It’s that time of the year again: festivities happen, people come together, and joy is everywhere. No, not Christmas, but student house-hunting season. Around now, non-final year students are looking for a home for their next year in Sheffield, and if you’re in that position and haven’t yet, you really should be. I’ve joined in: foolishly having decided to move in with eight other people next year, we’ve been looking high and low for a property that meets all of our demands (within so many walks from certain buildings, with so many bathrooms, bedrooms of a certain size, and so on) and organise it across nine people. I’ve seen the other side of the coin, helping out some friends that haven’t managed to find anyone beyond their group of two, and are struggling to find student housing at a reasonable rate – with differing expectations of reasonable. While browsing through a near-endless, and yet surprisingly limited, catalogue of properties you get a wide variety of quality: from the swanky newbuild flats around Netherthorpe Road tram stop, to the much older run of converted houses in and around Crookesmoor, there should be something for everyone, at least before you look at the prices.
Students are big money: latest figures put UK university student counts at around 2 million, and each one of those needs a house – although not a house each. As such, there’s plenty of money flowing into student housing, and plenty of money to be made from students, and you would think that student housing would have improved. Many areas in Sheffield have undergone, or perhaps suffered, studentification: the process where an area becomes more tailored towards students. Studentification isn’t just to do with the physical properties, although that’s a big part, but also impacts the wider area, from what the local shops sell to local services like schools and GPs. With this process, you would’ve thought that student housing should be improving.
As one geography lecturer jokes, even the simple fact of en-suite bathrooms has improved the university halls experience massively, although that’s not something many students, including myself, have. And while you would think that student housing has improved, the absolute state of some of the properties I’ve visited would make you change your mind. Putting aside the mild filth – that’s more the tenants than the wider trend – house-hunting and viewing has taught me that still today a lot of students are expected to live in cramped, almost overcrowded, conditions. These are conditions that I think would be considered on the edge of acceptable if the tenants were families rather than students.
Still today, developers see students as tenants with lower requirements than non-students. In 2021, The Guardian reported on the University of California’s “Cube”, a windowless student housing block, with little natural light or ventilation for potential tenants. Conditions were comparable to the Industrial Revolution’s tenement blocks and back-to-back houses, I believe no such proposal would get planning permission if the tenants weren’t students. Closer to home, although a decade ago, UCL’s New Hall student housing won the Carbuncle Cup, the architectural failure award for “prison-like” conditions, again reported by The Guardian. The local authority, Islington Borough Council, did deny planning permission, a decision that was later overruled. The Planning Inspector said that the poor quality of the rooms was acceptable, as “the main use of the rooms is sleeping”, with day activities happening elsewhere at university. Personally, I find this ridiculous: are students’ homes only used for sleeping with the expectation of vacating during the day? Would it be acceptable for a family home to have no natural light, as the occupiers should be busy from 9-to-5 anyway? That sounds ridiculous: so why student housing is given a lower standard to be considered acceptable is a mystery. All part of the ‘student experience’, I’m sure.
In fairness, these halls are bad enough to have made national – or international – news, and most housing is a lot better. In the brief for this piece, I was told to talk about how student housing in Sheffield, in particular, is improving or deteriorating. The emergence of swanky new developments all across the city tell me that student housing is getting better. With increasing competition for students, standards will inevitably rise. This is good news: student housing standards fall well below that of non-student homes, so there’s no shortage of room for improvement. Although one has to be careful about just looking at the developments at face-value and making a judgement just on that. Many students live in converted terraces, and no glass-clad skyscraper is going to remove the mould off Victorian bricks.
My personal search for properties continues at speed, fully aware that the longer we leave it the less suitable properties are available, racing our fellow students to the best deal in the best location.
