The bathroom Brian Des Roches ’25 shares with his neighbor is covered in black mold. The shower is crammed under a staircase, making it difficult to stand up while using it. On multiple occasions, the toilet has stopped working and the bathtub has filled with sewage.
Des Roches is going on two years in his off-campus apartment. While he noticed many problems early on, he was often hesitant to make a fuss.
“In my first year, living off campus was like, ‘oh well, I’m just lucky to have somewhere to live,’” Des Roches said.
Des Roches’ story is not uncommon. Across Williamsburg, many College of William and Mary students live in poor, dysfunctional and sometimes uninhabitable rental properties. These students often put up with negative conditions as they see no other options.
Beyond the bathroom, Des Roches’ apartment has no air conditioning and only a small, ineffective radiator. His front door is broken and lets in bugs. There is also a mystery sludge under the floor.
“In between whatever the real floor is and the laminate, there’s sludge kind of,” Des Roches said. “I can kind of peek into it because where it doesn’t quite meet the wall, there’s this really thin layer of grime and dead bugs. But when it gets wet, it leaks.”
Gregory Klingensmith ’26 similarly recalls moving into a dirty house filled with fleas, ants and rats.
“I just had to be on the lookout all the time,” Klingensmith said. “I placed traps in different places. I remember there was one morning where I woke up around like five and walked into the kitchen, and a rat up here jumped and almost landed on me.”
Conditions for Klingensmith and his roommates got so bad they decided to move out just a few months after their lease began.
“We started the moving process once some of the parents came and they were like, ‘yeah, we’re not letting our kids live here,’” Klingensmith said. “My one friend’s mom is an attorney and she was like, ‘yeah, this is illegal.’”
Rats are a common occurrence, especially in the older houses near campus. One student who wished to remain anonymous explained that none of their roommates go to the first floor at night out of fear of the rats.
“Food has been eaten and like, nibbled on,” they said. “There’s been rat droppings all over our bathroom. You can hear them scurrying through our ceilings and walls.”
Elizabeth Fretz ’23 remembers rats being one of many problems with the house she rented as a student. She had to invest much of her own money into buying rat traps, installing curtains and figuring out alternatives to their broken heating system.
It took six weeks for Fretz and her roommates to get their landlord to send someone to fix the heating, and she will always remember her interaction with the electrician.
“He goes, ‘did you know that there was just a live wire underneath your house, like running the length of the kitchen, not connected to anything?’” Fretz said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, you mean a live electrical wire underneath our wooden floorboards of our very old house? That’s super cool. I love that.’”
Before living in the house, Fretz knew it had problems such as warped floorboards, rotted porches and a general lack of maintenance. Still, she decided to move in because the property had been passed down through her sorority.
“I think because it was like a house that had been passed down, I was kind of willing to overlook all of that just for the sense of community that I would have living there,” Fretz said. “But definitely looking back, I should have taken a closer look at that.”
Fretz and Klingensmith both found their previous houses from their Greek life organizations and cited community as one reason for moving in. Like many other students, Klingensmith also identified location as a primary concern.
“I don’t have a car, so I wanted to be somewhere close to campus, but kind of have my own crib not being like a dorm or something like that,” Klingensmith said.
One of the biggest factors contributing to students’ housing decisions is a lack of options.
The anonymous student said that she was aware the house she was moving into had problems with rats, cockroaches and heating. They decided to go forward with it anyways, as she couldn’t keep paying for transportation from an apartment far from campus.
“There was no other option,” they said. “Like genuinely, I got put on the waitlist for the on-campus housing, and it was basically presented to me that as a rising senior, my options were just like, I couldn’t do that.”
The College is currently undergoing a 10-year comprehensive plan to renovate dining and residence halls. As a result, there are fewer beds available for upperclassmen students. In 2023, 548 students were placed on a waitlist for on-campus housing.
Long waitlists have forced students to seek rentals off-campus. Williamsburg City Councilmember Caleb Rogers ’20 recalls the desperation students felt after being waitlisted.
