Last year, as part of the 10-year Campus Plan, the University unveiled plans to renovate the Hibben-Magie Apartments and allocate all units within that complex to graduate students. In late March, this plan was revised, ostensibly because of the funding challenges posed by the current financial crisis. Under the revised plan, the University would contract a private developer to achieve its goal of updating the housing stock at the Hibben-Magie Apartments. In return for fronting the capital to finance construction, the developer would control the property for an extended period of time, during which it would retain any rents collected.
This proposal has raised a red flag within the graduate student community. If the experience of students at peer institutions is any indication, we have every reason to be concerned. Rents will almost surely be significantly higher, rental agreements will be less flexible, and students will be at the mercy of a landlord who has little incentive to cater to the interests of tenants who rarely stay in the same housing for more than two years.
The concern over rents can perhaps be seen most strikingly by considering the University’s own experience in the construction of the new Lawrence Apartments complex. When New Lawrence was completed in 2004, the University set rents at market rates. The result was a whole host of empty units, and the University was ultimately forced to lower rents to below-market levels.
Yet even with this subsidy, rents at Lawrence remain significant. The cost of a one-bedroom apartment at Lawrence during the 2009-10 academic year will be $1,031 per month, which is 48 percent of the pre-tax income of graduate students in the humanities or social sciences. A private developer is almost certainly not going to charge less than market rates, and it is foreseeable that students could face rental prices of well more than 60 percent of their pretax income.
Beyond immediate concerns about higher rents and heavy-handed landlords lie more subtle anxieties about the consequences of ceding University control of student housing to private developers. Graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, protest that the important sense of community that is built around student housing has deteriorated significantly since developers began leasing apartments to individuals who were not members of the Penn community.
Concerns about the provision of facilities such as computer clusters and common areas, which do not generate profits for developers, abound. One might argue that the University will be able to anticipate these problems and contractually forbid practices that will negatively affect graduate students. Such a perspective is optimistic — perhaps overly so. The University cannot anticipate every contingency, and clearly there is a strong incentive for a profit-minded developer to exploit every loophole it can find. But more significantly, we question the University’s ability to dictate terms to a developer — even if it were able to anticipate all contingencies — when it finds itself in a weak economic position, having to beg outside firms to front the capital to finance its projects.
It’s hard to imagine, moreover, that the University hadn’t been exploring the option of contracting with private developers long before the financial crisis began to bite. After the completion of Lawrence, the University declared that graduate housing was too expensive for Princeton to build anew.
To facilitate a growing graduate student body, the University has looked to house graduate students at existing complexes such as the Stanworth Apartments. But Princeton doesn’t come equipped with many large-scale apartment complexes. At some point, new construction to house graduate students will have to occur. Since the late 1990s, several of our peer institutions have experimented with these “land-lease” arrangements with private developers, and it would be very surprising if the University hasn’t been contemplating this option for many years.
If we weren’t so confident in the University’s bona fides, we might wonder if Princeton wasn’t simply using the financial crisis as a ruse to garner support for a highly controversial venture.Given the current state of the economy, the plan to contract with a private developer is hardly a prudent measure on the part of the University. There need not be any rush to renovate or replace housing at Hibben-Magie.
To be sure, the complex is several decades old and could use some updating, but the walls are not crumbling. The economy will bounce back soon enough, and graduate students are content to wait a few more years to ensure that any improvements are planned with their best interests in mind.The University may not be able to afford to make things better at present, but it can certainly avoid making them worse.
Anne Twitty is the Graduate Student Government press secretary and can be reached at atwitty@princeton.edu.
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