Wajd Suliman knew choosing to live at the Identity Dinkytown apartments would come at a cost. She just couldn’t predict how much.
The new six-story apartment complex — located in Dinkytown, a neighborhood near the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus — promised its tenants sleek units, a 24-hour fitness center, a club room with gaming tables, a study lounge, and other amenities.
Even though she knew it would be a stretch to cover the $1,300 rent, Suliman, a junior at the university, leapt at the chance to live there. Over the summer, she worked evenings after her internship so that, as a STEM student with a heavy course load, she could prioritize her studies instead of working during the academic year.
But an August email from her new landlords sent Suliman’s hopes for a simple semester crashing down. The day after she paid her first month of rent, Identity Dinkytown informed her that construction would not be complete for an August move-in. She later learned that the complex would not be ready by the start of classes, leaving her and hundreds of other student tenants in the lurch.
As flagships continue to increase their enrollment, many large institutions in urban settings are grappling with how to sustainably grow their housing availability in tight quarters. While attention has often tended to focus on shortages of space in residence halls, the situation at Identity Dinkytown points to a different downstream effect of enrollment growth.
Off-campus housing crunches have become dire in some parts of the country as demand has soared. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, students have resorted to living out of their cars; the University of Utah created a program for students to live with local alumni; and a few students at Central Washington University were so fed up with limited options they even decided to build their own house.
Housing is a huge issue. There’s so many students, and there’s not enough places to live.
Situations like the one in Minneapolis capture just how tricky it is to tackle off-campus housing problems at their sources with the limited tools colleges have at their disposal.
Still, students like Suliman are looking to their institutions to step up to the plate in a bigger way. She recognizes she put herself in a situation where she would have to pay higher rent at Identity Dinkytown. At the same time, she felt like her options were limited as a student inextricably linked to campus, where nearby housing options are slim and prices run high.
“I feel like that’s what people don’t understand,” Suliman said. “Housing is a huge issue. There’s so many students, and there’s not enough places to live.”
While some renters at Identity Dinkytown moved into the complex in late September, others are still waiting.
Anxious tenants told The Chronicle about the headache of living off campus and commuting to classes. Another student said he crashed on the couch of his fraternity house until he could move in. Tenants without a place to stay could get a hotel paid for by Identity Dinkytown and an $80 daily gift card to help with expenses, while those who had somewhere to go could receive a $150 daily gift card.
But that wasn’t enough for all of the affected students to cover unexpected costs; one student reported taking out a loan to pay for two rents. Tenants have filed at least two lawsuits in relation to the Identity Dinkytown delays. A spokesperson for CA Student Living, the company that owns and operates Identity Dinkytown, said it could not comment on pending litigation.
If the situation at Identity Dinkytown captures the complexities that students can confront when renting off campus, it also highlights an evolving debate about what colleges’ roles should be when the arrangements for such housing go awry.
“The university has nothing to do with Identity and yet is completely and totally implicated in everything that’s happening there,” said Tania D. Mitchell, a professor of higher education at UM-Twin Cities. “And so, what is our responsibility to those students and to engage in those spaces?”
The university declined an interview request from The Chronicle. But in a statement, it said that university officials have met with student leaders and other stakeholders to answer questions about the institution’s role in addressing the recent debacle. The statement also detailed the resources it offers students who live off campus, including aid for those at Identity Dinkytown specifically, as well as the need for broader policy changes.
“No matter how much time and financial resources any university puts toward engaging with off-campus property managers/owners,” the statement read, “situations like this one are most effectively prevented by strong local and state policy, as well as enforcement, to protect the rights of renters.”
Mitchell, who studies the student experience and university-community relationships, recognizes that off-campus housing is certainly a difficult topic for colleges to navigate and that they can’t always be responsible for arranging housing for all of their students. But it’s also a challenge she thinks institutions must rise to meet.
Students, she noted, often need to live close to campus. “When a situation happens like this, and students get displaced,” she said, “what then can the university do — should the university do — to step into a space of advocacy for those students?”
The question of institutional responsibility for off-campus housing has gained steam as some large institutions have admitted students at record rates, including near-record class sizes at the University of Minnesota in recent years. If those students live on campus in their first year, they’ll eventually need to live elsewhere as they proceed through college. And when they move off campus, they often face hot real-estate markets and landlords who can capitalize on their lack of renting experience.
“I’ve had many professionals say part of the problem is you invite students here, knowing that they don’t have enough room for them all,” said Donald C. Heilman, who has written about off-campus housing as a prominent legal issue for the American Bar Association. Heilman said the availability of off-campus housing was the dominant concern he encountered in his former role as director of the Office of Student Legal Services at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.
