Housing

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With Barnard already sending out housing applications, students are starting to think about their living options for the upcoming semester. If you’re considering moving off campus next spring, then you’re better off starting your apartment search as early as possible, as apartment hunting in New York is notoriously difficult.

Community Board 9 members Marti Cummings and Dan Cohen have emerged as early frontrunners in a competitive West Harlem City Council race. In a post-pandemic city, council members will face unprecedented challenges—including a $9 billion revenue shortfall—making their role, which includes negotiating the city’s budget, a crucial one.

Last semester, the crisis unleashed by the pandemic underscored how Columbia not only serves the role of educational institution and employer for its students and workers, but also functions as a landlord for over 10,000 Columbia affiliates—with all of the forms of power over students' and employees' lives that this status implies. Columbia frames its position within the New York real estate market as beneficial for the project of higher education, but in reality, it has subjected students and faculty to a particularly brutal form of landlordism while having extremely destructive consequences for the working-class communities that surround the University. Now more than ever, Columbia’s role as a landlord-University must be challenged through an interconnected fight for housing justice, one that would unite both student-tenants and community members behind a vision of accessible and affordable housing for students, workers, and longstanding residents alike.

Columbia needs to address the housing affordability crisis facing Morningside Heights and West Harlem, and it has the ability to do so. In May 2016, a group of neighborhood activists founded the Morningside Heights Community Coalition in response to the uncontrolled development of luxury housing. We have held well-attended workshops and conducted surveys of residents that have confirmed the desperate need of our neighbors for retaining and expanding affordable housing. Our September 2020 survey revealed that affordable housing is one of the top concerns of our community members.

Barnard and Columbia announced a full move to online learning for all undergraduate classes and most graduate classes Friday afternoon.

With U.S. unemployment rates at a record high in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, rising market rates in a low-supply market will place low-income West Harlem tenants at heightened risk of eviction and virus contraction, according to housing experts.

Tamara Hache was supposed to spend her summer researching 19th-century literature in Argentina. The third-year Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Iberian cultures had secured a research grant and planned on subletting her Columbia-owned apartment, hopping on a plane to her hometown of Buenos Aires, and working on her dissertation while spending time with friends and family.

Grace Bertelli, CC ’21, found herself scrambling for housing options on Sunday morning when she learned she had to vacate her dorm. Members of her family are immunocompromised, so going home could risk exposing them to COVID-19 and endangering their lives.