Rutgers One Coalition holds town hall to address housing issues in New Brunswick

The Rutgers One Coalition (R1 Coalition) held a town hall meeting Wednesday night to discuss housing issues and costs with local New Brunswick residents, University students, faculty and alums.

Approximately 60 people gathered at the College Avenue Community Church at 100 College Avenue to voice their grievances regarding housing conditions and the costs of on and off-campus housing, as well as to learn about who can be held accountable for these issues.

Organizers of the event included members of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT), New Labor Coalition and members of the R1 Coalition.

Todd Wolfson, an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies and vice president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said the town hall is part of an ongoing effort by the union over the past several years to get more involved in community and undergraduate student issues.

Some key issues participants raised during the event included high rent, bug infestations and lack of heat.

Sebastian Leon, an assistant professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Criminal Justice and a member of the executive council at Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said an event like the town hall improves community building and is crucial for uniting different impacted groups.

"Part of today is to (try to) connect student housing with community and residential housing," he said. "It’s a way of bridging the student community with the less transient community that has lived here and will continue to live here."

Andon Bury-Longino, a School of Arts and Sciences sophomore, has experienced his own housing issues living on campus and said he heard about the town hall through a friend involved with organizing the event.

He said he thought attending the event was essential to learn more about the issue and see what others have gone through. Bury-Longino said he had faced issues while living on campus with maintenance and upkeep that never seemed to be addressed.

"On Busch campus, when I was there last year, there was always a bathroom issue with plumbing or the showers, holes in the ceiling leaking," he said. "And then here (the College Avenue campus) we had an issue with the urinals bed overflowing."

Leaders at the town hall called for Rutgers to cap its housing costs for on-campus housing in order for the landlords and the city of New Brunswick to lower their rent prices to compete.

They hope to get signatures from community members and present a list of demands to the University's Board of Governors at their next meeting later this month.

Some critical demands the R1 Coalition hopes to achieve are freezing housing costs, creating debt forgiveness programs for Rutgers students, investing in more affordable housing and addressing poor living conditions in and around Rutgers University—New Brunswick.

Annika Ault, a School of Arts and Sciences first-year and member of the R1 Coalition, said she lives at the Honors College on the College Avenue campus and had not experienced any of the housing issues expressed that night.

"(The Honors College’s newness is) an equity issue of having hundreds of students, who fit certain demographics more than other students do, being the only (ones) to have access to livable dorms," she said.

Leon said the increase in luxury housing in New Brunswick has exasperated the housing crisis and shrunk middle-class housing options.

He said it creates a situation where the New Brunswick community is forced to decide between absurdly high costs in these self-purported luxury buildings or living in terrible conditions.

Wolfson said appealing to the Rutgers administration for the reform measures has a significant impact in New Brunswick more so than Camden and Newark since the University owns so much of New Brunswick’s housing real estate.

"Rutgers in their vision of luxury housing, will have a gentrifying effect, in that it will push out long-term residents that are largely low wage and largely people of color," he said.