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SUMMER 2002

Throughout the monotony of high school, students search for independence. The ability to live without the wild call of nagging parents and, eventually, without the keen eye of an R.A. brings the responsibility and freedom we craved. Off-campus housing is the dreamland filled with the absence of authority: freedom.

However, the grass is greener on the other side until you have to mow the lawn. And from the moment we set foot into our new life, we realized how big the lawn really is.

When we left the dorms, we didn't think we would be exchanging a one-room living quarter with a clean community bathroom for an apartment with plastic windows painted shut and a coarse toilet seat frightening to the touch.

Yet, when we were looking for more personal bathrooms, we didn't think we would be using former closets to serve the purpose. But who cares about the living conditions of the college student when we are only here for four years? We do.

Our money is continuously dumped into these houses while their quality continually diminishes. And to top it off, rent for student housing in Plattsburgh are among the highest upstate New York's college towns.

Photo by Jeff Primeau

Dinky Toilet: This 4.5 feet by 2 feet closet allows for cool porcelain on each side of the body.

The State University of New York at Plattsburgh's off-campus housing list offers rentals that can range between $1500 and $1900. This figure is per student per semester.

Say you live in an apartment advertised for four. At $1500 per student, that's $12,000 per school year and $375 per student per month. Nor does this include the utilities we took for granted in the dorms and in our bedrooms at home.

Now a city with a population comparable to Plattsburgh is Oswego, also home to a SUNY campus. However, rent for a four-bedroom apartment a half-mile from campus can cost only $185 per student-or with the four roommates combined, $5920 for the school year. These rental costs are less than half the price of off campus housing in Plattsburgh.

In yet another SUNY town, Potsdam, the rent is also lower than Plattsburgh's. A four-bedroom apartment with utilities included at Potsdam can cost $4600 a semester. This works out to be $9,200 a school year. That's $1150 per student per semester. Combined, even this is nearly $3000 cheaper.

The high demand for college housing is what allows the landlords to charge such exorbitant prices. But how much of this money is actually going back into the houses?

Normally we are the ones paying for utilities, and judging by the slanting house structures, small, leaky bathrooms and fire-hazardous windows, there doesn't appear to be a large percentage of money put back into the houses.

As it stands, because college students often do not stay at one specific address during their time at PSU, they are left at the mercy of their landlords.

Photo by Joe Samuelson III

No security. A deadbolt dangling from a thin strip of wall molding.

 

Joe McMahon, a Plattsburgh city Housing Code Inspector, said that many college housing landlords generally drag their feet when issues of maintenance and upkeep are brought forth.

McMahon believes that landlords are more interested in catering to the needs of yearlong tenants, rather than college students that are only here for four or eight months out of the year.

"It seems to me that college kids are more content with living with their buddies; sometimes they don't mind sleeping on heaps of garbage with water leaking from the above apartments," he said.

While we are happy with living with our buddies, we are not happy with could be easily remedied--problems that accumulate in our homes like shower drains that cough up food from the garbage disposal, rain gutters on porches that do not halt incoming precipitations, or bedrooms that have been separated by a thin sheet of wood paneling to increase the influx of rent money.

We think we deserve a little more credit and respect from the landlords who provide the housing. The landlords are already raking in copious amounts of money, maybe a little of that profit could be put back into their property.

But hey, for all those prospective landlords out there, if you are looking to make some money, you may as well hop on the bandwagon with the rest of the rental property owners and contribute to the ongoing trend of high costs for low quality.

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