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Off Campus for Dummies: Basic information students need to move and live off-campus and on their own
Students currently living off campus explain the world of hostile landlords, rickety porches, funky molds, cockroach-infested apartments, housemate quarrels, the freedom of escaping the dorms and meal plan and living on your own
by Brian Perbix
Life on the Outside
On a grey Sunday afternoon, while the rest of Grinnell is dozing in the dorms or nursing hangovers in the Forum, Nate Janega ’06 sits outside his High Street house hacking away at a pair of wooden stakes with a knife the size of a catfish.
Structural integrity might not be the first thing most students associate with the buildings they call home, but to those who live off campus, shoddy construction is but one of many concerns that go hand-in-hand with a life independent from dorms.
In Janega’s case, a floorboard has come loose from his house’s expansive front porch and he is hoping to prop it up. In some cases, such repairs fall to the landlord, but often the minutiae of daily life call for a dose of ingenuity on the part of the student. As Janega said, while renting a house is fun, “You’ve got to do things like fix the porch every once and a while.”
Starting your OCNCO Process:
Getting Off
As autumn arrives and the corn harvest draws to a close, many of this year’s sophomores and juniors already have well-laid plans to leave the dormitories behind next year and make what is often their first foray into real world tenancy.
In order to live off campus, students must accomplish two things: be granted permission to leave by Grinnell and attain a lease contract with a local landlord. Simply having a contract is no guarantee that the school will allow one to move off campus, and being granted permission to leave the student waives a student’s guaranteed housing and could prove disastrous if the student fails to reach an agreement with a landlord.
According to Dean for Student Life Jen Krohn, sometime in late February Student Affairs will give notice that the college is accepting applications to live off campus. Current sophomores and juniors who wish to move off campus next year must go to the office of Student Affairs and sign up individually by this year’s March 14th-deadline.
Krohn emphasized that deadline, saying that in nearly all cases where incoming seniors are not allowed to move off campus, the issue was punctuality.
Once applications are in, “We line people up by their [room draw] numbers and usually we get through the seniors for students who sign up by that date,” Krohn said. “Then we work our way through the juniors.”
This first group of students will be notified in late April. Those not approved will be put on a waiting list. Last spring, about 150 juniors and seniors were initially allowed off campus. Krohn recalls that over the summer a few more groups of about 10 students were also approved. The exact number of approvals is contingent upon the number of students returning to Grinnell in addition to the estimated size of the first-year class.
The glaring incongruity of this system is that students are often forced to sign a lease contract six or seven months before they actually know if they will be able to live off campus. While conflicts are rare, they are very much a possibility.
Liz Ward ’07, who hopes to move into the Brande apartment complex at the intersection of Park Street and Fourth Avenue next year, already has her roommate lined up and lease contract signed. Despite the school’s advice that students wait until they are approved to live off campus before signing lease contracts, Ward said that for popular areas like the Brande or High Street, “Autumn of the year before you want to move off campus is also when you want to get in touch with your landlord.”
Allen Latcham, landlord of the Brande, confirmed that, “a couple units are already rented for next year. All of them they are usually gone by December.”
Apartment or House
Apart from the nagging uncertainty built into the process, once the search for off-campus housing begins there are numerous potential pitfalls. A good starting point for students who want to live off-campus is to decide between living in a house or an apartment.
High Street and Broad Street are home to some of Grinnell’s more infamous party houses. An important consideration for all future party hosts is that in a house, the neighbors are not in the next room, but are physically separated. That additional degree of separation frequently is the determining factor for noise complaints from the neighbors. For a quieter experience, students often seek out Park Street, which offers colorful houses that are directly across the street from school.
For many, the appeal of houses lies in its common spaces. While apartments almost always include a kitchen and often a living room, houses might offer a dining room, a basement and a porch. Carly Schuna ’06, who lives in a Park Street house, said, “The best part for me is having a kitchen.”
With more space come more responsibilities. Currently, Schuna and her housemates are embroiled in a dispute with their landlord about a technicality in their lease contract regarding yard maintenance (their landlord, Dan Huebner was unable to be reached for comment).
While Schuna said that they haven’t had any “big problems,” students who would rather not have a backyard to think about or a porch to fix might want to consider renting an apartment.
Grinnell’s two most sought-after apartment complexes are arguably the Brande and the above the pub apartments. Both house mostly students and have units of about five rooms.
In some cases there is only a minimal tradeoff between apartments and houses when it comes to social life. Chris Forster-Smith ’06, a resident of the above The Pub apartments and host of many an impromptu dance party, said, “Our specific apartment has historically been sort of a party location, a bachelor pad kind of apartment.”
While police have responded to noise complaints at his location, they have not resulted in arrests or citations, possibly, he said, because until recently Main Street was closed due to construction.
