Three young women sit in the living room of their apartment. A futon, a blue couch and a coffee table fill the space. Pictures of family and friends are scattered about the room.
The SMU juniors are frustrated and a little bit stunned as they discuss the letter they discovered on their back door earlier that day.
The SMU student housing office notified Katrina Myers, Angellia Chandler and Devon Adams that the apartment they’re living in will be demolished. The Office of Resident Life and Student Housing told them to move out by May 31.
The demolition will eliminate 79 percent of the on-campus apartments available for upperclassmen. Almost 300 residents currently live in the Binkley Apartments. Students are left with the choice of returning to residence halls or trying to find housing in the expensive real estate market surrounding campus.
“Look at this place, we made it our home,” Adams said.
A wall hanging sits above the futon, a gift from Chandler’s boyfriend to help complete the decorating spree that lasted for weeks after they moved in. The bookshelf is filled with the textbooks required for the English and religious studies degrees Myers is paying almost $40,000 a year to complete.
All of the decorations are coming down, the furniture is going to have to be moved and the upheaval of moving will be undertaken again.
Myers, Chandler and Adams are not alone. Upperclassmen, graduate students and some faculty and staff fill the 154 apartments on Binkley Avenue, west of the new Crum Basketball Center and the intramural fields. Many students find these apartments appealing because of their moderately low rent and close proximity to campus.
“When I first heard the apartments were closing, after a long string of obscenities, my first thought was, ‘What am I going to do? Where am I going to live?'” Adams said. “Because I don’t have a car, off-campus options are very limited. For financial reasons, I really can’t afford University Park housing.”
Students are concerned that knocking down the Binkley Apartments will destroy one of the few areas of affordable housing. The apartments’ destruction might also make SMU less economically diverse and reinforce its rich kid reputation. In addition, also mixed up in the demolition debate is the possibility of the land being used for the not-yet-confirmed Bush Library.
“In taking down the only affordable housing there is, they’re basically saying, ‘I’m sorry if you’re not rich enough to afford Highland Park life,'” Myers said. “You’re either living in dorms and taking out loans or you’re basically screwed because you don’t have anywhere to go or to live. And in doing so they’re just making it less affordable for the people who don’t fit into the SMU stereotype and ultimately they’re going to stop these kids from coming to school here.”
SMU’s decision to knock down the apartments is explained in a letter from Chris Casey, vice-president for business and finance, as the result of a need for land for “additional residence halls, intramural fields and other facilities.”
“There have been various iterations of where the library may or may not go and until we have a final decision we won’t know,” Casey said. “We would be doing what we are doing regardless of the library because we do have other needs as far as housing and the fields are concerned. I guess it’s safe to say it’s identified in options, but there are many options that have been identified as far as locations [for the library].”
For some residents, the issue is not with the university’s intended plans, but a matter of economics. Residence halls’ costs have risen each year and will increase again for the 2008-2009 school year. In contrast, the apartments are more affordable and equally convenient.
Myers, Chandler and Adams pay $845 a month for a two bedroom, one bathroom Binkley townhouse. Utilities and Internet bills run an additional $50 a month, and food costs average between $100-150 a month per person. The monthly cost for each roommate amounts to about $400, considerably less than what students pay in the residence halls.
The average monthly cost (based on four weeks of the weekly cost) for the 12 residence halls (including the Multicultural and Service houses) for the 2007-2008 school year is $726.28 for one person in a double room. Meal plans are also required for residence hall residents and cost $1,850 per semester. For apartment residents spending an average of $100-$150 a month, groceries for August to May would cost $1,000-$1,500. A meal plan would cost $3,700 for the same time period.
Moving back to the residence halls would mean an average of a $325 increase in monthly “rent” and over double the cost for food. Myers, Chandler and Adams simply cannot afford the financial burden.
Contrary to the typical SMU student, Myers receives no financial help from her parents in paying for her tuition or housing costs. During the school year, she works two part-time jobs and takes a full class load. For the past three summers, she worked an average of 60 hours a week between two jobs in her native rural Ohio. Myers went entire months without a day off, working seven days a week to counter rising tuition costs and avoid taking out more loans.
Moving in with Chandler and Adams, friends who were also looking to lessen the expense of housing, was one way to ease the pressure of trying to cover all the costs.
Chandler also receives no financial help from her family and is $50,000 in debt. She works an average of 28 hours a week on top of taking 13 hours of class.
Adams almost transferred to a state school because of the expense of tuition, but managed to stay when she received an additional scholarship her sophomore year. She doesn’t have a car and looks for ways to shop frugally and save money.
Brian Bailey, the vice president of Mustang Realty Group, a real estate firm that specializes in the Dallas and SMU area, says he has seen the amount of affordable housing around campus shrink in the past few years as developers knock down older, cheaper properties to build newer, more expensive townhouses.
“Landlords of newer townhouses are charging anywhere between $800 to $1,200 a bedroom,” Bailey said. “A new three bedroom townhouse could cost $3,000 a month.”
Residential laws in University Park prohibit more than two unrelated residents from living together. Students take the chance of being caught, fined and asked to move out if they try to have more than one roommate to help lower costs.
“For someone looking to lease rather than buy, there is definitely not enough affordable housing around SMU anymore,” Bailey said. “A lot of students are going to have to find housing a little bit farther from campus.”
Yet not all students can simply find housing off campus. They may not have a car like Adams. Or maybe they are like Gabriel Martinez, a graduate student in the history department, who struggles to produce the letters of credit and other documents often required by landlords. As a native of Mexico, he has lived most of his life in the United States but is not a citizen.
“I think in particular for the international students they should be a little more understanding that we’re not in the same situation as other people,” he said. “The first year I was here I tried to look around [off-campus], and I realized that there were a lot of things that I couldn’t come up with.”
RLSH will still operate 42 north campus apartments, but vacancies are expected to be limited because of returning residents. Current Binkley residents will be given priority for these openings at the RLSH housing lottery on March 26.
“We’re going to serve the Binkley students first,” Susan Strobel Hogan, assistant director for assignments and marketing for RLSH, said. “If there are five [students], great. If there are 50, I don’t know how many of them we will be able to help.”
Casey said the closing of the Binkley Apartments is part of a master plan for SMU that was put in place in 1997. The plan includes increased expansion and building for housing, intramural fields and other needs.
“It hasn’t been just a decision today to close them tomorrow,” Casey said. “It’s been a long, extended process and the time has come for that to happen. So it has certainly been included in the university’s planning process all along the way and has been through the appropriate channels and those sorts of things.”
At the end of the day, the result is still the closing of 154 of the 196 on-campus apartments available for upperclassmen, graduate students and faculty and staff.
“Yes, I feel like I’m losing my home,” Adams said. “I came into the Binkleys with a huge excitement because it was my first apartment and we had got it all decorated and just exactly the way we wanted it. And I feel like I’m losing a place that, even for this short period of time that I’ve lived here, has meant a lot to me in my growth as a person and as a student.”
