Fighting off the housing frenzy requires either a great deal of self-control or mere ignorance. Everyone is talking about it, and no one wants to be left homeless.
Students are going beyond conventional means to find a desirable off-campus property. Web sites such as the University’s Office of Off-Campus Housing and sublet.com facilitate the search if word-of-mouth is not doing the job.
At one extreme, an anonymous Jane Hoya admitted to stalking people on facebook.com to see where they live and if they will share their landlords’ phone numbers. From this, she made a massive spreadsheet of names and numbers that is being passed around like hidden treasure. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
The problem is, these aren’t desperate times. There is plenty of property for rent in the Georgetown area, according to Charles VanSant, director of University Student Affairs, and you can wait until the spring to find it.
Nonetheless, the myth of an off-campus housing shortage has built upon itself over the years, to the point where students begin house hunting for next fall before the summer humidity has even let up.
“Georgetown students started contacting me at least a month and a half earlier than previous years,” Ann-Lee Chen, who manages four properties in Burleith that she rents to Georgetown students, said. “All my leases have been signed. This usually doesn’t happen until December.”
VanSant thinks that students do not need to be signing leases already.
“Signing the lease now is like buying a brand new car and leaving it in the driveway for an entire year without using it,” he said. “It’s just too early.”
Even though students realize that signing so many months before the lease will begin is irrational, they have no choice.
“We did it now because that’s what you have to resort to if everyone else is doing the same,” Jon Nguyen-Phuoung (CAS ‘07) explained. “Run with the pack, as they say. Otherwise, you get left behind.”
By submitting to the peer pressure about finding off-campus housing, students forget who is calling the shots in this operation. Students become subject to their landlords’ whims because they fear that if they don’t act quickly, someone else will take the house they want.
“If we could break this frenzy, it would make the students realize that they are in complete control, not the landlord,” VanSant said.
Take a deep breath, Hoyas. You may not roll out of bed right onto Healy Lawn, but I promise you will find housing for next year.
