‘I Just Wanted to Find a Decent Place’: High Rent, Low Quality on the East Side

Housing near campus is an essential aspect of student life for any university. As students often are unable to be fully employed, they benefit greatly from affordable housing.

From Craigslist to Zillow to Apartments.com, rental listings for properties on Milwaukee’s Upper East Side are published regularly. However, a percentage of that housing is not plausible for students to occupy due to rental costs and income requirements.

Elizabeth Schlehlein, a senior in Education at UWM, had been looking for housing from February to August. For her senior year, she was excited to start looking for a one-bedroom apartment. She had worked full time all summer at the on-campus Children’s Learning Center, nannied on weekends and took out some loans leading up to this move. When the time came to begin searching, she found the process far more difficult than expected.

“It was really hard to get in contact with landlords and leasing companies. A lot of them would not answer the listings,” she said.

Schlehlein said she contacted over 25 properties and most of them did not get back to her, while others were gone before she got a chance to look at them.

“When I did find a place I was interested in, they didn’t have availability,” Schlehlein said. “A lot of them go so quickly as well, I’d call them and they’re, like, ‘oh yeah, I just leased it out’ or ‘somebody just came by today and took it.’”

Aside from the competitive rental market, she had difficulty finding affordable housing that was worth the rising cost.

“I just wanted to find a decent place that wasn’t run down or really fancy either, but something that was affordable,” she said. “A lot of them are around, I want to say $900 without utility, so it came out to over $1,000, which is still fairly cheap I guess considering one bedrooms can be pretty expensive. A lot of them are over a grand now, the cost of living just keeps going up and rising like that.”

Schlehlein’s lease ended in July, and she ended up moving back home with family an hour away for August and half of September before moving into her own place in October.

Inflation Impacts Rent

Renters across the United States have seen prices increase and supply plummet during and following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Higher mortgage rates, larger asking prices and a lack of inventory have caused would-be home buyers to stay in the rental market. This causes a shortage of rental housing and an increase in demand, pushing rental prices up.

Renters across the U.S. have seen the average rent rise 18% over the last five years, outpacing inflation, according to consumer price index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From February 2020 to February 2022, rent prices were up 6% compared with a 10% inflation rate.

According to the 2021 Wisconsin Policy Forum “Expanding the Blueprint,” Milwaukee’s median gross monthly rent (including the cost of utilities) is $865, which is close to the statewide median of $867 and below the national median of $1,097. Nevertheless, there is a large gap between the number of low-income renters and the number of housing units that charge rents affordable to them. For instance, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reported “an estimated 31.5% of renter households in Milwaukee earn less than $20,000 per year, but only 9.5% of rental units in the city charge rents under $500 per month, which is the maximum those households could afford without becoming rent burdened.”

A large percentage of college students are also low-income renters because they often are unable to work full time while balancing school, work, a social life and extracurricular activities.

More than 30% of college students said securing housing was harder this year than last, according to a recent Realtor.com® survey. Additionally, more than a third of college students say they can’t afford to rent an apartment near their school.

Roughly 19% of students are receiving help from their parents this year—financial assistance they didn’t need last year. An additional 21% are living at home to save money. Thirteen percent are adding more roommates to cut costs, while 10% plan to live in lower-quality housing.

Despite the need for affordable housing, it doesn’t look as though the issue will improve anytime soon. Americans anticipate continued rent increases in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations. It is expected that rents will increase by 10% this year – which is larger than the expected increase in price for any other commodity, including food (9.2%), college education (9.0%) and gas (8.8%).

Higher Prices, Same Quality

Many UWM students said the price of rent they were or are paying was not equivalent to the quality of place they received. More than half reported issues in their rental that had not been fixed.

After living with two roommates, Maddie Chase, a UWM student in the Music Performance Department at UWM, is looking for a two-bedroom for herself and another roommate for when their lease ends in April.

“It’s basically just the struggle of finding somewhere that’s affordable, that is near campus and is decent which especially in our campus, it’s hard to find places that are decently upkept,” Chase said. “I’ve looked at Craigslist, Facebook, Apartments.com, the UWM Neighborhood Housing Office. I asked around to friends, landlords and it’s getting a little tedious.”

For Chase, the struggle will persist after college because she has had to take out loans to afford rent on top of her education.

“I’m taking out a f*ck ton of loans while I’m in school so that I can make sure that, as I’m not working full-time, I can be alive because it’s really hard to work and to sustain myself as well as get a good education,” she said. “I don’t have help. I’m completely doing this on my own and my parents don’t help me. I’m completely doing this by myself and it’s almost impossible.”

At her current place, she and her roommates pay almost $2,000 a month for rent alone, but issues within the apartment continue.

“It’s literally so expensive and our front door handle keeps coming off. We have one of our radiators that we can’t physically turn off and it gets ridiculously hot, so we just have to open up the windows,” Chase said.

Schlehlein described a similar issue when looking for housing. She was surprised at some of the asking prices for rent when the property was not up-to-date and utilities were excluded. She says that when rent increases, some students can’t afford to move or can’t find another place to live, so they get sucked into spending more money than the property is worth. Other students choose to commute, living outside of the area to get lower rents and better apartments. Then they have to drive more and deal with campus parking.

Gracie Reineking, a journalism student at UWM, commutes 25 minutes to school to avoid campus costs and poor-quality apartments.

“I felt like if I rented something away from school, I might get more updated places for a better price,” Reineking said.

As a junior, she lived in a house on campus with two other roommates in a townhouse where people lived above and below them. Their rent was $950 a month, but the house was old, squeaky and property management wasn’t always responsive. They didn’t have AC, it was not kept up outside, and the garbage in the garage was always a mess.

“Moving into the suburbs was definitely a good move for me,” Reineking said. “Rent is more expensive but you’re getting what you pay for, and I’ll gladly commute to stay in a better complex and area.”