Milton Chen's home last year was a Mercury Sable station wagon. After he failed to win a room in the University's housing lottery, the doctoral student in engineering assessed his options--which did not include, because of the going price, an off-campus apartment--and decided he spent so much time in the lab that he really just needed a place to sleep. So he bought the University's cheapest parking permit, borrowed a twin mattress from a friend, signed a contract to take his meals at one of Stanford's eating clubs and got used to showering in the Gates Building, where he worked.
Chen, 27, wasn't the only one living out of a car. He figures a dozen or so people slept parked beside him in a lot near Stanford Hospital. A few were families of patients with permission to camp out, but Chen says he spoke with others who, like him, were housing-market refugees. "Sometimes it's a little bit depressing to go to a car to sleep, but it wasn't too bad," says Chen, who is back in a campus apartment this year.
Just before classes started last fall, a San Jose Mercury News story spelled out the seriousness of the Stanford-area housing shortage. The vacancy rate for rentals in Santa Clara County was 0.6 percent. Rents in the first six months of the year rose 23 percent, and the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto-Menlo Park was $1,973 per month. Those grim numbers mean some students are forced to take extreme measures to find a place to live. The hardest hit are graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and medical residents. Unlike undergraduates, they aren't guaranteed on-campus housing, and they can't compete with tech company employees for apartments in the area.
A common way around the crunch is an illegal sublet of University quarters. Todd Benson, the housing assignment services manager, says his office typically catches between three and five illegal subletters each quarter, which he believes is a small percentage of those actually engaged in the practice. Housing Office staffers monitor an Internet newsgroup called SU Market to catch people advertising accommodations illegally. Violators lose their eligibility for on-campus housing and can be fined up to $175 a day.
Even as they crack down on students breaking the rules, administrators are sympathetic about their housing dilemma, Benson says. "We strive to be as equitable as possible," he says. "We need to offer spaces to people in the order they are on the list." One effort to help: this year 275 additional subsidized off-campus apartments are available to graduates who don't get housing on the Farm.
But the results of the rental crisis are clear. Benson says he heard recently about an international couple who arrived for a postdoc position and found no apartments they could afford. Their nearest friends were in Los Angeles, so they drove down there to regroup. Benson wasn't sure if they would ever return.
