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livinginlandmarketing · 4 years ago

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In late January, Sana Jaffery, a 19-year-old public policy student at UC Riverside, signed a lease to rent a private, off-campus apartment for the 2020-21 school year.

Jaffery was careful to reserve a room well before the September start of fall quarter.

UC Riverside student Sana Jaffery, seen outside her home in San Jose on Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2020, is among hundreds of UCR students who found themselves locked into private off-campus apartment leases they no longer needed after classes moved online because of the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Anda Chu, Bay Area News Group)

“There’s a housing shortage everywhere,” she said. “So they tell us, ‘You need to get your housing locked and loaded so that you have a place to live.’”

Then the world flipped upside down.

The novel coronavirus struck. And, on March 13, Riverside County closed all schools, including universities.

Seven months later, the vast majority of UCR classes — 97% — are being taught online. It may be many more months before students return to the classroom.

Because of the pandemic, Jaffery no longer needs an apartment for classes she takes online from a laptop in her San Jose home. But when she tried to get out of her lease, Jaffery said she ran into a wall of resistance.

Hundreds of other UCR students have, too — and continue to.

It’s a problem occurring across California and elsewhere in the Inland Empire, though the biggest impact in the region appears to be at UCR.

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Leticia Gutierrez-Lopez, associate vice president of student health and wellbeing at Cal Poly Pomona, said about 50 Cal Poly students are in leases for off-campus private housing from which they have been unable to get out.

Cal State San Bernardino spokesman Joe Gutierrez said his university’s housing director wasn’t aware of similar problems there.

At the private La Sierra University in Riverside, spokeswoman Darla Martin Tucker said officials received a few reports about students renting private off-campus housing who “found it difficult or impossible to break their leases.”

Jaffery said some housing providers appear focused on the fact that students entered into rental contracts.

“Yes, we signed a contract,” she said.

But Jaffery said students could not have known a deadly disease would sweep the globe. She managed to get out of her 12-month lease the last week of July.

Since then, she has assisted 200 other UCR students locked in leases. Jaffery launched an online petition and a website — breakingucrent.com — to call attention to the issue.

Jaffery said students generally lease rooms in four main off-campus complexes: University Village Towers, The Palms on University, GrandMarc and Highlander at North Campus.

Apartments say they still have bills to pay

Operators of two of these complexes responded to requests for comment; two did not.

Keith Thompson, vice president of property operations for The Scion Group in Chicago, which manages The Palms on University, said his company is sensitive to students’ situation.

“In fact, as soon as we learned last summer that UCR would be primarily online this Fall, we invited any of our future residents whose plans had changed to contact us, so we could attempt to replace them and potentially release them from any obligation,” Thompson said via email.

Thompson wrote that The Palms, which primarily serves UCR students but is not exclusively reserved for them, isn’t “in a position to simply allow open cancellation” as it still must pay its mortgage, property taxes, payroll and utility bills.

He said the “vast majority” of student residents moved in and are studying online “from the relative comfort and safety of their homes in our community.”

Besides Jaffery’s efforts, Riverside Legal Aid and the Fair Housing Council of Riverside County have teamed up to try to solve problems for more than 60 students.

Legal Aid attorney Ernie Reguly said those students have complained about GrandMarc and University Village Towers and only a few have gotten out of leases.

Nathan Cieszynski, the council’s program manager, said, “It would be nice if we could get the property owners to come to the table to work with the students to find an equitable solution. But they really don’t seem to want to have those conversations.”

Students stuck in unpredictable situation

Cindy Finley, the community manager at University Village Towers, acknowledged “the unprecedented circumstances facing the student community” in an email. And she said her complex is exploring ways to “offer flexibility to our residents.”

“We are committed to working with each of our residents on an individual basis,” Finley wrote.

A person answering the phone at GrandMarc referred an inquiry to the corporate office of HH Red Stone Properties in Maryland, where an employee said the inquiry would need to be addressed to Kelley Brine, executive vice president. Multiple attempts to reach Brine were unsuccessful.

Highlander at North Campus did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Joshua Howard, a spokesman for the Sacramento-based California Apartment Association, called the situation “an unfortunate consequence of the pandemic.”

The plight of students in private housing stands in contrast to the experience of those who reserved rooms in university-owned campus housing. UCR spokesman John Warren said the university refunded campus housing fees and canceled leases upon request.

“UCR does not have any legal leverage over matters involving non-university housing,” Warren said in an email.

But he said officials are trying to work with apartment complex owners and are “hopeful of a positive outcome.”

Problem adds to students’ stress

As for students with whom Jaffery has worked, she said some moved into apartments, figuring if they are going to pay they might as well live in the place they are paying for. Others elected to stay home, including Tammy Wang, 19, a second-year biology student who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Los Gatos.

“I can’t afford $840 a month when I’m not even staying there,” Wang said by phone recently. “I never even picked up my key.”

Wang thought she had found someone to take over her University Village Towers lease. But she said the person “scammed” her out of incentive money she put up and didn’t take the apartment.

“I just really want out of the lease because that’s a lot of money down the drain,” she said. “I have been trying to find a replacement for so long, I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Reguly, the attorney, said housing companies are “abusing” students.

“These kids are stressed,” he said. “They are already dealing with a nonstandard school year.”

Howard, of the California Apartment Association, said operators of rental properties are facing financial challenges, too.

“As the pandemic lingers and vacancies rise, it’s becoming increasingly difficult – especially for mom-and-pop landlords – to pay their mortgages, payroll, property taxes, repair bills and other expenses,” Howard wrote.

The association urges members to “be flexible and try to come up with solutions,” Howard said, adding that the federal government should provide rent relief for student tenants and property owners.

Nicole Ryan, spokeswoman for the National Apartment Association in Arlington, Virginia, which has 85,000 members representing more than 10 million apartment homes nationwide, said the pandemic has been hard on the rental industry.

Ryan said by phone that vacancy rates are expected to peak in the fourth quarter at 7.2%, a more-than-3-percentage point increase from the fourth quarter of 2019. She said rent amounts are projected to slide down 8.1% during 2020.

‘Doubling up’ in rooms could end

Besides paying for unneeded housing, there is the concern about exposure to the virus.

Riverside City Councilman Andy Melendrez is working to help UC Riverside students stuck in apartment leases. (Photo courtesy of Andy Melendrez)

Riverside City Councilman Andy Melendrez said the larger housing complexes typically assign four students to four separate single-occupancy rooms that share a common living room and kitchen area.

But, because of a student housing shortage, Melendrez said city ordinance lets up to 15% of those single-occupancy rooms be assigned to two people, which he said is unsafe.

Melendrez said he plans to ask the Riverside City Council to temporarily suspend the “doubling up” policy.