Earlier this fall, like so many parents of young people, I sent my son off to another year of college. He’s a straight-A student at the University of Central Florida and living off-campus for the first time. What keeps me up at night isn’t his grades. It’s his rent check.
The cost of his apartment is breathtakingly high. According to Apartments.com, average rent in Orlando — the area where I also live — is $1,580 a month. That’s slightly below the national average of $1,640 for monthly rent. Across the country, parents and students alike are being crushed by a rental market that is increasingly hostile to young people trying to live, study, and thrive.
The fact that there’s a housing crisis is nothing new to those of us who live in Central Florida — or anywhere else in the country, for that matter. Last year, a report found that housing is unaffordable for a whopping half of renters. But we don’t often talk about the crisis’ effect on college students and new graduates.
With much of the housing around campuses being taken off the market by companies and individuals who see greater profit in turning homes into short-term rentals, students are pushed much farther away from campuses or forced to pay more than they and their families can afford for housing.
We’re making a generation of students carry the weight of a housing crisis at the very moment they should be most focused on learning and growth.
Over the last few decades, platforms like AirBnB and Vrbo have reshaped many local housing markets, including our here in Orlando. What was once a modest apartment available for a student, a young family, or a working-class renter is now marketed as a weekend getaway for tourists.
This manufactured scarcity isn’t just happening in tourist hubs like Orlando. It’s a problem almost in every college town or area, often driven by interest in football games and other big events: the World Cup, music festivals, and national conventions.
Short-term rental companies flood local markets with ads aimed at local homeowners. Many take the bait, converting long-term rentals into lucrative short-term stays. Owners may win big, but students and other renters with limited incomes lose desperately needed affordable options.
With rents weighing on them, many students have to juggle work and school. And while there are many benefits to working while in college, the stress of needing to work — often on minimum wage — to afford rent can compromise young adults’ ability to keep up with schoolwork, get good grades, and even graduate. Others take loans to pay their rent. We should be working to drive student loan amounts down, not up.
Housing is not just an asset class or a side hustle. It is the infrastructure of opportunity. Without housing, everything else collapses. For students, affordable housing is the platform that allows them to focus on education rather than survival. For communities, diverse housing stock is what sustains a vibrant, stable local economy. When students graduate, many get to stay in the areas where they’ve invested so much of their college experiences, and we all benefit from that.
Orlando and other places can do things like:
Do more to regulate short-term rentals so that they do not cannibalize the housing supply.
Collaborate with our local universities to ensure they partner with affordable housing organizations, providing sufficient housing for the students they attract.
Prioritize housing development over quick-profit tourism booms.
We’ve got to make sure our communities have a diversity of options: apartments, dorms, co-ops, shared housing, starter homes. With plenty of housing people can afford at different life stages, students can focus on learning for their futures and new graduates can focus on transitioning to post-college jobs, rather than worrying about whether they can make rent this month.
And parents like me can get a better night’s sleep.
Tiffany Manuel is the president and CEO of TheCaseMade, which helps leaders build better, stronger communities that are diverse, equitable and inclusive.