College Trek III: The Search For Affordable Housing

"Wh... These units don't have a weight room! CURSE YOU, VON KLEIN!"

Living in college dorms is a lot like summer camp, provided that your summer camp was built in the middle of a marijuana field adjacent to a brewery and the female campers were having noisy drunken sex with everyone but you. And sure, it’s fun to spend nine months at camp (unless you don’t smoke pot or drink and women treat you like a leper) but as much as you may want to, you can’t keep going back every year without being sort of creepy.

This may sound strange to some of you who go to school in New England, where real estate is so ridiculously expensive that it’d be impossible to live off campus without running a very successful prostitution ring on the side, but here in the Northwest, real estate is plentiful and real estate is cheap. In Oregon alone, there’s 3 million people occupying a state slightly larger than Uganda, so there’s plenty of elbow room for everybody. We’ve got so much real estate, we don’t know what to do with it. I opened a box of Fruit Loops this morning and the prize was 20 acres of property outside Baker City. Not only is real estate relatively cheap, but housing at the University of Oregon is relatively abysmal. We just recently learned that my dormitory, Bean Hall, does not have a functioning sprinkler system, and the housing staff have informed us that if someone steals our fire extinguisher again, we will not be issued a replacement. This is very concerning to my mother, who considers buildings without sprinkler systems to be the eighth deadly sin, but I’m not too worried about fire because this building was constructed with three highly inflammable materials: brick, asbestos, and misery. Add to the equation the fact that certain sandwiches from our cafeteria literally bleed grease and you will understand why less than ten percent of students return to the dorms after their freshman year.

I, along with my intrepid hallmates Jeff and Josh, are only three of the thousands of rats fleeing the sinking ship of University Housing come the end of this year. Because of the remarkable demand from students who don’t want to live amid the darkness and marijuana fumes of the dorms anymore, the area around campus has rapidly developed with literally hundreds of apartment buildings of varying size, shape, and quality strewn helter skelter through a maze of alleys and side streets choked with the thousands of tons of garbage produced by the countless sororities and fraternities that surround the university like so many hedonistic Orcs around Helm’s Deep. In the search for an apartment, we’ve found that most places fall into the following categories:

1) Livable And Close: These apartments are brand new. The living space is open and modern, the exterior paint is fresh and bright, and almost no hobos have taken a dump in the garden yet. In some cases, it’s even closer to campus than the dorms. The owner knows this, and thus rent is so high that it would actually be cheaper to buy New Zealand and just go to school there.

2) Livable And Far Away: These apartments are brand new. The living space is open and modern, the exterior paint is fresh and bright, and the police have almost cleared away the dead bodies that hobo buried in the garden. What’s more, the rent is affordable, so affordable that you could sell your Dreamcast at a flea market and pay for six months plus the security deposit right then and there. There’s only one catch – the apartments are in Idaho.

3) Seemingly Livable And Close: These apartments were constructed by Native Americans shortly after they crossed the land bridge from Russia, but thanks to exterior renovations it looks like they were built during the optimistic times just after the SARS epidemic. They’re pretty close to campus, and pretty affordable too. Everything is fine until your first night in the unit, when the wall collapses and the toilet backs up. These properties are all owned by the slum lords at Von Klein Property Management LLC of Eugene, who have never once in their history returned a safety deposit and charge outlandish prices for sub par dwellings. If you’re going to the University of Oregon and you like not being screwed, don’t rent from Von Klein. For God’s sake, just look at their name! They sound like the bad guy in an Indiana Jones movie. “Von Klein, you can keep the Obsidian Crown of the Incas, just let the girl go!”

4) Not Livable And Close: “You enter the dimness of the unit, located close to campus at a very reasonable price. The moist orange carpet squishes underfoot. The elves in the party with the Nightsight feat can see brown spreading stains on the ceiling and a wide variety of bugs scurrying across the walls. Suddenly, the mold patch in the conversation pit begins to coalesce and grow upward into a humanoid figure as rats flow into the room from every nook and cranny. A Level 6 Fungus Beast now stands before you, his Level 2 Dire Rat army blocking your only exit! Roll initiative and prepare for battle!”

Truman Capps hopes that his living situation next year will be so nice that he will be unable to complain about it for any reason, but since that’s not going to happen, please do expect more blogs like this in the future.