Specifically, off-campus housing. Every year, students move in all across campus: into their dorms, their apartment complexes, or even this year, into hotels, when one Ann Arbor housing complex wasn’t prepared for move-in day.
Then, every year without fail, students are expected to hunt for apartments or resign their leases thirty days later. Freshmen barely know each other and are expected to make a legal decision about who they plan to spend the next year living with. Tenants who have just moved in are expected to decide whether they will re-lease with a landlord whom they haven’t had concrete experience with yet.
I know my freshman year, all of the girls in my hall were planning on living together. This was a conversation I stumbled into one day after class, in the communal lounge when everyone was shopping for houses and apartments. If it wasn’t for this accidental interruption, I would have had no idea that I was supposed to be looking around already—after only being in the dorms for a month.
The girl I planned to room with and I scoured campus for an affordable two bedroom apartment that allowed cats and had at least one parking space. This proved to be a feat. We knocked on doors, toured an unruly amount of houses that looked like they hadn’t been updated in years (although now I know that is just Ann Arbor student housing charm), and by some miracle, found a place that wasn’t the longest walk ever to campus. The next year, like clockwork, was the same.
In early 2021, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) lobbied for an Early Leasing Ordinance, which states that landlords cannot show apartments or sign leases until 150 days before the expiration of the current lease. This ordinance was lobbied for because graduate students didn’t find out whether or not they were accepted until January or February—long after undergraduate students had signed their leases.
Although the ordinance was set up to disrupt the hectic pattern of students signing their leases every year, landlords have filed a lawsuit against the city for the ordinance, ae sending emails to students pushing them to resign their leases early, and listing their properties online again.
If you’re interested in signing the GEO open-letter to the Regents of the University of Michigan, you can do so here.