Housing

Like many students, I struggled to find housing for this year. I searched day and night on Facebook groups, Craigslist and Cal Rentals. After a solid month of scrambling to find a place to live, I finally signed my lease for a co-living house. 

Tenants in the cities of Berkeley and Oakland have struggled to afford housing as a result of high-security deposits that present a high initial barrier to renting. 

Like so many others, the course of my freshman year was filled with an undercurrent of housing anxiety. Where would I go after the dorms? What if I couldn’t find a place? At the suggestion of a Berkeley alum, I decided to open up the Berkeley Student Coop website and send in my application.

We cannot allow local homeowners to block developments due to unrelated concerns, when we must prioritize student accessibility to housing, transit and their campus above all.

Housing is a human right. Measures M and N both take steps to ameliorate Berkeley’s critical housing crisis.

Measure L needs the support of two-thirds of voters in the November general election to pass. It is time to invest in Berkeley. We must not delay.

As progressive groups and individuals on campus, we believe advancing the interests of marginalized people requires the use of all tactics available to us, and participating in the electoral process is a crucial one, despite its flaws.

When I tell people I live alone, I usually receive a mixed bag of reactions – anything from “that’s the dream” to “I could never live alone.”

We got our own place, sold all their furniture — 60 dollars of cash that we left lying behind the toaster. I don’t even have curtains, our neighbors can look inside. But I don’t mind, all they’d see is us gabbing at night.

Here are some of the pros and cons I’ve discovered about living in Northside in Berkeley as an undergrad student.