Media portrayals of faculty life typically present the dorm as a melting pot, the place college students from a variety of backgrounds get thrown collectively to study life past the classroom. However the actuality is that only one in 5 coeds within the U.S. at the moment really stay on campus in such a setup. Many stay off campus, a majority face vital affordability challenges, and secure scholar housing is way from a given—an ongoing disaster that threatens the achievement of upper schooling.
An experiment in housing affordability, which turned a dilapidated motel into a brand new house for college students, is a case examine in constructing cheaper, extra reasonably priced scholar housing, and ideally an instance of the right way to create a extra equitable school expertise.
Not too long ago opened in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, Abigail Courtroom gives a brand new mannequin for serving the numerous inhabitants of faculty college students in dire want of reasonably priced housing. What was as soon as a falling-apart motel has been remade right into a collection of 70 studio residences with an ethereal frequent room and a brick-lined courtyard. It homes college students from Mt. Hood Group Faculty, Portland State College, and Portland Group Faculty.
It’s the work of Faculty Housing Northwest (CHNW), a Portland nonprofit targeted on designing and constructing reasonably priced, accessible areas for college students. For this 55-year-old nonprofit, Abigail Courtroom turned a brand new mannequin for funding and creating an area that’s higher fitted to college students to check.
[Photo: courtesy CHNW]
Because the nation’s school inhabitants started an upswing beginning within the Sixties and ’70s, due largely to increasing entry to extra Individuals from completely different financial backgrounds, the price of school—and particularly housing close to college—started rising as nicely. Room and board, the fastest-growing expense for college students, can typically be greater than tuition, mentioned Jim Rader, CHNW’s government director. There was an expectation when the group began within the ’60s that any school scholar had household help and didn’t want to fret about housing prices. A 2025 report from Temple College’s Hope Heart, which research challenges in school life, discovered that 48% of U.S. school college students are experiencing housing insecurity at the moment, with 14% having skilled homelessness.
Scholar housing can be one a part of the reasonably priced housing puzzle that always doesn’t get addressed, and it’s a vital one, since enabling college students to make it via to commencement helps them higher their incomes potential and entry higher housing later in life.
In accordance with Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociologist and tutorial who research school affordability, current analysis clearly reveals that housing entry and affordability enormously enhance instructional outcomes for college students. A multiyear examine Goldrick-Rab ran in Tacoma, Washington, discovered that federal housing help for college students not solely elevated their commencement charges but additionally improved their general bodily well being; they’d fewer emergency room visits, decrease charges of meals insecurity, and fewer interactions with police or legislation enforcement.
“It’s an enormous deal,” Goldrick-Rab mentioned. “About 50% of faculty college students are scuffling with lease.”
[Photo: courtesy CHNW]
At this time, the nation’s schools and universities—together with group schools, which frequently draw extra working-class and low-income college students—have begun to construct out extra dorms and housing meant to assist shut the hole, however establishments don’t have the means to satisfy the size of the problem. Goldrick-Rab believes many establishments beginning to construct out housing merely aren’t skilled as builders or landlords.
As well as, two of the nation’s extra distinguished reasonably priced housing packages—LIHTC, or the Low Revenue Housing Tax Credit score, which funds new housing building, and Part 8, a voucher program to assist help with rental funds—don’t apply to varsity college students. Together with a booming for-profit scholar housing business (the surging sector of business actual property noticed $8.5 billion in transactions final 12 months alone), this lack of public funding has created a school housing market very like the bigger rental market within the U.S.: plenty of high-priced, market-rate choices, a handful of extremely backed models for these most in want, and a widening hole for these with low to middle-range incomes.
CHNW was in a position to afford to do the Abigail Courtroom challenge by way of an Oregon state program referred to as Undertaking Turnkey, which launched in 2020 to assist create housing for Oregonians displaced by wildfires. Alex Wallace, an actual property supervisor at CHNW, heard about this system and determined to see if it is likely to be relevant to varsity college students. CHNW proposed to make use of funds to show the Ponderosa Inn of Gresham, Oregon, into a brand new type of scholar residence, and was awarded about $6 million from Undertaking Turnkey to amass the property.
[Photo: courtesy CHNW]
The nonprofit spent one other $8 million to adaptively redevelop the lodging into fashionable scholar housing, which added as much as about $112,000 per unit, lower than half what Wallace estimates it might take to construct a brand-new dorm from scratch. The entire build-out, which took 18 months, opened final September with lease for a studio set at $915; it’s now 100% leased, and a state-funded rental help program helps 32 college students pay functionally zero lease.
In Could, CHNW obtained approval to make use of state tax credit for reasonably priced scholar housing, and hopes to make use of this skill to purchase a 100-unit constructing close to Portland State College that it might convert into the same housing challenge.
“Inns and motels of this measurement are nice for small housing,” Rader says. “We go into these areas the place there’s a group school, it’s typically in want of revitalization, and these renovations can assist revitalize the group.”
