Resource Management, offer “housing counseling” to new employees. But expectations of colleges, where faculty members often remain for their entire careers, can be higher.

An assistant professor’s salary may appear generous to a new Ph.D., but that doesn’t prevent “a little bit of sticker shock” at the cost of living in some areas, Mr. Barnshaw says. Is it worth paying a premium to live near a campus or better to go miles away, where housing may be more affordable? What about schools, transportation, and the commute? That soft knowledge can be even more valuable than financial help in the short term.

Four years ago, Terence Hannum accepted a position as an assistant professor of art at Stevenson University, outside Baltimore. Stevenson offers full-time employees who qualify for a Maryland mortgage program as much as $5,000 toward a down payment and closing costs. But Mr. Hannum, who was moving with his family from Chicago, wasn’t ready for that. “I’d been an adjunct faculty member for seven years,” he says. “How am I going to buy a house?”

He knew little about Baltimore’s neighborhoods or schools. The university paid his relocation expenses, and his new colleagues offered advice, but from Chicago, he was left to sift through scams and shady properties on Craigslist. “Time was just being whittled away,” he says. “It became very stressful.”

He settled on a suburban rental house but soon came into conflict with his landlord. After a somewhat tense year, he and his family moved to another rental house.

Mr. Hannum looks forward to taking up Stevenson’s offer of help buying a home. “It’s a great thing,” he says, “for the future.”

Push for Help

Finding a place to live can be difficult anywhere, but in some cities, it’s become downright forbidding. The median list price for rental properties in Boston has increased by 30 percent in the past five years, according to the real-estate-database company Zillow. The median sale price for a home there has risen by 41 percent, to $551,000, over the same period. In San Francisco, the list price for rentals has gone up by 53 percent, and the median sale price by 59 percent, to about $1.1 million.

The picture is similar in Washington. One local institution there, American University, has joined with the District of Columbia’s Office of Planning in its Live Near Your Work program to offer grants of up to $12,000 to full-time faculty and staff members who want to buy homes in the city. But that program is an outlier.

George Washington University, for example, offers no home-buying or rental assistance to its faculty members, though it maintains a limited amount of free residence-hall space for “faculty in residence” who work to promote student engagement. The university has lost good candidates over the years because of cost concerns, says Charles A. Garris Jr., a professor of engineering and executive chair of the Faculty Senate.

Megan C. Leftwich, an assistant professor of engineering at George Washington, tapped into an informal network. When she and her family moved from Los Alamos, N.M., in 2012, they rented the home of a fellow academic who had gone on sabbatical. After six months, they found a house to buy in Silver Spring, Md., just outside the city. Searching for housing “is a little overwhelming at first,” Ms. Leftwich says, “but it isn’t impossible.”

Faculty members at the University of California at Santa Cruz, just south of Silicon Valley, have struggled for decades to find affordable housing. A faculty advisory committee argued in 2001 that the university was in the midst of a “housing crisis” and needed more on-campus faculty housing and better financial-assistance programs. In the years since, the university has added more employee housing, going from 130 units in 2000 to 239 units for sale or rent today. More on-campus housing has helped, says Nancy Chen, a professor of anthropology who contributed to the 2001 report. But it remains “very difficult to find housing that’s close to the university,” she says, “unless it’s actually university housing.”

‘Great Peace of Mind’

A few colleges, however, make a virtue of offering help. The University of Southern California, for one, runs a suite of programs designed to ease employees’ entry to Los Angeles, where the list price for rentals has increased by 8 percent in the past year, and the median sale price for homes has risen by 45 percent in the past five. Some faculty members are eligible for loans or renewable subsidies to help buy a house or pay rent. Full-time faculty and staff members can also apply for a grant from the university of up to $50,000 to buy a house in certain areas surrounding the campus.

Such programs give USC an edge in attracting star professors, people there say. “If we’re recruiting somebody who might be at Harvard, for example, and they come out here and see that they have a challenge purchasing in the Los Angeles market,” the perks can matter, says Lisa G. Rediger, an employee-housing administrator at the university. Across town, the University of California at Los Angeles doesn’t offer such enticements, although the University of California system does offer mortgage loans to tenure-track faculty.

Ms. Rediger’s office also connects new hires with relocation specialists and offers them advice on school districts and traffic. “Sometimes they don’t even know what all their needs are,” she says.

When Morgan S. Polikoff took a job as an assistant professor of education, in 2010, USC connected him with a real-estate broker to help him and his partner figure out where they might want to live on their budget. The university then subsidized their housing for three years; they rented an apartment before buying a house. “Plenty of people make it work on way less, but it was very, very helpful,” Mr. Polikoff says of the subsidy.

Guidance alone can make a difference, even in smaller markets. When Christian Anton Gerard applied last year for an assistant-professor job in the English department at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, he was surprised that his on-campus interview included a two-hour tour of the town with a local broker. He was offered and accepted the job, and he worked with the same broker over the summer to find a home.

The initial tour “provided a great peace of mind for me, even not knowing if I had the job,” he says. The message was clear: “This was a place that was going to look out for me.”

The Fort Smith campus is a former community college that joined the university system in 2002. Asking local brokers to meet with finalists for full-time jobs doesn’t cost the university anything. It’s part of a longstanding effort to hire and retain good professors, says Paul B. Beran, the chancellor.

At any job interview, “two interviews are happening,” he says. The university is interviewing the candidate for the job, and the candidate is interviewing the institution, to figure out “whether or not this is a place they want to be.”

In tiny Sewanee, Tenn., the University of the South rolls out a different kind of welcome mat. The university owns 134 houses and townhouses — about a quarter of Sewanee’s private homes — and rents them, at a profit, to faculty and staff members. Some professors have lived in university-owned homes for decades. The university recently had to change the rules governing the rentals, in fact, so that retirees wouldn’t stay so long, and new hires could move in.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and assorted other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.

Correction (10/12/2015, 11:35 a.m.): The original version of this article referred to the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith’s practice of asking local real-estate brokers to meet with finalists for tenure-track jobs. In fact, because the university does not offer tenure, brokers meet with finalists for full-time jobs. The text has been corrected.