The University of Miami’s housing crunch is causing a lot of stress. Here’s what is going on
A month before she started as a freshman at the University of Miami, Julia Tsagaroulis discovered she couldn’t get a dorm room.
After she was accepted, the Chicago native who relocated to South Florida about five years ago applied for on-campus housing in November. She was wait-listed.
In December, the university notified her she didn’t qualify to live on campus because she was a local student, and UM wasn’t prioritizing Miami-Dade or Broward students for dorm rooms due to a housing shortage. With no time to find off-campus housing before the first day of class in January, Tsagaroulis commuted three mornings from her parents’ home in Pembroke Pines to UM’s Coral Gables campus, an hour each way with traffic. She leaned on caffeine and phone calls to avoid falling asleep at the wheel.
“It got stressful. It was hard honestly,” said Tsagaroulis, 19. “Especially at the end of the week, I was so tired. And my parents were like, ‘You’re exhausted.’ ”
Tsagaroulis is among hundreds of students impacted by the housing shortage at UM, the largest private university in South Florida. It’s not only affecting new students; seniors returning after a semester away in their junior year also landed on UM’s housing wait list, which topped nearly 1,600 in February, the largest wait list in the school’s 97-year history.
In January, at the start of the spring semester, UM shipped 135 students to two nearby hotels for about six weeks, shuttling them back and forth between the hotels and campus. This fall, it will send up to 80 again to a hotel off campus.
Dorm shortage impacts sophomores, juniors, seniors
The spring’s housing crunch wasn’t limited to new students.
Regina Potenza, originally from New York, lived on campus at McDonald Tower at Hecht last year, her freshman year.
In February, on the first day she could register for on-campus housing for her sophomore year, Potenza left class to secure a dorm. For nearly an hour, she refreshed UM’s housing registration web page, texting her friends — her future roommates — and her parents to confirm her building choice: Lakeside Village, UM’s newest housing complex, which it opened in 2020.
Lakeside Village was denied. She phoned the UM housing line. Nobody answered.
“It was chaotic,” said Potenza, 19.
After she didn’t get her housing choice on the first day of registration, she did the same thing on Day Two. Then Day Three. Finally, on the fourth day, she and her future roommates abandoned Lakeside and put in for a room at Eaton Residential College, one of the oldest halls at UM. She got it.
“It ended up working out well for me,” she said.
But if Potenza hadn’t secured a bed on UM’s campus, she’s not sure what she would have done.
“There’s not many apartment complexes within walking distance of campus,” she said. “I was doing the math, and to live in some of these would mean walking an hour to school if you don’t have a car like me. So on-campus housing is really important; otherwise, it is not great if you’re working or studying until 10 p.m. and you have to walk for an hour to get to your house after that. And the closer you are to campus, the higher the rent is.”
By the end of the February housing registration period, the wait list stood at 1,577. By Tuesday, the wait list had dropped to zero, said UM spokeswoman Megan Ondrizek, mainly due to students finding other accommodations and canceling their requests.
Miami’s steep rents
UM says the problem largely stems from soaring rents in Miami’s real estate market, which U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge recently labeled as the “epicenter” of the U.S. housing crisis. The high rents off campus led to more students seeking housing on campus, rather than renting in Coral Gables, South Miami, Coconut Grove or Pinecrest, the neighborhoods near UM and some of Miami-Dade’s priciest neighborhoods.
Usually, 50% of the students who live on campus request to return for the following year, UM said. In the spring, a whopping 87% of returning students asked to live on campus. Usually, about 25 percent of UM students live on campus, but that rate climbed to 27 percent in the 2021-22 school year.
“We expected a little bit of that but certainly not to that level,” said Richard Sobaram, assistant vice president for student affairs in housing strategic initiatives at UM, about the demand surge. “Most students, come December and January, they were looking for off-campus options because that’s their first choice.
“Recognizing that the off-campus options were very limited or very expensive, they chose to apply for university housing. And that’s what caused the wait list to get so large.”
The Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area was the sixth least-affordable market for student renters in the 2020-21 academic year. They paid on average $14,481 in off-campus room and board, compared with the national average of $11,327, according to a study released Monday by Porch, which incorporated data from the National Center for Education Statistics in its research.
READ MORE: Miami’s Housing Affordability Crisis
Large freshmen class
UM’s problems can’t entirely be attributed to rising rents, some faculty say, because some university decisions compounded the issue.
For one, the size of UM’s freshmen class surged in the 2021-2022 academic year. For last year’s fall semester, UM enrolled 3,247 freshmen, the largest class in its history, a 23 percent increase over its 2019 pre-pandemic freshmen class of 2,649.