Houses and apartments have no major price differences; the students interviewed for this article paid as little as $160/person/month for a smaller room in a High Street house, to $240 /person/month in the Brande. In between were $205 for above The Pub and $230 for Park Street.
The utility bill must also be budgeteed in, which is likely to shoot up in the winter. According to Forster-Smith, the above The Pub apartments, former lawyers’ offices, are spacious and have high ceilings, which requires a lot of energy to heat.
How It Is
Often students are oblivious to problems within the house or apartment they plan to rent and only discover them after they have begun to live in the house. Unsuspecting students can fall prey to rusty water pipes, water stains, signs of insects and exposed electrical wiring. Students can get more information on aspects of their temporary home at the website of the American Society of Home Inspectors, www.ashi.org.
Allison Tobey ’07and her roommate Rachel Walman ’06, who live on the first floor of the Brande, found that the state of the house often depends as much on the previous occupants as it does on the landlord. When they moved in to their apartment, the place was cockroach-infested.
Walman said that the family that had lived in the apartment for seven years before them was probably responsible for the unwelcome guests.
Their landlord, Latcham, said, “Very seldom have I heard anything like that. I think sometimes [the tenants] bring them in with them.”
Walman said that Latcham took care of the bug problem by boarding up a wall and have since not had any trouble with the roaches.
Many Grinnell landlords often do not respond to complaints because they know that students will be gone within two years. “The landlords won’t do anything unless they have to,” Walman said. “Unless you get a specific complaint, they’re hard to pin down.”
As the inhabitants of 933 High Street Jessica Peltan ’06, Nicole Bungert ’06 and Lauren Page ’06 found, sometimes a dump is a dump.
Walking into their spacious house on a corner lot, the bright green wall in the rear left of the lower floor immediately seems out of place surrounded by other walls of muted colors.
As it turns out, the house has serious plumbing issues. Water drips down the wall day and night from the chimney. The housemates remedied the situation by painting the wall green, which hid the water stains.
“It’s damp at all times and sometimes there are little beads of water on it,” Bungert said. “We would assume there’s mold.”
An upstairs shower leaks so much water that to a person sitting downstairs it always sounds as though there is someone taking a shower. They refuse to cover the enormous water bill. This has resulted in an enormous water bill which they have refused to cover. Their landlord, while not insisting that they pay the full bill, had not repaired either the wall or the shower at the time of interview.
Down on High street, Janega shows just how much difference choosing the right place to live can make. Putting the knife away, he lies down and begins to relax after a hard day’s work. Resting on his porch, he said, “I really like the porch. I do alot of chilling on this porch, and I get to watch the passers by.”
Sidebar:
Ask the tenants
• What do they think of the landlord? Does the landlord have a tendency to show up unanounced?
• How much do they pay for rent and utilities?
• What repairs would they make to the house or apartment (Ask the landlord to fix these existing problems before you sign the contract)?
• What are the neighbors like? Do they complain about excessive noise or are they excessively noisy?
• Have there been any problems with bad plumbing, mold, leaks insects or rodents?
• Are they willing to sell some of their old furniture or better yet, just give it to you rather than lug it to their new place?
• Does it always smell like that?
Ask the landlord
• Who is responsible for paying for which repairs? What repairs and renovations have been made recently?
• Is there laundry on site or somewhere close by?
• Will the landlord allow you to back out of a lease contract if you can find other tenants?
• For those living in houses, is mowing the lawn the tenants’ responsibility or the landlord’s?
• Does the landlord charge you to unlock your door if you are locked out?
• Is the place furnished?
• How clean will the apartment be when you get it and how clean does it have to be when you leave?
What to watch for
• High ceilings and big rooms take lots of energy to heat in the winter, so be wary of pricey utilities; if you are looking at a house, efficient furnaces and insulation in the attic can make a big difference.
• Faucets shouldn’t drip; also, water stains on ceilings or floors often indicate previous plumbing problems that might not have been addressed.
• When it comes to visible damage, such as rusted pipes or rotten woodwork, always remember that what you see is only the beginning of what you get. It is likely that there is much more damage behind the walls or under the floors.
• Check for scorched wires in electrical boxes, a sure sign of damage and a potential fire hazard. Also, ask about the wiring; in the off chance that a house has aluminum wiring, that poses a fire danger too.
• Cockroaches scurrying about? Mouse traps in the cellar? You might have to decide how comfortable you are with a few more roommates.
• The house or apartment should have spaces that suit your individual needs. If you like to cook, make sure there is plenty of counter space and that the oven and stove work well. If you plan to have parties make sure the living room and porch are big enough.
• The more people living together, the more problems will with division of chores, rent and utilities payment, cleanliness, groceries, safety, personality conflicts and scheduling conflicts.
• Horrid, florid wallpaper
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