Moving out

Weinberg second-year Wes Spivak had just started his second quarter of freshman year when he realized he was behind in a process he didn’t even realize had started: the search for off–campus housing. Upperclassmen friends had told him to start thinking about signing leases, but reality hit when his friends started making housing groups and touring properties more than 18 months in advance. 

Spivak jumped into action, but the process of finding a junior-year house proved overwhelming. He signed a lease in February, but is still dealing with leftover challenges.

“Locking in living with people who you have only known for five months was a little bit tough,” he says.

Spivak is not alone. Many Northwestern freshmen are already worried about where they’re going to live as upperclassmen. They never expected to be touring houses, negotiating with realtors or signing a lease during their first year at Northwestern, and many say the process can become stressful and intimidating.  

Leaving the dorms

Northwestern requires students to live on-campus for their freshman and sophomore years. The two year live-in requirement began in 2017 in an effort to increase the number of students lodging on campus. 

While upperclassmen technically have the option to live in on-campus residences, many of them choose to rent a house or apartment so they can save money, live with friends and explore life outside the University. Spivak says he never considered staying in the dorms for his junior or senior years because “everyone else” took the off-campus route.  

According to Northwestern data, 55% of undergraduates lived on-campus during the 2022-23 school year, leaving just under half of the school living in the greater Evanston area. Paul Harb, a longtime real estate agent in Evanston, says Northwestern students who want to lease a home make up 50% to 60% of his clients. 

One reason many undergraduates choose to find their own housing is the cost-savings. Northwestern’s undergraduate financial aid page says standard on-campus room and board, including a meal plan, costs around $21,126 a year — though this can change based on the dorms and in some cases, variations in meal plans. Harb says off-campus housing prices vary greatly, from $800 to $1,700 a month for a room in a shared house or around $3,000 for a studio apartment in a higher-end building.

An accelerated timeline

While the price of off-campus housing may vary across homes and apartments, the process is often fast-paced. Although the exact timeline of the off-campus housing search shifts each year, recently, students who want to live in houses try to sign their leases before the end of their first year. 

Jackie Mack, an Evanston-based real estate agent who has been with Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty for the past 25 years, says students should start the process prepared: ready to sign a lease, have parents on board and even be able to put a deposit down. 

“[Students] really have to be thinking ahead when they look for rentals because things go quickly,” Mack says. “The landlords like to rent them up early, before the next September school year.”  

Medill fourth-year Emma Siskind says she didn’t start looking for an off-campus house until Spring Quarter of her freshman year. She was over a year out from actually living off-campus, but her process still started later than Spivak’s. 

Siskind says she faced difficulties in the off-campus housing process, from finding the right rent price to making sure she liked the location and having enough room for her whole group. However, she says the process seems to be more stressful now than it was when she was a freshman. 

“I would consider myself, generally, a calm person, but with everyone worried about it, it definitely made me a lot more stressed out,” Weinberg second-year Maya Helmrich, who recently went through this process, says. “It seemed like a competition because everyone was competing for the same houses in the same area.”

The pressure to start the process so early seems to have trickled down from year to year, picking up pace as older students pass down their experiences to younger ones. Helmrich and Spivak say they were both prompted by older students to start looking into off-campus housing early.

“I think there’s a little bit of a group effect, so people hear from their friends they booked housing, and then that kind of spreads around,” says David Giljohann, (Weinberg ‘23), who now owns Londominium Properties. “It creates a little bit of a frenzy around everybody feeling like they’re behind if they don’t reserve housing right away while they’re freshmen.”

Landlord troubles

Students who worry they’ll lose out on their ideal home say they feel pressure to sign leases quickly, though it might be their first time negotiating contracts. Helmrich spent time with her father reviewing the lease because she had never gone through a process like this before, and she wanted to know what she was getting into. 

Giljohann pursued student real estate because of situations like the ones Helmrich worried about. He says he saw many students stressed out and seeking help in finding an off-campus house when he was an advisor for one of the fraternities on campus, Delta Tau Delta.

“I was handling a lot of issues the Delts were having with off-campus landlords who were taking advantage of students, not maintaining the properties correctly or creating unsafe environments for students,” Giljohaan says. “I thought I could do it a lot better, so I started buying off-campus properties, renovating them and making them nice for students.”

Giljohaan says landlords could often include unnecessary or “deceptive” fees in the leases, but students wouldn’t know any better. For example, move-in or move-out fees could cost an entire month of rent, or landlords would add hidden costs for parking or subletting.

According to Giljohaan, many of Evanston’s rental properties are in poor condition, but landlords in the area are not dedicated to fixing these issues for students. 

“Landlords would make promises about doing certain renovations or improvements or maintenance on the property, and those promises were routinely being broken,” he says.

Students, not knowing much about off-campus life and trying to deal with a tight timeline on top of legal problems, may find themselves in unfortunate situations, Giljohaan says. He has seen students willing to sign leases with unfavorable terms because there is added pressure to lock in a house before someone else does.  

It’s a pressure Spivak himself says he felt.

“You gotta act fast,” Spivak says. “If we didn’t sign the lease the day we saw that house, someone else would have signed it, and we would still be looking.” 

Not all students partake in the rat race of finding an off-campus house. Instead, some opt to live in an apartment. This means living with less roommates and having more time to look for accommodations. 

Medill third-year student Audrey Hwang lives with one other person, and says she and her roommate liked the idea of sharing a smaller place together. After touring a few complexes, Hwang says they felt most comfortable in an apartment. 

“I love how I can go upstairs, go downstairs [to other units], and there’s always people I can hang out with,” she says. “I feel like it’s like having the college experience to socialize.” 

A Northwestern perspective

Jason McKean, assistant dean of students and director of strategy and operations, says many freshmen contact him about off-campus housing and are concerned about the process.  

Northwestern aims to provide students with adequate support in their transition to off-campus living, especially with the shorter timeline. McKean’s department helps students throughout the process, correcting misconceptions, answering questions about contracts or finding the right place, and encouraging students not to rush into anything. 

Even with this help from the school, Northwestern’s student body moves quickly to figure out off-campus plans, and McKean says students feel this pressure even during the department’s programming at the start of the school year. 

This differs from other schools, like Dickinson College, Vanderbilt University or Middlebury College, where students are required to live on campus for all four years and often don’t have to worry about who they’re living with or where they will end up until the semester before they move in. 

University of Richmond first-year, Virginia Nelson, says she doesn’t expect to think about off-campus housing at all during her freshman year, based on what she has heard from upperclassmen. 

“At Richmond it’s really just like if you can find housing off campus, and you want to do that, you should,” Nelson said. “From what I’ve heard, it’s pretty relaxed.” 

Slowing down

While there may be a craze surrounding off-campus housing at Northwestern, McKean says students shouldn’t be worried.

“They can slow down a little bit and can think about what some of their other needs are,” he says. “Finding an apartment off campus is often about not just having the box into which you move, but having that box be filled with the things you feel like are most important to you.” 

McKean emphasizes the resources that Northwestern provides students. He has answered questions and helped students through difficult situations when finding somewhere to live off-campus and encourages people to reach out and go through the process thoughtfully.

“Let’s find a way to give you some more knowledge,” McKean says. “So you can slow down and actually cultivate all of the things you’re going to need to feel good about moving off campus.”

Print design by Julia Volman and photos by Cheryl Zeng.