“I remember students knocking on my door because I lived on Richmond Road at that time, just assuming it might be a student rental and asking if we had any available rooms that next year,” Rogers said. “So that drove students to a level of desperation of literally door knocking for housing.”
Director of Housing and Residence Life Harriet Kandell emphasized that all students have gotten off the waitlist in recent years.
“The past 3 years Residence Life has managed a waitlist of 500-600,” Kandell wrote in an email to The Flat Hat. “Each year we have been able to offer housing to all who remained on the wait list by late July.”
However, the precarity of the waitlist means that many students are too scared to wait until July to secure housing.
“Yeah maybe everyone on the waitlist does get off,” Bella Hammond ’26 said. “But that’s probably because the majority of the waitlist has to go find off-campus housing as they’re not secured on-campus housing until very, very close to the start of the year sometimes.”
Student Assembly Secretary of University Policy and Student Rights Hannah Cawley ’25 views the last-minute scramble for off-campus housing as contributing to students living in poor conditions.
“School housing comes out much later than when you would need to work on getting a house lease or work on going to Midtown,” Cawley said. “So people were stuck in a really bad situation at that time. It led a lot of people to take apartments or offers on houses that looked sketchy and were infested with rodents or were just gross.”
Des Roches faced difficulties finding an apartment after being told that there wouldn’t be housing available on-campus.
“You’re kind of lucky to get anything,” Des Roches said. “Because of that, people are so thankful that they kind of let landlords walk over them.”
Beyond school policy and resources, Rogers and many others feel that Williamsburg does not have enough housing to meet student and community needs.
“There’s just an ever-present demand, but it’s growing,” Rogers said. “One, because Williamsburg doesn’t have a ton of room, but two, people are always wary in any community about any more housing. That’s a difficult position to be in where it’s hard to build here.”
The City of Williamsburg does not allow more than three unrelated people to live together, except in certain cases. However, feeling they have no other options, many students break that rule and live with “ghost tenants.”
“I’ve definitely heard just a lot about packing into houses illegally and having ghosts on the lease, and then that leads to a lot of issues of overcrowding,” Cawley said. “That makes students afraid to contact a landlord if they have issues.”
In many cases, illicit overcrowding is a move of desperation.
“The sewage is just going out in homes or like, toilets are not working and so people have to go across the street or come to academic buildings to use the bathroom, which is quite literally insane,” Cawley said. “And I know in the house that I lived in like previous years, they had taken in frat guys who were illegal on their lease when the water stopped working there.”
In 2021, the Current Midtown Apartments opened and were expected to ameliorate some of the city’s problems by offering additional housing for 650 students and young professionals. However, this development is far from a perfect solution.
When Hammond moved into Midtown in August, she found the apartment to be “filthy” and noticed water damage. Her air conditioning was also broken and didn’t get fixed for two months, despite constant requests to management.
“That’s not what they advertise,” Hammond said. “They advertise this new place because it was built not that long ago. So it’s marketed as, ‘Oh look, this brand new nice apartment complex.’ Anywhere you have to be okay with a level of there’s going to be stuff that isn’t perfect, but I think it’s very telling how they respond to it.”
Current Midtown Apartments did not respond to a request for comment.
Hammond believes Midtown’s hands-off management is partly related to the fact that many tenants are students and that there will always be a demand for housing. Across Williamsburg, these factors have impacted landlord-tenant relationships.
During his own student years, Rogers remembers dealing with an absentee landlord who would take a long time to respond when the door, dryer or washer broke down.
“Our experience was not one where the landlord was incredibly responsive, and I think the house was more treated like a cash cow,” Rogers said.
Some property owners are more guided by profit than supporting tenants. Cawley pointed out how a few landlords own a lot of properties in Williamsburg. She also recalled one trying to get her to pay more than the advertised rent in what felt like an auction.
