This Petition is about changing college students’ and teaching assistants’ living environment and affordability near Universities.

WHY IS THERE NOT ENOUGH HOUSING
First, the availability of houses beside Universities is insufficient and secondly, the value of these houses keeps going up due to close to valuable resources, students and teaching assistants have to compete for limited housing.

RENT
Students and teaching assistants have to either pay rent on average of 1500 dollars per month for an independent room, or adults in their 20s have to be stuck in a triple or even a quadruple room just so they are able to afford housing close to campus. This is a destructive environment for people’s mental health since people need their private space.

PRESSURE 
One of the key reasons rent is such a heavy burden for students and teaching assistants is because they are already under the pressure of school and doing research; some of them even have tuition loans for years. Secondly, the payments for part-time jobs students can do or teaching assistants’ jobs are low. It is low to the point that countless strikes have happened, and their payments cannot even cover their basic living expenses. With rent that they can’t cover and also cannot ask for help since they are adults, they either need to move far away from school, which increases their transportation cost, or stay in terrible conditions near schools.

SOLUTION
In this case, if the government can provide funding similar to EBT to cover a part of students’ and teaching assistants’ rent outside the campus according to their family financial situations, it can actually help more people in the academic field to focus on their areas of study. (I understand that the government has funding policies regarding people living in dorms, but people cannot always live in a dorm since it is not an ordinary and healthy way of long-term living.)