Thursday, April 19, 2012

UW Students Having Trouble Finding Housing?

With a 2% vacancy rate and landlords doing some heavy screening, some UW-Students who's jobs are on hold may have trouble finding housing this spring. Consider what a landlord recently told the Tenant Resource Center:
Thanks to Gov Walker, funding for UW programs has not been released. This is really a problem in the medical science areas such as stem cell research as they are being told they may not get any funding released. This is effecting many people that work within the labs of the UW as they cannot guarantee employment for next year and they are telling their students that it might be another 4-6 weeks before they know their status. PhD candidates and students are in limbo in many areas for funding reasons and summer hours are being cut back. I bring this up as I have had a lot of students applying for apartments that have now found themselves without employment. Many of these students do not speak English as a first language and are distraught in terms of what to do. This is really a problem for foreign students whose visa status depends on the University. I am sure I am not the only Landlord running into this, but I wanted to let you know so that you can give your staff a heads up.
Students may wonder if this is legal or if they are being discriminated against. Most likely, no. If students are not being rented to because they are students, that would be discrimination. Or, if they were not being rented to because they were from a different country, that could be discrimination. However, Madison laws that protected tenants based on having too little income were overturned last fall by the state legislature with SB107. So, landlord can use whatever criteria they want for income in the City of Madison. As long as they are applying the criteria equally and not treating someone different simply because they belong to a protected claas, its their market to do as they please.