HED: Tufts students propose Somerville ordinance to fight off-campus housing rush
SUB: The measure would restrict lease offers and renewal requests to later in the academic year.
By: Will Pinto
WC: 832
The rush for Tufts sophomores to secure off-campus housing for the following year and the lack of restrictions on lease signing dates have led many desirable housing options to be taken shortly after students return to campus. Two seniors are hoping to fix that.
David Van Riper and Jack Wilan have proposed an Early Leasing ordinance in Somerville that would move the leasing timeline to the spring semester.
The ordinance aims to reduce pressure on tenants to renew their leases by changing when landlords can offer leases to prospective tenants and request renewal decisions from current tenants.
According to Van Riper, four months before a lease is up for renewal, landlords would have 30 days to offer existing tenants the option to renew their leases and roughly 90 days following that period to begin putting the property on the market and signing leases with new tenants.
“The basic problem that we’ve experienced, and I think a lot of Tufts students have experienced, is that you basically have to sign a lease a year in advance — sometimes the summer before, sometimes as soon as you get back on campus in September or October,” Van Riper said.
Senior Clara Goltz said her landlord asked her and her roommates to decide whether they would renew their lease in September before moving on to prospective tenants.
“We weren’t planning on renewing the lease, but it felt quite early, and then we only had 48 hours to respond,” she said.
Although the university cautions students against signing leases too early in off-campus housing guides for sophomores, some students say they have felt pressure to act quickly.
“Everyone was telling me by September, by mid-October, the best houses are gone,” Charlie Gavin, a sophomore who went through the process of searching for off-campus housing this past fall, said. “I was a 19-year-old — I didn’t know where to start, what to do.”
Rayna Santos-Wright, a senior, described a similar experience when she searched for housing as a sophomore.
“It was kind of like hell, because we would go through tours and there would already be another group looking,” she said. “You either had to sign a lease in that moment or it would be gone.”
Wilan said the early timeline can create additional challenges for students, including ending up with “subpar” housing and location, rushing to find roommates, which can lead to “a lot of bad roommate situations” and uncertainty about future plans, including studying abroad.
“Most students don’t know if they’re going to study abroad yet or not … which puts you at a ton of risk, because if you don’t determine you’re going to study abroad [early on], then you need to find a subletter somehow,” Wilan said.
The timeline can also conflict with Tufts’ on-campus housing lottery. Junior-year housing lottery numbers are distributed in early November, after many students have already signed off-campus leases.
The ordinance would first need approval from the Somerville City Council, including sponsorship from a councilor, stakeholder consultation, committee approval and a final vote before the full council.
Somerville City Councilor Emily Hardt expressed interest in the proposal and said that housing was one of the city’s most pressing issues.
“On first glance, I think it’s great and I think that I’d be supportive of pursuing this and figuring out how to solve this issue,” she said.
Certain housing regulations require approval from the Massachusetts state legislature, [a]which would force Somerville to seek a home rule petition requesting permission to implement the ordinance.
“Even if everybody’s supportive, it would certainly add to the process,”[b][c] Hardt said.
Early leasing restrictions similar to Van Riper and Wilan’s proposed ordinance have faced challenges in other cities like Ann Arbor, Mich., where the University of Michigan is located. Landlords have attempted to bypass rules by asking prospective tenants to sign agreements promising to sign leases later.
“They were signing agreements to sign a lease in the future as a loophole,” Wilan said.
He added that implementing a similar policy solely in Somerville could present additional challenges because Tufts students also rent houses in Medford.
For now, Van Riper and Wilan are focusing on building awareness among Tufts students and Somerville residents.
“People can get behind [this proposal] and create more awareness and more people that are actually interested in pushing for this,” Van Riper said.
“[Students] think of themselves as Tufts students first and then they just happen to live in Somerville or Medford,” he added.
The Somerville Office of Housing Stability has created a survey for residents who have experienced early leasing pressure, which Wilan says is necessary before moving forward with the ordinance. Tufts administrators and officials in the Somerville Housing Department told Wilan that the ordinance cannot be passed based simply on “anecdotal evidence.”
Emily Hardt, Ward 7 City Councilor
Somerville Office of Housing Stability Survey
[a]are you still making edits?
[b]I'd recommend keeping this part of it if possible
[c]sure !