UM says its computer models inadvertently led to a higher percentage of students being accepted, but some faculty have questioned whether UM boosted the number of freshmen due to concerns about a decline in students during the pandemic. For the 2021 fall semester, many schools in the U.S., not just UM, accepted more students than they intended because of the faulty model, which could have been due to COVID skewing historical data, Sobaram said.
UM admitted about 12,000 for the fall of 2021, which translated into the 3,247 freshmen class. For this fall, UM admitted a class of just over 9,000, but UM won’t know the exact freshmen class size until September.
“Over-enrollment is not unique at the University of Miami,” Sobaram said. “The reason for that is we all use the same formula. Just like airlines and hotels, we say, ‘OK I want to have 2,200 students so I admit this amount and I’ll get that.’ That model has worked perfectly for decades. If we wanted 2,200, we might have gotten 2,150 or 2,250. No big deal.”
Last year, that all changed: “For whatever reason, we did not get the number that we thought we would get,” Sobaram said. “It’s not like the university said, ‘Oh, we want to take in more students.’ ”
Sobaram said families appreciated that their children lived at The THesis and the Dadeland Marriott, two new hotels near campus. UM gave each student a $45 Ubereats gift card per day while there and shuttled them back and forth from campus. At the Dadeland Marriot, UM staffed an RA.
“Even though it was very costly, we thought it was the right thing to do,” he said.
For the upcoming fall, up to 80 students will stay at the THesis again.
Demolishing Hecht
At the same time UM accepted more students, it demolished the two towers of Hecht Residential College this summer, trimming its housing inventory by 850 beds, or 19 percent of its 4,400 beds.
And while it opened Lakeside Village — a new housing complex with 1,115 beds — in the fall of 2020, the cost of living there is $23,300 a year, making it the highest-priced housing unit on campus.
For the upcoming year, student housing will range from about $9,000 a year for a two-bedroom with a shared bathroom to about $23,000 for a private one-bedroom, one-bath apartment, UM said.
Laureen Bingham, who lives in Loveland, Ohio, said when Lakeside opened in 2020, the family lamented how their daughter, Rosemarie, then a rising junior, didn’t get in. But, later on, they re-framed the misfortune as a “blessing in disguise” because of the cost of living there. Her daughter graduated from UM this spring.
“Honestly, her college education cost more than our house. It was very expensive,” Bingham said. “We just didn’t realize how much they were going to increase costs every year.”
The total cost of attending UM for students living on campus in the 2022-23 year will be $78,640, UM’s website estimates. Total cost for students living off campus will be $83,260. Tuition alone will be $55,440.
What will replace Hecht?
UM initially planned to knock down Hecht Residential College in 2020, around the same time that it opened Lakeside Village, Sobaram said.
But the university postponed it due to the pandemic. In July, UM demolished Hecht to make way for Centennial Village, a complex that will accommodate approximately 2,025 first-year students, complete with a dining hall, spread among five dorm buildings.
The first two dorms are slated to open in fall 2024, with the dining hall. The remaining three dorms will open in fall 2026, UM said. UM plans to tear down Stanford Residential College, which houses roughly 960 freshmen, in May 2024.
“If we delayed it one more year, there was no guarantee that we wouldn’t have to delay two years or three years or four years or five,” Sobaram said of the Hecht demolition. “How do we know we’re not going to have a housing crisis five years from now?
“There are always sacrifices that we all have to make. I’m looking out my window at Lakeside Village. There were students who had to sacrifice when that was being built. The wellness center — I remember students working in a trailer for three years, and they never got to enjoy it,” Sobaram added. “This is part of what we do. One generation sacrifices for the next.”
What’s at stake?
The housing dilemma affects UM in two critical ways, said Justin Ortagus, a professor of higher education administration and policy, and the director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida.
The first concerns equity, as students from lower socioeconomic levels get shut out if they can’t figure out how to put a roof over their heads.
Secondly, Ortagus said the lack of housing could threaten the university’s finances, as students who may have committed to UM may end up backing out or dropping out because they can’t pay rent.
“Even if admissions are up and students are excited to go there, if they’re unable to find affordable housing — whether that’s on campus or in the surrounding area — that’s really concerning for their ability to succeed in higher education,” he said.
The housing situation also applies to other schools in metropolitan areas with high real estate costs, he said. In California, colleges and universities, particularly UC Berkeley, are facing similar housing challenges.
“This is not just a University of Miami issue, but it is an issue that’s exacerbated in high cost of living cities such as Miami,” he said.
Sobaram said UM has not seen a drop-off in enrollment due to the housing issues.