“He was like, ‘Okay, how much more are you willing to pay a month?’” Cawley said. “He was like ‘$25 each more? $50 more? $75 more?’ And that puts students in a really bad place, in my opinion.”
Especially given extra charges like a concierge fee and an ambiguous ‘residential benefits’ package, Des Roches reflected on the disparity that often arises between the money demanded for rent and the service provided.
“I feel like they’re trying to extract every ounce of profit for me with as little effort,” Des Roches said.
Landlords are able to charge so much because of the high-demand housing market in Williamsburg, in which there is no shortage of students looking for a roof to keep over their heads.
“The demand is so high that landlords recognize rent can always go up,” Rogers said. “There always will be more students. Those students might always be willing to pay more.”
Being a full-time college student presents unique challenges when navigating landlord-tenant relationships. According to Hammond, it is especially challenging for young, busy students to find the time to know their rights and advocate for themselves.
“[Landlords] don’t really care because they know we’re students who are focused on other things or just don’t know a lot about renting and all that kind of stuff,” Hammond said. “It’s very unfortunate that they can take advantage because they know that.”
The financial limitations of paying for college also leave students at a disadvantage, sometimes requiring them to add ghost tenants as a means of shouldering high rents. Klingensmith described one such situation.
“There’s nothing we really could have done,” Klingensmith said. “If we wanted to say something, it was at that standstill where it was like, ‘Oh, well, you did this,’ but ‘Oh, well, you guys had seven people in here.’ And it’s like, how else do you expect to pay for $5,500? For three people?”
Fretz is currently in law school in Boston and has noticed a difference between the treatment of tenants there versus in Williamsburg. She believes that in Boston, it is more common to withhold rent or take a landlord to court in response to poor housing conditions.
“There are just a lot more protections for tenants that exist in Boston, like if our landlord here tried to ignore me the way that my landlord in Williamsburg did, that would be totally unacceptable,” Fretz said.
All the challenges of being a student renter make it hard when individuals want to do something about their poor conditions. When possible, students rely on their parents to advocate on their behalf. Klingensmith, Fretz and Hammond all had their roommates’ parents, who were lawyers, contact their landlords.
“They just started ignoring me,” Fretz said. “So then I had to get my mom to start reaching out on my behalf because they would respond to my mom. Eventually they got sick of responding to my mom, so I had to enlist the help of my roommate. My first year living there, my roommate’s dad was a lawyer, and so he started having to reach out on our behalf because he was scary I guess. I don’t know. And eventually they stopped listening to him, too.”
The ability to rely on parents, particularly those who are attorneys, is a privilege that not all students share. Cawley identified how living off-campus is inaccessible for many first-generation, low-income students or those whose parents aren’t able to provide financial support.
“My roommate that lived with me for all four years and I — my parents didn’t go to college and her parents didn’t go to college in the United States,” Cawley said. “So we would call them and be like, ‘Can you look at this lease or something?’ But it was very difficult because they didn’t really know what they were looking at. And so the advice there was minimal at best, and that was really frustrating for both of us.”
Despite this, the order in which students get off the on-campus housing waitlist is randomized. Cawley reflected on how no priority is given to students who would have a harder time attaining and navigating on-campus housing.
“I know students who came to our department to talk about the fact that they didn’t have a car, maybe they had mobility issues and they knew people who were getting off the on-campus housing waitlist who probably didn’t need to be living on-campus,” Cawley said. “I just think there was a lot of steps the school could have taken in order to mitigate how much of a catastrophe it was that just didn’t happen.”
To support student renters, the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs and the Student Transition Engagement Program have hosted off-campus housing fairs. Student Assembly also sponsored an off-campus student housing panel.
Neither Fretz nor Klingensmith were aware of these, and Cawley was frustrated by how many of the properties represented at such events are not accessible for students without cars.
STEP’s website reminds students to consider budgeting, renter’s insurance, safety and transportation, as well as links to a webpage powered by Apartments.com containing property listings that reach as high as $2,500 a month.