“Off-campus housing is absolutely something that universities have to look at,” he said. “There’s just no way around it.”
The University of Minnesota’s Office of Student Legal Service has been the institution’s main conduit helping those affected by the delays at Identity Dinkytown. The office is representing students in at least one lawsuit filed against the housing provider, and staff have spent over 200 working hours assisting tenants, along with connecting students to on- and off-campus resources for help with food, storage issues, and mental-health concerns.
This hardship is the product of an uneven bargaining power that renters have when signing their lease.
Shana Tomenes, a staff attorney with the office, testified to state lawmakers in mid-September on behalf of the more than 100 students who have reportedly requested its services in resolving issues at the new building. Tomenes told lawmakers that back-end solutions, like lawsuits, weren’t able to meet the tenants’ immediate concerns and that action taken by the legislature could help prevent “future hardships and displacement” for renters.
“At best, they’ll be facing a disruptive move mid-semester that affects their academics after weeks and weeks of being displaced now,” Tomenes said. “This hardship is the product of an uneven bargaining power that renters have when signing their lease.”
Heilman said offices like the one at Minnesota are one of the few tools available to students to tackle off-campus housing issues.
Such offices, which provide consultation and legal advice, advocacy, and sometimes representation in court, can help resolve off-campus housing disputes and protect tenants’ rights. And he said the University of Minnesota has one of the strongest offices in the country, noting that it’s “out in front on many of these issues.”
Still, the university’s complicated arms-length relationship with off-campus housing providers can be seen in its Off-Campus Housing Program’s listing service. Private properties must comply with a set of conditions set forth by the university or they will be “delisted” and blocked from accessing the program’s resources, like student housing fairs. (The university issued a 30-day notice to Identity Dinkytown’s owner, alerting the company that the property was “non-compliant” with its listing guidelines.)
However, a disclaimer includes a buyer-beware statement that illustrates the university’s limited ability to assure the adequacy of off-campus properties.
“The inclusion on the public list of any property management company or property owner is not a determination as to whether a property management company or property owner is necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or whether a student should or should not rent from a particular property management company or property owner,” the university’s non-compliant properties webpage says.
Some students left stranded by Identity Dinkytown want the university to provide more support and explore more-systemic solutions to off-campus housing problems.
While student leaders and tenants alike are grateful for legal services offered by the university, Siya Sakhardande, the state coordinator for the Undergraduate Student Government’s government and legislative affairs team, described its approach to the problems at Identity Dinkytown as “hands-off.” She thought the institution didn’t do enough to quickly take care of issues like storage and food for tenants. To Sakhardande, it’s also an example of why the university needs to take a bigger stake in all off-campus housing challenges.
“The issue of Identity really shows that there needs to be more collaboration between the institution and other stakeholders to really support the students that are going through this,” Sakhardande said. “It would be nice to have that institutional backing, especially because of the way that the landscape is going to continue changing, and there’s going to be more off-campus housing” for students to navigate.
Sakhardande and other student leaders plan to continue pressing university and government officials to recognize students’ unusual position in the housing market, including more-stringent requirements for property owners to have rental licenses before they collect rent and for adequate accommodations in the case of delays.
If the university takes a more proactive role with landlords, maybe developing a better relationship would enable us to protect our students a little bit more.
Sakhardande is hopeful that the Identity Dinkytown debate will lead to changes: Minneapolis City Councilwoman Robin Wonsley has introduced an ordinance that would allow tenants to get out of their leases if the property isn’t finished on time.
“I think we just need to take advantage of the fact that everyone is agreeing,” Sakhardande said.
Experts like Heilman and Tina Martins Cruz, who took over for Heilman as director of Rutgers’ Student Legal Services office, see off-campus housing as an area where stakeholders can better come together to balance the interests of all parties. Heilman, who has a doctorate in the social and philosophical foundations of higher education and worked in student affairs, said he’s seen how much tension off-campus housing issues can create between colleges and communities, and he noted that institutions should seek to collaborate with their local partners to attack problems. “The university is not going away,” he said. “The students are still going to be coming.”
Martins Cruz believes colleges could take the lead on facilitating discussion with landlords and make their support for students clear. “If the university takes a more proactive role with landlords,” she said, “maybe developing a better relationship would enable us to protect our students a little bit more.”
Mitchell, the Minnesota professor, thinks there are plenty of reasons for higher-education institutions to strengthen their response to off-campus housing challenges, contending that housing must be a part of “our calculus in thinking about how we create desirable institutions.”
“The campus living-learning environment,” she said, “is all huge in terms of how students think about their college experience, and so it benefits us to be proactive and engaged in understanding what that’s going to look like — even if it is off campus.”