“We’re always concerned about how many students we can attract,’’ he said. “I will say, we’re seeing every year, our number of applications and quality of students keep going up. So for right now, we’re not seeing that happening. I can’t say for sure whether or not that’s going to change, but for now ... our brand is still very attractive to students across the country.”
As for affordability for all students, UM spokeswoman Megan Ondrizek referred to UM President Julio Frenk’s inaugural address in January 2016, in which he pledged to meet 100% of admitted undergraduate students’ financial needs. She said UM already accomplished that.
‘I feel like I have been hitting my head against the wall’
In Virginia, Donna Robinson, the mother of a rising UM senior, navigated the Miami-Dade housing market in the spring after she found out her son’s rent would jump by $700 per month.
After arriving at UM as a junior last year, Robinson’s son lived at The Standard, a student housing complex in Coral Gables that opened last year. He lived with two others in a three-bedroom apartment that went for $5,535. As one of three, he paid $1,345 a month because the company granted him a “move-in incentive” and dropped the rent by $500.
This spring, The Standard didn’t offer the incentive and raised the rent to $6,210. That meant Robinson’s son would be on the hook for $2,070 each month — a $725 per month jump.
“I feel like I have been hitting my head against the wall,” Robinson told the Herald in late April, as she called everyone up to the CEO and COO of The Standard, pleading for help.
After searching for weeks, Robinson rented a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate at the MiLine, a new apartment complex that opened in Glenvar Heights, off Bird Road about Southwest 69th Avenue, about three miles away from the Gables campus. Her son’s new rent: about $1,600 per month.
“It’s a new apartment complex so they’re trying to get people in,” she said.
Pushing students to Brickell, not the Gables
Ryan Waugaman, a Miami real estate agent who specializes in UM students, said UM students being unable to secure housing isn’t a new trend.
“The University of Miami is notorious for accepting more students than it can handle,” he said.
Waugaman, originally from Houston, was accepted to UM in 2018 but couldn’t attend because he couldn’t get on-campus housing, and off-campus housing was too expensive for his family.
“Even back then, coming from Texas, we were like, ‘This is ridiculous. That much for an apartment?’ ” he said. “It’s the University of Miami. Yes, it’s a really good school in Florida, but it’s not like it’s Harvard or Yale.”
Waugaman attended the University of Texas, Dallas. When college classes shifted online during the pandemic, he moved to Miami and finished classes from here.
A few months after graduating from the University of Texas in May 2021, he delved into real estate to stay in South Florida. He now helps UM students who are in the position he was in roughly four years ago.
“College students are at the bottom of the barrel. No one really wants to rent to a college student, especially if they have a newly renovated place,” he said. “And then a college student’s budget is not the best.”
It’s most challenging for out-of-staters who don’t know the neighborhoods.
“Coral Gables is an expensive area,” he said. “Everyone is like, ‘Oh, I want to be near the University of Miami.’ I’m like, ‘Is your budget at least $2,000? Because you’re looking at a $6,000 home there.’ ”
Nowadays, he directs most of his clients to Brickell, where he has found more available housing and students can take the Metrorail to campus.
He advises applicants to offer a few hundred more than the asking price, sometimes an extra $500, to increase the chances of getting an apartment. Some students also team up. To make a three-bedroom house semi-affordable, six students might join to pay the bills, he said.
Sobaram said UM offers an online page that lists apartment complexes nearby to help students and their families find housing. This spring, the university also offered fairs with real estate agents.
Tsagaroulis, the student who commuted from her parents’ Pembroke Pines home last semester, considered transferring schools. Ultimately she didn’t, she said, because she loved what she learned during her first semester, had secured an off-campus apartment near campus for the fall, and has only a year and a half left, as she’s a junior credit-wise. She’s majoring in education and human development.
Tsagaroulis worried about how she’ll pay rent for the Red Road Commons apartment in South Miami. She’ll live with a roommate; each will pay $1,800. Her parents will chip in, but she saved as much as possible this summer from working every day as a swim instructor at the YMCA.
And she’s grateful her commute is gone.
“Now that I’m going to be closer, I feel like I’ll get to meet new friends,” she said. “I’m excited to make connections and attend events.”
UM facts
Founded: April 1925
Number of students: About 19,000 undergraduate, graduate
Number of beds on campus: About 4,400
On-campus housing wait list as of Aug. 16: 0, down from 1,577 in February, 600 in July
Cost of undergraduate tuition for the 2022-23 academic year: $55,440
Total cost of attendance if living on campus, according to UM: $78,640
Total cost of attendance if living off campus, according to UM: $83,260
Price range for housing on campus: $9,080 - $23,300 per year
Percentage of students who lived on campus for the 2021-22 academic year: 27%
This story was originally published August 17, 2022 at 4:30 AM.
