Students looking for summer housing in East Lansing do not have to search much further than social media to find a place to live. Facebook groups are dominated by students posting advertisements for subleasing their house or apartment after spring semester ends.
These groups are often places for students to buy or sell used items, such as online garage sales or roommate searches, and are beginning to fill with summer sublease inquiries.
Matt Niven, leasing manager for The Landings at Chandler Crossings, aids people who go through the subleasing process.
Niven said while he doesn't have statistics on subleasing at Chandler Crossings, they do find there is a "pretty good" success rate regarding people who try get their apartment sublet at The Landings and that, with all of the different ways to advertise their offers, students don’t have much trouble doing so.
According to the 2010 Census, there were 15,787 housing units in East Lansing that year. The owner-occupied housing unit rate was 34.4 percent between 2011 and 2015.
Applied engineering sciences senior Alex Peterson used Facebook to promote his apartment bedroom available for sublease in Campus Village on Michigan Avenue.
“I don’t really see a point of stay on campus if I’m not working on campus or if I’m not doing anything specific with campus over the summer,” Peterson said. “If I could save some money by subleasing, I don’t see why I wouldn’t.”
Utilizing the option to sublease their apartments to save money is a commonality shared between students. Child development senior Carolyn Wilson said she does not have a job lined up in East Lansing for the summer and moving home allows her to save some money.
In previous summers, Wilson has stayed on campus to work at a preschool.
“The community atmosphere is a lot different,” Wilson said of MSU's campus during the summer.
She noticed that East Lansing in general has a lot more families around. There are a lot more festivals, Wilson said, which can be traced to the increase in family outings.
On the other end of the spectrum, some students, such as accounting junior Breann Merry, prefer to stay on campus because of how isolating it feels to not. Merry is leaving East Lansing because of an internship opportunity in San Francisco and said it would be infeasible to pay for both apartments. Still, she said she enjoys East Lansing during the summer.
“It’s honestly my favorite time to be in East Lansing,” Merry said. “To me, it’s like an abandoned little city.”
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