Ask a city or college official about living conditions for students who rent off-campus apartments in Boston and the response will include a variation on this phrase: Safety is the top priority.
It’s an obvious, and defensive, answer. The state of off-campus housing has been the subject of much discussion, and not enough action, ever since a 2014 Boston Globe Spotlight Team investigation found many student-rented apartments and homes were overcrowded firetraps in flagrant violation of the city’s housing code. Problems included too few exits, a lack of heat, illegal basement and attic living quarters, inoperative smoke detectors, rodents, broken windows, and doors without locks. Enforcement of the rules was lax or ineffective, and landlords who flouted the regulations were able to continue cashing rent checks with minimal — if any — repercussions.
In response, Mayor Martin J. Walsh persuaded officials from Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern University, and other schools to hand over the addresses of students living off campus. Armed with that data, city inspectors were expected to be able to enforce a zoning ordinance aimed at limiting the number of unrelated full-time undergrads in a single apartment to four.
Now the rule has been declared unenforceable by Walsh and William Christopher, commissioner of the Inspectional Services Department. Christopher said his department identified about 600 properties suspected of being in violation of the zoning ordinance. But because the regulation does not require occupants to admit inspectors or to divulge who is living in an apartment, he said, his staff was only able to get inside a fraction of the units. Not a single citation for violating the “no more than four” ordinance was issued.
“We tried very hard to enforce it,” Christopher said. In any case, he added, how many unrelated students live in an apartment is not by itself “a life safety issue.”
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Walsh, who praised Christopher’s performance, said the city is “looking at different and unique avenues that ensure student housing is sanitary and safe.”
What’s taking so long? The city has been promising such a plan for months. Officials must have known before the semester got underway that the zoning ordinance, as written, would not do anything to improve living conditions. Even if it could, the measure should have been incorporated into a comprehensive safety strategy aimed at better enforcement of safety rules, harsher penalties for violators, and increased coordination between the city, colleges, and landlords.
During the recent move-in period, Christopher’s department did hit landlords with more than 3,500 property code fines, — many of them in the student-dense Allston and Brighton areas — along with about 450 violations of housing, building, environmental, and sanitary regulations.
Sustained enforcement of the rules is essential, but substandard off-campus housing won’t disappear without additional on-campus housing. There has been progress on that front, even though some students still rent apartments out of necessity instead of by choice.
The number of students living on campus in Boston increased by more than 6 percent in 2014, according to a city report released in April. The trend appears to be continuing this year. Northeastern, for example, recently opened a new dorm with 720 beds, and is planning to add another 1,000, bringing the total to about 10,000 for an undergraduate population of 16,000. It also requires freshmen and sophomores to live on campus. So far this year, just one student has complained about unsuitable off-campus accommodations, said Northeastern spokesman Michael Armini, “and in less than 24 hours she was moved.”
Kenneth Elmore, BU’s dean of students, said undergrads are guaranteed on-campus housing, and that 76 percent choose that option. “The best way to keep them safe is to keep them on our property,” he said. As for off-campus housing, he said, the university favors “stricter enforcement of rules and tougher safety codes.”
But just as city officials can step up their efforts to reduce unsafe living conditions, so, too, can the schools that bring tens of thousands of students into Boston every year. One way is for them to partner with developers to build private dormitories beyond campus borders, something that is being done in other regions. It would help alleviate overcrowding and decrease the transient populations of students in neighborhoods.
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Another possibility is for colleges and universities to take a more active role in monitoring apartments where their students live. They might follow the example of the University at Buffalo, which sends school employees out with city workers to visit off-campus apartments. Daniel Ryan, the university’s director of off-campus student services, said students tend to be more receptive to opening the door to a school official than a city inspector. “We’re not looking for anything other than safety issues that the landlord should be addressing,” Ryan said. “We’re not checking to see if you washed the dishes or have a bong on the table.”
These and other creative approaches to off-campus housing should be on the agenda next month when Boston city councilors Josh Zakim and Mark Ciommo plan to hold a public hearing on the “no more than four” ordinance. “The hearing is to make sure we’re doing everything we can,” Zakim said. “It’s not an issue of laying blame.”
Perhaps, but accountability matters. If city and college officials — and the landlords they’re supposed to be monitoring — expect to earn a passing grade on safety, they have a lot of work left to do during this academic year.