Housing barriers for student renters
In the University of Montana’s 2019 #realcollege survey, 44% of respondents experienced housing insecurity in the previous year and 23% experienced homelessness in the previous year. Preventing eviction is critical to addressing student homelessness, but so is addressing barriers that prevent students from getting housed in the first place. Here are some of the barriers I have observed as I have worked with students.
First of all, many students have limited rental history and credit history. If they know someone with good credit history, such as a parent or older relative, they can increase their odds of approval by applying with a cosigner. Unfortunately, not every student has such a person in their life, and those who don’t incur higher costs including more application fees or double security deposits.
As if those financial hurdles weren’t bad enough, many students also experience housing discrimination. Many students have disabilities and need reasonable accommodations, and they sometimes experience discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. But even more often, they experience age discrimination in the form of advertising that states “no students.” As Montana Fair Housing Executive Director Pam Bean put it, “Now, should a housing provider have practices saying no students? In our opinion that is likely an age violation.”
The are plenty of examples of this prejudice in ads landlords have created for the ASUM Renter Center’s Housing Finder web app. I receive so many calls from landlords looking for “visiting faculty only” or sometimes “graduate students only” that we updated the Terms of Service to ban that type of language: “Listing parties should/shall not use Housing Finder to advertise for renters who are not UM students.”
One force underlying all of these issues is pervasive adultism, “ the bias or discrimination adults and social institutions demonstrate against young people on account of their youth.” When students deal with landlords, human services agencies, and even faculty or staff at their colleges, they sometimes encounter prejudice based on one or more stereotypes about students. Some that I have heard include:
- Students are “kids”
- They don’t know how to care for rental units, or they’ll trash them
- Their food insecurity is a rite of passage
- Their homelessness or housing insecurity are personal choices
- They have relatives who could help them out, or
- They don’t belong in college
Those stereotypes harm students’ ability to secure safe, stable, affordable housing, and they just aren’t true. According to an NPR story from 2018, among college students:
* 1 in 5 is at least 30 years old
* About half are financially independent from their parents
* 1 in 4 is caring for a child
* A quarter take a year off before starting school
* 44 percent have parents who never completed a bachelor’s degree
Unfortunately, with so few rental units available right now, housing in Missoula is a seller’s market (and a lessor’s market). That makes it difficult to hold landlords accountable or to counsel clients to improve their odds, so these barriers are steeper than ever.
