By Ceoli Jacoby

As the percentage of owner-occupied single family homes in College Park continues to decrease, both the city council and the College Park City-University Partnership (CPC-UP) are showing renewed interest in neighborhood stabilization initiatives. But some University of Maryland, College Park students — particularly those who have been priced out of area apartment buildings — are concerned that such initiatives could worsen the existing student housing crisis. 

At a Feb. 1 meeting, the College Park City Council considered proposed amendments to the New Neighbor Homeowner Grant Program, which was implemented in 2005 to encourage the conversion of rental properties to owner-occupied housing. Currently, any individual purchasing a home that was previously rented for a minimum of two years is eligible for a $5,000 grant. The proposed amendments would increase the grant amount to $10,000 and make all homes, regardless of previous rental status, eligible under the program. 

Additionally, the CPC-UP — a local development corporation — announced in January its intent to create a trust for the purposes of neighborhood stabilization. Eligible home buyers would have the option to enter into a shared equity agreement with the trust. Under this agreement, the trust would help shoulder the financial burden of the property under the conditions that the home remains occupied by the owner and that the trust will have first dibs on the home when the owner decides to sell.

While the initiatives would likely prove helpful to first-time home buyers trying to break into a market over saturated with landlords — the owner-occupied housing rate in College Park from 2015-2019 was 42.8%, which is 19.3% lower than the rate in Prince George’s County as a whole and 24.1% lower than the state’s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — student renters worry that they could also decrease the supply of affordable rooms in the face of increasing demand. 

According to the University Community Vision 2030 Report, renting a room in a newly constructed apartment is 70% more expensive than renting a room in a single-family home. And the cost of renting a room in a student-focused apartment building can exceed $1,000 per month.

Hana Abouelenein, a freshman in the College of Letters and Sciences, said she feels bad watching the school bus pass each morning, knowing that the single-family home in which she rents a room “could go to an actual family.” But as someone paying her own way through college by working 20 hours per week at Terrapin Tech for an hourly wage of $14, her $560 monthly rent is all she can manage.

“As someone who lives in a neighborhood of single-family homes that house many university students, it definitely feels like UMD tries its best to pretend we don’t exist,” Abouelenein said. ״[Student-focused apartments are] simply not an option for someone like me.” 

Abouelenein says she understands why the council doesn’t prioritize students in its city planning — after getting their degrees, many are likely to move away from the area. However, she feels that neighborhood stabilization initiatives don’t address the “root cause of the issue”: the high cost of living in the area overall. 

Jair Certório is an electrical engineering PhD student who lives on the money he earns from serving as a teaching assistant, where he earns about 22k pre-tax per year. He rents a room and a shared bathroom in a single-family home for $600 each month. He acknowledges that he doesn’t have all the answers to the student housing crisis, but he is skeptical of the recent initiatives. 

“I worry that [the push to increase the owner-occupied housing rate] will just push students further away from College Park,” Certorio said. 

The city seems to be counting on the construction of new high-density housing in College Park, but the high monthly rent in area apartment buildings makes Certório “wonder if building new apartment buildings will help at all, or if it will just become another place for young professionals to live.”

James Chang, a 26-year-old alumnus of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology specialization, echoed Certorio’s concerns. 

“If [the city] removes rental homes, then that gives even more power to those companies to keep rent as high as they like because there will literally be no other choice unless students intend to commute from further out of the CP area.”

As a student, Chang spent four years living with roommates in three different single-family homes. At times, his five-bedroom house would take in a sixth roommate to keep costs low. The city limits the number of unrelated people in a single-family rental home to five, but this rule did not apply to Chang’s group, as one of his roommates was his brother. 

Still, Chang had trouble balancing his academic obligations with his work schedule — full-time at IKEA. 

“If I didn’t have the shared house and my brother helping me out, I would be in a much worse position,” Chang said. “It got to the point where I actually had to take a semester off to regroup and rethink how I was living because I needed to have more time to focus on classes.”

Chang ended up cutting his weekly hours from 36 to 24 and arranging for his brother to pay a portion of his monthly rent. Some in Chang’s circle were not so lucky — he has heard stories of people having to rearrange rooms when city inspectors came by to conceal the fact that seven or eight people were splitting rent in the home.

Brooke Krauss is a fifth-year music performance major who lives in a single family home off Metzerott Road. 

If neighborhood stabilization initiatives were to be implemented, she said, she thinks it would be difficult for the city or the proposed trust to ensure that people who receive financial assistance to purchase a previous rental actually end up living there. 

“[The city inspectors] don’t check that thoroughly,” she said. “We’ve had a home inspection each of the four years since I’ve been there, and this is the first year they mentioned my room not having a smoke detector.”

Krauss pays $471 a month to rent the cheapest room in her house. She is opposed to the push to increase the owner-occupied housing rate, convinced that it could squeeze lower income students out of higher education. 

“You would have a lot of kids sleeping in cars, or you just wouldn’t have people going to this school in the first place,” Krauss said. “It would fuck everyone over. It would have a huge butterfly effect.”