This week, the College Park City Council began discussing a clarification to its rent control policy that gives landlords and skeptics yet another argument that the policy will do little to reduce what students pay to live in the city.
Rents in College Park are already astronomically high; the council cited this as one of its reasons for creating rent caps. But the amendment proposed for the policy makes it clear the clock is not turning back and rents will not fall. The most the city can do is freeze rents at their peak and wait for creeping property values to start driving them up again.
In the months leading up to the vote on rent control, the council was engaged in a struggle with landlords about who would have student support. The council’s deliberate exemption of apartments from their caps bolstered the landlords’ opposition, especially as new apartment developments and renovations to old ones drive up apartment rents. With the revelation that the policy won’t actually lower the outrageous rents some landlords are charging, students should start asking what the policy will actually do for them.
At the very least, those currently living off the campus can rest knowing their rents aren’t likely to increase when leases are renewed at the summer’s end and that benefit will only be felt as long as the current crop of renters stays in the city’s neighborhoods. For students moving off the campus for the first time, or those moving from a house to an apartment, the “sticker shock” of College Park rents will remain.
Another change to the ordinance puts it through some legal gymnastics that make sure the caps clear the gray area of the Knox Boxes — townhouses that were long ago separated into three or four units apiece, leaving them somewhere between cramped houses and tiny apartment buildings. The difficulty in exempting apartments such as University View, Berkley Apartments and Berwyn House Apartments, while capping the “triplexes” and “quadraplexes” along Knox and Guilford Roads, lends strength to the landlord’s argument that the council is interested only in pushing students out of single-family homes and into the expensive apartment complexes. If the council truly wanted to get the students to accept their rent control plan, it should have tried to reduce rents to reasonable levels instead of merely creating a stutter in its inexorable upward climb.