First years stranded in off-campus housing
Over one hundred first year students have been living in shared rooms or housing off campus following a shortage of University accommodation.
The crisis, which follows three consecutive years of similar housing shortages, has forced the University to rent private properties off campus, which were subsequently sub-let to first years who were not allocated accommodation within their colleges.
Some private houses, although more spacious than the typical University halls, are up to four miles away from the campus. Students living in them have complained of being isolated from campus. First year student Katie O’Malley, currently living in town said: “Our house is nice but the fact that it’s a 45-minute walk from campus isn’t good enough…Our STYCs have been great but it’s definitely harder to meet people when you live so far away.”
During Welcome Week, students living off-campus in accommodation provided by the University were given access to a taxi account, allowing them free travel to and from the campus throughout the week. However by Wednesday funds had run out and the students were told that they had to make their own way to and from the campus during the day.
“I don’t understand why we weren’t just given bus passes,” said one student. “We have to pay the extra cost of getting the bus to the campus every day which we wouldn’t have to pay if we were living in the college.”
The accommodation crisis has distressed many new students for whom moving away from home is already a difficult time. Many were allocated accommodation on the day before they were due to travel to York, and some students were originally told that they would have to find their own accommodation before discovering, some as late as Saturday morning, that they had in fact been given somewhere to live. “It was all a bit disorganised and stressful,” said one first-year. “I was trying to find somewhere to rent privately all day Friday then they rang up to tell me they had a room for me. I was relieved, but they left it a bit late.”
Steve Page, Student Support Manager for the University of York, admitted that there had been “a certain degree of confusion” in the weeks leading up to the start of term and that “clearly some things have gone wrong”, but stressed that “communication with students” had been one of the major issues contributing to the crisis. Page rejected claims that administrative errors made by the Accommodation Office were responsible for the crisis.
With the last student moving out of temporary accommodation on Wednesday of Week 2, the crisis seems to have abated and most of the students affected have settled in to their new homes. “I was originally annoyed about not being able to live on campus,” said David Price, one of the students living in a shared house with other first-years. “But now I don’t mind as much. Our house is nice and we are close to York city centre. The uni did the best they could to get us into accommodation and it seems to have worked out quite well.”
Last year first years were housed in a hotel at an estimated £30,000 cost to the University.
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