|
The plain fact is that college students
<br />can almost always outbid more traditional
<br />households for an apartment or house.
<br />Even in Boston, with its red-hot real estate
<br />market, the students win. The Boston Globe
<br />Spotlight Team, the same people portrayed
<br />in the 2015 biographical crime drama film
<br />Spotlight, which won Oscars for Best Picture
<br />and Best Original Screenplay, published a
<br />"Shadow Campus" series describing the
<br />takeover of a single-family neighborhood by
<br />college students (2013).
<br />The reporters describe one house with
<br />on -file building plans showing six bedrooms,
<br />yet it had 14 people living in 12 bedrooms,
<br />including three in an illegal basement apart-
<br />ment. A Boston University senior, Binland
<br />Lee, was kilted in a fire in that house when
<br />she was trapped in her illegal attic room. A
<br />year earlier, right across the street, another
<br />student escaped a fire by jumping from an
<br />attic window, suffering permanent traumatic
<br />brain injury.
<br />Economics are the driver here: from the
<br />landlords seeking the highest revenues, to
<br />the students struggling for affordability, to
<br />the colleges that admit more students than
<br />they can or will provide housing for. This is a
<br />life -safety issue, and more will die and others
<br />will be injured, some for life, if the off -campus
<br />student housing demand is not met and the
<br />problems are not aggressively addressed, If
<br />we assist the private market in building new,
<br />clean, safe, student -adapted moderate- and
<br />high -density housing close to campus, we will
<br />go far toward protecting our young people —
<br />and our single-family neighborhoods.
<br />THE SAD STATE OF THE LAW
<br />Exacerbating —maybe it is better described
<br />as aiding and abetting —the problem is the
<br />troubling precedent in the U.S. Supreme
<br />Court, the failure to address the issues at
<br />the state level, and the utter lack of effective
<br />local regulation that would help bring order
<br />to the chaos.
<br />The U.S. Supreme Court in Village of
<br />Belle Terre v. Borass (1974) ruled for the vil-
<br />lage in a student off -campus housing case,
<br />thus validating as a matter of federal consti-
<br />tutional law a definition of family designed to
<br />keep the students out:
<br />[o]ne or more persons related by blood,
<br />adoption, or marriage, living and cooking
<br />together as a single housekeeping unit,
<br />Q _ The Greek Village near the University of South Carolina's campus in
<br />Columbia is home to 20 purpose-built fraternity and sorority houses.
<br />exclusive of household servants. A number
<br />of persons but not exceeding two (2) living
<br />and cooking together as a single house-
<br />keeping unit though not related by blood,
<br />adoption, or marriage shall be deemed to
<br />constitute a family.
<br />The Court accepted the belief that:
<br />The regimes of boarding houses, fraternity
<br />houses, and the like present urban prob-
<br />lems. More people occupy a given space;
<br />more cars rather continuously pass by; more
<br />cars are parked; noise travels with crowds.
<br />The Belle Terre decision is still good
<br />law. But it interprets the U.S. Constitution
<br />only, not the state constitutions. A half -
<br />dozen or more state courts have held similar
<br />definitions of family to be unconstitutional
<br />under their state constitutions. For example,
<br />New York courts in a series of decisions inter-
<br />preting its state constitution have essentially
<br />reversed Belle Terre.
<br />Where does Belle Terre and the law
<br />in most states leave us with regard to off -
<br />campus housing? To the extent that local
<br />zoning defines "family" or "household" in
<br />a similarly restrictive way, and most do, the
<br />result is a nation of willful violators —princi-
<br />pally, the landlords who rent to households
<br />that do not qualify under zoning to live
<br />together and the tenants, and home owners,
<br />who intentionally and in knowing violation of
<br />the law choose to live together when they are
<br />not, by definition, a legal "family" or "house-
<br />hold" (Durning 2012 and Otevri 2015). This
<br />turning a blind eye to the law can be avoided
<br />with good regulation, while at the same time
<br />protecting the so-called "family values" that
<br />are sometimes a pretext for exclusion, not
<br />the avoidance of nuisance.
<br />A `MONKEY WRENCH' INTO THE WORKS
<br />The Fair Housing Amendments Act (FHAA)
<br />protects the rights of protected classes of
<br />people —physically disabled or develop-
<br />mentally challenged, for example —to live
<br />most places where any single family might.
<br />The FHAA trumps local zoning and is used
<br />most often to permit the location of sober
<br />houses for recovering alcoholics and sub-
<br />stance abusers. About half of the federal
<br />circuits support a "rule of eight" limiting
<br />such houses to eight people. State statutes
<br />often mimic the federal law and provide their
<br />own level of protection. When considering
<br />the definition of family in the context of
<br />off -campus student housing regulation, it
<br />is essential to consider how you will handle
<br />group homes.
<br />And it is not just the FHAA. Planners
<br />need to consider the needs of other"alterna-
<br />tive household" types: extended families
<br />that share no relationship by blood, mar-
<br />riage, or adoption; cohousing; group homes
<br />ZONINGPRACTICE 8.17
<br />AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION I page 3
<br />
|