Graduate Hills apartment complex
When graduate student Sun Hye Kim enrolled in this university and prepared to move from her home in Seoul, South Korea, she found it difficult to find information about housing online.
For some international graduate students, finding affordable, quality housing is nothing short of an odyssey. Between language barriers and having to sign leases from across the globe, these students are more susceptible to scams and rip-offs. As a result, the Graduate Student Government has made easing this burden a priority for this year.
“The university doesn’t give enough information,” Kim said. “I had to rely on informal information, so it was not official information.”
She used the university’s off-campus housing websites to search for apartments near shuttle spots, but she had trouble discerning whether the vacant units she found were in good condition, reasonably priced or even habitable. So Kim looked to friends for advice and ultimately found an apartment in good condition in Silver Spring.
“We have a lot of grad students that come from China, India and other places,” GSG President David Colón-Cabrera said. “Most are unfamiliar with their rights and duties as tenants here in Maryland and sometimes have problems with landlords.”
Gaurav Khandelwal, GSG committee affairs vice president, recalls his own difficulties when he first arrived at this university. Khandelwal hails from Mumbai, India, and is familiar with some of the complaints graduate students have brought to the GSG. Some landlords, he said, will charge unreasonably high rent for international students or will present them with leases that don’t hold the landlord responsible for basic amenities such as heat and water.
Other students have complained about landlords who will mislead students into signing leases before seeing the property, said BreAnna Davis, GSG student affairs vice president. Once the students are locked into the lease, they might discover the basement, a room or the entire unit is unfit for habitation.
“A large portion of our client intake deals with Landlord Tenant issues,” attorney Stensie Sanders, director of the Graduate Student Legal Aid Office, wrote in an email. “However, it seemed as though international students were being affected more than others.”
This issue came up in a casual meeting among Colón-Cabrera, Sanders and Sonja Dietrich, the coordinator of Graduate Student Life, as they discussed pressing issues facing graduate students.
”Seeing the problems that students were having in terms of housing issues, we just decided to work on this,” Colón-Cabrera said.
Students don’t know how to look for housing, and the university doesn’t give them the tools to do so, Khandelwal said. There are safer, university-approved housing options for these students, such as Graduate Hills and Graduate Gardens, but students are not informed they are allowed to live there until a week or two before the semester begins.
“The university doesn’t recommend anything [else] to graduate students,” Khandelwal said. “You have to secure other options.”
Information is key, and Khandelwal and Davis are seeking to fill the gap with a to-do list for international graduate students. The list, composed with the help of the Graduate Student Legal Aid Office, is still in its development phase, but GSG officials intend to eventually send it out with acceptance letters.
The document will include information on tenant rights, how to search for housing, what to look for in a lease, reviews of housing options from former graduate students and more. Davis said she hopes the document will be ready in time to send out with the next batch of graduate program acceptance letters.
“[International graduate] students were basically getting offers to come to Maryland but were not exactly savvy to what it meant to be a tenant,” Davis said. “We wanted to be able to help students who were coming here to be more informed.”
The Graduate Student Legal Aid Office issues a “Top Ten Mistakes Made By Renters” list with regards to housing, which includes pitfalls such as “failing to get the landlord’s promises in writing.” The new document, Davis said, will take an active stance on housing and include more information than the current list.
Davis said she and Khandelwal are also brainstorming with the Graduate Student Legal Aid Office on ways to help international students who are in bad housing situations, such as by holding informational seminar sessions and helping students find someone with whom they can discuss their living situation.
Sanders said she sees graduate students who have housing issues, but often it is too late because he or she has already signed the lease.
“We got involved because we started seeing a lot of problems with international students and rental housing,” Sanders said. “We want to help prior to them getting involved in a binding agreement.”
