The paucity of University living spaces forces many rising seniors to find off-campus housing in an annual process that increasingly resembles the state of nature: nasty, brutish and short. The anarchic housing search, which begins earlier every year, forces students to make rushed decisions, sign bad contracts, live under negligent landlords and pay rapidly rising prices. It doesn’t have to be this way. Georgetown students can and should take control by forming a housing union to regulate the search process and find the best possible housing while driving bad landlords out of the business.
Establishing such a union would level a playing field now sharply tilted toward landlords, who prey upon the panic and uncertainty of the rental search and upon the fact that they have a captive market in students who have nowhere else to turn. The union could begin by mandating that the housing search for the following year not begin before a certain date, mitigating the cutthroat competition that causes students to lock themselves into bad leases in the rush to secure some house, any house. The date could be set after housing eligibility is granted by the University to help students who receive eligibility avoid the entire process, further lessening the competition.
Immediately after the eligibility decision is made, the union could hold a meeting to educate students on what to look for in a fair lease and how to go about the negotiation process. It could also share information on pricing, showing what students have paid for similar housing in similar locations and ultimately decide what prices are fair. It could even go so far as to establish an “unfair” ceiling—a price that no standard housing should exceed.
Most importantly, the union could maintain records of individual landlords’ performances in house upkeep and meeting safety regulations. In cases of neglect, which are consistently displayed by borderline malevolent landlords, such as SHA (Student Housing Association, Ltd.), the union could force landlords to improve or, in extreme circumstances, blacklist them. While the students in need of housing are dropped into landlords’ laps, the loss of this market would devastate their businesses, and such a threat would be an effective bargaining tool.
While the task is ambitious, it can be accomplished by a group of diligent individuals and would drastically improve the housing search process. Whether initiated by GUSA or created independently, such a group would not only make the housing search fair and less stressful, but more importantly also help to prevent tragedies like the death of Daniel Rigby two years ago that stem from landlord negligence.
