Sunday, March 1, 2009
Living off Campus
Searching for a place to live around Ohio State campus can be very stressful. Students already have a lot of money concerns especially for tuition and text books, adding cable electric and gas bills along with rent just makes matters worse. I sometimes find myself wishing someone would do something about the price of rent around campus and until I took this econ class I didn't know what that should be. Now I realize that putting a price ceiling on rent would help to solve this problem. Some would argue that yes it would make rent cheaper but living conditions and maintenance of housing would fall to sub-par standards. My response to this would be have you ever seen the housing off campus? Most of it is like this anyway. Unless you are very fortunate to have a good landlord (not likely) or want to spend ridiculous amounts of money (which as students we don't have) you probably live in one of these crappy over priced houses, and I think its time for someone to do something about it.
I totally disagree. Right now a lot of off campus housing is in terrible conditions. If you remember from our notes, both buyers and sellers are worse off from rent controls. Our notes say that "one economist called rent control 'the best way to destroy a city, other than bombing.'" When my older sister was in school south campus was "bad part of campus." My dad was shocked when I said I wanted to live on south campus because he saw it as a rat hole. Since south campus gateway has been renovated, south campus has a whole new feel to it. Sure, the apartments on south campus are expensive, but they should be. The quality of apartment that you get at the gateway is way hight than anything else. With a rent control, the prices of these apartents would have to be lowered forcing south campus to become the rat hole like it once was. Rent control in the short run might help individuals, but in the long run there would be housing shortage due to insufficient funds needed to maintain or build new establishments. A price ceiling is not the answer.
ReplyDeleteI can see how price ceiling can be both positive and negative for off-campus living. First of all, in January myself and two other girls decided we should start looking and figure out where we would live next fall. At the beginning we just started looking somewhat randomly and saw mostly very bad living situations (dirty, old houses) and very few nice ones. We found two nice houses and spent a couple days debating the pros and cons of both. By the time we had made a choice, they ended up both being rented out, which was very disappointing. We had to start looking all over again and realized all that was left were awful houses/apartments. We ended up finding one nice place, but there was a huge negative aspect. The price of this apartment is very expensive, but fortunatly very nice inside. Since there is no rent control or price ceiling on apartments, prices can be overly high because they know students need a place to live. I agree that it is hard to find nice places that are affordable, so then it would help. But I also understand that too much control over the economy and prices only worsens things overall. In time hopefully there is some way to balance it all.
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