Freshman Students Hunt for Housing
Underclassman find that their dorm rooms are being converted to meet housing demands.
By: Parker Neumeier
College living is overcrowded and under-provided. Even freshmen who should have guaranteed housing in the dorms are being shafted. Ania Kelly, a freshman studying biology at MIT, lives in a “forced triple” in Cambridge — slightly removed from MIT’s main campus in Boston.
When describing her dorm, Kelly said, “It was originally a double, however, many years ago, it was made into a triple.” These “forced triples” and other rooms like it are becoming more popular, as universities are scrambling to find space to fit their students.
While the dorm rooms remain the same size, more and more students are being forced to share these spaces.
Even common rooms in dorms are being converted into dorm rooms, just so students have a place to stay. This is the result of housing markets becoming exponentially more competitive, with more students electing to live in dorms due to outrageous off-campus rent rates and difficulty finding roommates and leases for apartments.
This issue is not unique to just the campus of MIT. Here on UW-Madison’s campus, the same things are happening. During the pandemic, student lounges in dorms were converted to fit multiple students – sometimes up to six students. Off-campus apartments like Dorm@Lucky are being marketed to freshmen who are supposed to have housing in the on-campus dorms. In addition to the overcrowding issue, price gouging has been a frustrating problem.
The average UW-Madison student pays $1,273 in rent per month. In order to afford this, one should be making $58,000 a year. As college students and young adults, this is impossible for every student to afford. Rent rises every year, and students have no choice but to empty their pockets just for a place to return home to at night.
Madison is home to UW-Madison, Edgewood College and MATC. UW-Madison has by far the largest student populations of these institutions, but, in cities like Boston, where MIT is located, Kelly touched on the dynamic of finding housing in competition with the 44 other colleges and universities located within the city limits.
She said that students from schools like, “Berkeley or maybe Northeastern since they’re a little bit closer to Boston […] looking for apartments in Back Bay that […] are going to be very expensive.” With competitive markets in all cities with dense populations of college students and young adults, affordable housing and housing in general is incredibly difficult to secure.
Because of this, many students get discouraged in their search for housing. The added headache of a complicated housing search on top of school work and stress is something students do not have energy for, but have to deal with anyway. If there were to be an app that consolidated available leases, roommate matching and price locking options — the process would be so much smoother.
OpenHouse addresses the issues that freshmen face as they are thrown into the world of finding and signing leases just weeks into their first semester of college, many of whom have just become adults. Our mission is to make housing hassle-free, transparent and affordable for everyone so that there are no barriers to education or quality of life.
Sources:
Ania Kelley, Biology student at MIT, (516)269-1868, aniak@mit.edu
Grecu, V. (2025, March 5). Hottest rental markets in the U.S. in 2024. RentCafe. https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots/most-competitive-rental-markets-this-year/
Estimate of median household income for Dane County, WI. FRED. (2024, December 20). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHIWI55025A052NCEN
Jacobs, T. B. and K. (2022, October 7). Hopeful tenants camp out overnight for affordable housing in Madison. https://www.wmtv15news.com. https://www.wmtv15news.com/2022/10/07/hopeful-tenants-camp-out-overnight-affordable-housing-madison/
Madison report 082624.PDF: Powered by box. Box. (2024, August 6). https://uwmadison.app.box.com/s/ytkwz3x3sulz23p84j2adgo7cw5d03du