The webpage holds a disclaimer that the College does not “screen, investigate, endorse, or approve the landlords, their business practices, or the rental properties” nor hold any responsibility or obligation to “resolve problems and disputes of any nature.”
Associate Vice President for Campus Living and Director of Residence Life Maggie Evans maintains that the City of Williamsburg is responsible for rental housing issues.
“W&M has no authority over off-campus housing or landlords. The City of Williamsburg does provide a variety of resources for students,” Evans wrote in an email to The Flat Hat.
Resources provided by the city include the Student Resources page located on its website, which provides additional links to a variety of support services for student renters, such as how to report issues or violations, parking regulations and a link to Who’s Your Landlord.
Likewise, Rogers encouraged students to reach out to the city’s Code Compliance Department for issues like mold and rodent infestations.
“If they’re not receiving what is owed to them, which is a very quick response from the landlord about what the permanent solution will be to that, then they should reach out to the city,” Rogers said.
Rogers acknowledged that depending on the intensity of the problem, there may be a need for emergency housing while it is being resolved, as well as a removal of housing from the market after the fact.
“The city can remove that landlord’s opportunity to rent out the house, which while it may hurt the students at the moment, it protects the students the next year who aren’t going to live in that same awful situation,” Rogers said.
Despite this, many students are not aware of these resources.
In response to demand for more action by the city, Rogers said a new “rent ready” initiative is expected to be rolled out by the beginning of next year. The program would allow landlords to add a fourth legal tenant to a lease in exchange for being more communicative and careful with renters.
“This idea of ‘rent ready’ would be for students, an opportunity to utilize the bedrooms in the house per the number that there may be, and for the city to have landlords, especially those that don’t live here and for whatever means have acquired or inherited houses here that they just rent out but they don’t pay much mind to, it would give them more onus to really care about the sightliness of that house, the quality of their tenants, through their ‘rent ready’ categorization or certification,” Rogers said.
As for the College, Fretz echoed the sentiments of many students, expressing her desire for more action from the administration. She claims the College cannot exempt itself from responsibility when it has intentionally chosen to admit more students than it can house.
“I want more people to come to William and Mary, but also we’ve got to figure out a way to house all these people,” Fretz said. “It shouldn’t be the burden of the students who are 19, 20, 21 years old, who are trying to get their life together, to have to figure all this out on their own.”
By the end of 2032, the College’s comprehensive renovation plan will have added zero additional beds to campus, despite steadily increasing enrollment over the past four years. This decision was guided by research from an outside consultant group.
“Based on that research their recommendation was to renovate or replace current inventory but not to expand,” Kandell wrote. “No need for new beds was identified. The perception that we don’t have enough beds is a result of temporary reductions in space due to closures for renovations/replacement.”
Even with recent concerns about waitlists and on-campus housing, students facing off-campus issues is nothing new. Both Fretz and Rogers had problems with their landlords before renovation plans were even announced.
The anonymous student mentioned specific ways the school could better help, such as offering more targeted and logistical assistance vis-a-vis how to search for housing.
“I do think that it needs to be a better conversation of who to talk to, who to physically ask, where to go, because when you live on campus, you can’t have a car, so how are you supposed to get to these showings of houses? How are you supposed to get around to these locations? You need transportation from an upperclassman. Sure, the bus exists, but not always to places that you’re going to be renting to,” they said.
Klingensmith suggested adding a ‘rental readiness’ section to the College Studies online module which students are required to take before matriculating as freshmen.
“There was never a time in high school where we talked about paying rent or being on a lease. Even in college, there’s no training courses or stuff like that,” Klingensmith said.
Ultimately, Rogers hopes students know that when off-campus houses are unlivable, it is not the fault of the tenants, but of the landlords. He encourages them to seek support from the city, emphasizing that they belong here as much as everyone else.
“The only thing I’d say, and I’ve always thought, is I hope students in the neighborhoods consider themselves full residents just as their neighbors are.”
