Question:
What’s got this many Penn students lined up at 9 a.m. in the morning? (Hint: It’s NOT for Ben Kweller tickets.)
If you guessed “tickets to see a mediocre alternative rock act” despite my obvious hint … then you are probably a member of SPEC.
If you guessed “trying to secure a lease for housing next year”, then you’re on to something.
Campus Apartments (that’s a capital C, as in “Cash Money“), is arguably the most dominant monopoly my young eyes have ever seen. The cash-machine of a real estate company makes it rain so hard you can’t walk by their building on Walnut without an umbrella.
Re-read that last line again; it was poetic.
One need only take a stroll around the quiet, uneventful neighborhoods of Penn’s campus to see Campus Apartments’ influence. They have such a lock on real estate they even got the homeless hustling to make the rent. (Provided of course they were lucky enough to secure one of the luxurious cardboard boxes on beige block. I hear those don’t open up often.)
Penn Myth #345 – Living off campus is cheaper than living in a dormitory.
I bet it was Campus Apartments who leaked the rumor to the student body. If you throw in the fact that you’re paying for your room in Philly even while you’re off slaving away at your not-so-sexy internship this summer in NYC, it quickly erodes away what you save in base cost.
And don’t you dare even think of charging a summer student anything remotely close to full price for your room. Negotiating with a subletter is like tomorrow’s Penn vs. UNC basketball game. Oh sure it’ll start with a bang, but at the end of the day you expect to be severely disappointed by the score.
With talk of prices at the Radian starting as high as $1,100 next fall, I wonder if these will have some inflationary pressures on the rents of other off-campus dwellings. The $600 - $800 range (very rough estimate) of Campus Apartments seems like a steal in comparison to the new kid on the block.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Tags: Campus Apartments, Monopolies
An RSS feed of The Spin is available
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:53 pm
I do think Campus Apartments is kind of the devil, and what I saw led me to agree with the assessment that UCH is a slum lord. They’re not the only options though.
Off campus living is generally cheaper, and even when the cost is comparable, you’re generally getting much better quality. Subletters aren’t impossible to find, though in two summers I had little luck.
I sometimes think I miss the community a dorm provides, but any amount of time spent hanging out in a college house usually cures that.
Once you go off, you never go back.
December 4th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Simeon,
I love reading your opinion blog. You are funny, insightful and intelligent. Keep up the fabulous work.
xoxo
A Friend