On February 27th, instead of attending a deliberation in our own class, I attended another class’s deliberation on housing at Penn State. After hearing that this was their topic of discussion, I was very excited to hear their ideas, as I had gone through many issues in the fall trying to figure out my housing for next year so I feel like I could relate to this topic a lot. Their group’s three approaches focus on the expansion of on-campus housing, governmental funding and intervention for off-campus rent, and expanded access to transportation for those living far off-campus. I learned so much from their discussion and I’m glad I got the opportunity to participate!
The first approach their group discussed was focused on ways Penn State can directly help their housing crisis, such as moving housing contract deadlines back from the fall to the spring and building more on campus housing and apartments. As someone who had no idea how stressful the housing process can be here, I know it would have been helpful for me to have more time to decide on housing options. Moving the deadline back may also relieve some of the competition and scramble for students to find an apartment and sign a lease. Also, most of the apartments downtown are substantially more expensive than living in a dorm and even the on-campus nittany apartments or white course apartments. Currently, students either have to sacrifice having their own bathrooms and living space if they want to live in dorms for cheap, or will have to shell out a great deal of money to get an apartment downtown. Expanding the types of on campus housing options to include more suites and apartment-style living for a comparable price to the dorms may be the solution for many students.
The second approach involves ways the state can get involved to aid this problem, such as giving more grants or loans to students to be able to afford housing and setting governmental limits on how much the rent can be raised for off-campus and downtown housing. While the moderators did a great job explaining this approach, I couldn’t help but feel like this approach wouldn’t tackle the underlying issue. There would likely not be enough money to go around to cover everyone’s rent money, so only a small percentage of students would actually benefit from this legislation, if it could ever get passed. The ide of rent-control for off campus housing sounds great in theory as well, but many of the apartments are already unreasonably priced for the amount of space you get, so I feel like this approach can only go so far. I personally was more drawn to the ways Penn State itself can help to combat this issue. I think that it would be difficult to get the government to step in in the first place as it doesn’t directly involve them, and I am unsure about how much they can actually do to help.
The third approach focuses on transportation efforts, like expanding bus routes and more on- and off-campus parking lots. The idea behind this approach is that if more people can bring their cars or have more access to public transportation to and from their apartment, they will be able to sign leases for apartments farther off-campus, where there is more space and they are generally cheaper. I spoke up during the deliberation of this approach to add that there are already problems with overcrowded transportation routes right now, as my own deliberation group pointed out, so having more people come into campus through cars or buses would create or amplify a host of other problems. Additionally, not everyone wants to spend time commuting to classes every day or be removed from the liveliness of Penn State’s campus and downtown area. Overall, I found that this approach doesn’t consider the needs of students here, since many students either don’t own or aren’t able to bring their car here and rely on easy access to campus or the downtown area.
After hearing all the approaches from this deliberation, I was definitely drawn to the first approach to solving this issue. I believe that this approach is most likely to get to the root of the problem and would be beneficial to the most students. Knowing how much I struggled in the fall with finding housing, I really do hope that these issues get fixed and this deliberation was helpful in aiding that process!
