The large apartment buildings going up around University Hill expand housing opportunity in surrounding neighborhoods, and that’s a good thing. 

These buildings—505 Walnut, Theory Syracuse, The Marshall, UPoint, etc—attract a lot of scorn because they’re big, new, expensive, and primarily marketed to university students. ‘Why’ a lot of people ask ‘do we need more luxury student apartments when so many people in this town struggle to pay the rent?’

The short answer is that we don’t need them—students do. Students are people, and they need housing just like anybody else.

A more complicated answer is that we (anybody trying to secure housing in Syracuse) need these new apartments because students need them. To see why, it’s helpful to think about how university students differ from other tenants in the City.

First, they are often willing and able to pay more in rent than many other Syracuse tenants. Syracuse University and LeMoyne College charge students between about $900 and $1,550 per bedroom per month for on-campus housing. Student loans and/or family savings cover that cost, but those sources of income can also be used to rent off-campus housing too. Compared to the on-campus options, splitting the $4,500 rent on a 6-bedroom apartment with five other roommates is a pretty good deal—even though that’s well out of reach of any large family that might also want an apartment that size—and a lot of student tenants jump at the opportunity.

Second, they are geographically constrained. A good number of students move to Syracuse for school, don’t have much information about the City, and don’t have the time or ability to chase down Craigslist leads all over town. Students tenants also often need to be able to get to their campus without a car, and that means finding housing within walking or biking distance or on a bus line that goes to campus. All of this means that student tenants are a sort of captive market for University-area landlords, and that gives those landlords the power to set their rents at prices student tenants will pay.

Third, they evict themselves. Landlords value the ability to get rid of tenants who can’t pay high rent or are loud or demand basic maintenance or need reasonable accommodations for a disability or whatever. Landlords cherish easy evictions, but tenants who want long-term housing stability have some—not enough, but some—rights that allow them to fight off eviction and stay in their homes. Student tenants, however, often voluntarily move every year and are almost guaranteed to vacate the apartment after two years, so landlords who exclusively rent to student tenants never get ‘stuck’ with someone they consider to be a ‘problem tenant.’

If you’re a tenant looking for a relatively inexpensive, long-term home, you do not want to be competing with student tenants for an apartment. Lot of landlords would prefer to rent to student tenants, and they can usually screen you out by just charging more than you can afford.

This is also a problem for prospective homebuyers. When building new housing isn’t an option, landlords looking to rent to tenants will simply buy existing housing—including 1 and 2-family homes commonly purchased by owner-occupants—and operate it as rental units. If you’re trying to buy a house for yourself, you do not want to be competing with landlords who rent to student tenants. They often have better access to financing and are often willing to pay more because the rent can cover a pretty big mortgage payment.

So it is a very good thing for most Syracuse tenants and prospective homebuyers that a few big landlords are building big new apartment buildings specifically for student tenants, and lots of student tenants are choosing to live in those buildings. Because of those big new buildings, fewer student tenants are competing with non-student tenants for apartments in the older neighborhoods around Syracuse University, and fewer landlords are competing with prospective homebuyers to purchase older housing to rent to students in those neighborhoods too. 

Clearly, Syracuse’s housing problems are a lot bigger than “student tenants shape the rental market in ways that increase housing purchase and rental prices on and around University Hill,” and while big new student-targeted buildings can help solve that problem, they can’t solve every housing problem in the City.

But what’s great about these big new apartment buildings is that they do actually solve a real problem in Syracuse, they do it while generating new tax revenue (even when SIDA grants a PILOT), and they have done it by converting parking lots and vacant buildings in the City’s center into new homes.