The Privatization of College Housing: Poverty, Affordability, and the U.S. Public University

Abstract

Much of the research on housing policy over the past generation has focused on its relationship to affordability and the spatial demography of poverty. Here, I focus on a particular sector of the market that has largely gone unnoticed in the academic literature: college housing. I examine the relationships among college undergraduates residing off-campus, poverty rates, and housing cost and affordability measures. Using first-difference models of tract-level data from 2000 to 2008, I find robust, positive associations between off-campus populations and poverty rates, and more modest but still visible relations to housing outcomes. The results suggest that demographers should pay attention to the presence of college students in urban areas, and also hold implications for policy related to grant provisioning and housing.

Keywords::

• housing
• poverty
• community development block grants
• college towns
• public universities
• studentification

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Hannah Clarke, Dalton Conley, Harvey Molotch, Sara Moorman, Patrick Sharkey, and Florencia Torche for their insightful and valuable comments during the research, writing, and editing phases of this project. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers for their incisive criticism. Any and all remaining errors are mine alone.

Notes

^1. Although exact numbers are difficult to obtain for the total universe of higher education institutions in the United States, any cursory glance at estimates for on- and off-campus populations among large private and public colleges would bolster this notion. But see also Abramson (2003) for a nonrepresentative sample that supports this contention.

^2. Public–private partnerships for housing construction on university land are considered on-campus accommodations by the U.S. Census. Private development that remains unaffiliated with the university, although aimed at undergraduates, is not considered as such.

^3. This is not to say that college towns are not characterized by poverty in any measure—like any city or town, they certainly are. The question is to what extent and of what character—among families, singles, students, etc.

^4. An in-depth overview of the history of block grant funding is not possible due to space considerations. See Conlan (1984) for an early history, including the reorganization of block grants by the Reagan Administration, and Finegold, Wherry, and Schardin (2004) for a more recent overview.

^5. Of course, the administration and provisioning of funding by block grants more generally—aside from any statistical minutia used to calculate eligibility and funding—has often been criticized. For instance, Logan and Molotch (2007) point out that social-equity directives have often been subsumed to pro-development goals, with funding going toward infrastructure projects of dubious value for the general public welfare.

^6. Unfortunately, this study uses data to construct a measure of off-campus noncommuter students, which is available at the Public Use Microdata level, and is impossible to replicate at the level of geography used here without access to restricted data, which makes it cumbersome and difficult to replicate. Nevertheless, it is possible for the census to release aggregated data, which would refine our measures of “true” off-campus populations (i.e., living independently and not commuting from home, by age or any other variable).

^7. Although the Neighborhood Change Database (2012) can be used expressly to accomplish this goal of geographic stability over time, it does not include the variables necessary to calculate the proxy measure of off-campus resident populations.

^8. Consider an example: Median gross rents rise by 10% and 25%, respectively, in census tracts X and Y. During this time, the median gross rents of the cities that those census tracts are contained in rise by 10% and 50%, respectively. Even though census tract Y has a higher raw increase, it still becomes relatively more affordable in its geographic context.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas M. Laidley

Tom Laidley is a doctoral student in sociology at New York University. His current work focuses on urban form and sustainability.