By Grace McLarty
In class, in the smoking shelters, on Discord, we all hear stories of Olympia’s nightmare housing market. Friends move out of town due to rising rents, students post desperate pleas for rooms for rent on social media, you hear about people giving up on Evergreen and moving back home, sometimes out of state, because they can’t find housing in Olympia. If you haven’t been personally victimized by Olympia’s housing market, you know somebody who has.
And these aren’t just stories. According to the Thurston Regional Planning Council (TRPC), the price of rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in Thurston County has increased 30% since 2021, from $1,288 to $1,667. Also according to the TRPC, Thurston County has a lower apartment vacancy rate than both King or Pierce Counties, showing that there is an insufficient supply of housing in this area. Because of the low vacancy rate, and the fact that it is the capital city of Washington State and it is located close to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Evergreen students are in competition for housing with both government workers and military personnel. If you were a landlord, would you rent to the government worker with a reliable income, or an Evergreen student relying on part-time work and financial aid?
Olympia’s housing market is an inconvenient truth that the Evergreen administration has to face. Evergreen wants to enroll more students, but where are they supposed to live? In their most recent press release, Evergreen claimed that “the comprehensive rehabilitation of Building A has successfully alleviated housing stress for students, enabling them to focus on their education.” Adding 152 beds is a good step forward in helping students cope with the housing crisis, but to make the claim that this partial renovation of A-Dorm has “successfully alleviated housing stress for students” is tone-deaf and offensive when the majority of students have to deal with Olympia’s housing market.
Back in 2021, the HOPE Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University conducted a survey of higher education institutions titled “#RealCollege 2021: Basic Needs Insecurity During the Ongoing Pandemic.” The results of this survey showed that 58% of Evergreen students experienced housing insecurity in the year leading up to the survey. The results of this survey helped inspire the creation of Evergreen’s Basic Needs, Advocacy, and Resource Center (BNARC), where I worked for a year as a Housing Support assistant.
This job opened my eyes to the barriers students face while trying to find housing in Olympia. First, student loans and financial aid do not count as income when applying to rent a place. Second, young people, by and large, do not have good enough credit to qualify to rent a place (your credit score can be negatively impacted by things that disproportionately affect young people, such as your credit score being lower if your credit “age” is less than 10 years old). Third, there is a growing trend of apartment complexes and rental companies no longer accepting co-signers. (Urban Management, Walker John’s company, does not accept co-signers if the applicant’s credit score is lower than 680). Having a parent be a co-signer is a classic way that college students have been able to get around income and credit score requirements in the past, and abandoning this practice severely disadvantages students in an already competitive rental market. My time at the BNARC made me intensely aware of the almost insurmountable barriers students face in Olympia’s housing market, and how the current support offered by Evergreen doesn’t come close to helping students overcome these challenges. You can give a student all the grant money in the world, but that won’t help them qualify for an apartment.
The HOPE Center’s survey provides the most recent comprehensive data about the Evergreen student housing experience, but that data is already out-of-date in Olympia’s rapidly worsening rental market. There needs to be more up-to-date data on how students are dealing with the housing crisis. Which is why, this fall, a team of student researchers, including me, are trying to collect this data by conducting a survey on the Evergreen student housing experience. You can participate in this survey by scanning the QR code on the ad in this paper, or on the flyers around campus.
We have all heard the whispers about Olympia’s housing market, but we need your help to turn these stories into data that we can present to the administration. We want to know how much students are paying for rent, how difficult it has been to find housing in Olympia, what barriers students face while searching for off-campus housing, and we even want to know about your on-campus housing experiences. This data will help the administration realize that they can no longer ignore Evergreen’s student housing crisis.
