Just this week, the recently inaugurated mayor of Boston, Martin J. Walsh, announced his intention to launch a much needed city-wide reform of rental housing. In previous years, nearly every one of the tens of thousands of annual apartment inspections throughout the city was provoked by tenant complaints. In an effort to preempt complaints and prevent tragedies, Mayor Walsh is sending a team of city inspectors to examine 150,000 apartments in search of problems that will subsequently be addressed before residents bring them to the city's attention. Additionally, Mayor Walsh will begin working to ensure that most apartments in Boston are inspected a minimum of once every five years, and that special attention will be paid to landlords with previous offenses or a history of complaints. Efforts such as these will undoubtedly force property owners to clean up and maintain their properties, and will help to keep tenants safe.
With the majority of underclassmen currently in the middle of applying for on-campus housing next year, and most rising upperclassmen opting to, or having no option but to live off campus next year, housing is a pressing issue at Tufts. With on-campus housing not guaranteed after sophomore year, undergraduate students are often left to fend for themselves in the process of securing housing for their third and fourth years at Tufts. If Somerville and Medford were to employ similar tactics to those proposed by Mayor Walsh, students would at least have the peace of mind knowing that another party is looking out for their safety, and working to prevent landlords from taking advantage of young, inexperienced students who are desperately in need of a place to live.
And then there's the infamous and inevitably asked question: Where is the Office of Residential Life and Learning (ResLife)? What are they doing to help students find safe and affordable off-campus housing? Tufts needs to recognize that they have just as much obligation to aid upperclassmen in the process of finding reliable landlords and safe living conditions as they do to place underclassmen in suitable dorms. Unfortunately, as many students who have had to navigate through a few years of housing will vouch, ResLife often falls short of meeting these responsibilities, and students frequently are forced to turn to unreliable third-party options and housing search resources. While ResLife does, in fact, have an entire web page dedicated to providing resources to students seeking off-campus housing, the site is ridden with broken links and seems to be missing any kind of recent update to its rent and utility cost estimations. When figures are obviously out-of-date, it begs the question whether other facts listed on the page, like tenants' rights and obligations, are as well. Before students can benefit from any government efforts to clean up the rental property market, ResLife needs to display that it can effectively help both students on and off campus.
