Many Michigan State University students, like junior Josie Callendar, have experienced a similar situation. She signed a lease in October 2024, but by January, she had started to reconsider. She lost her security deposit, which in East Lansing can legally be up to 1.5 times one month’s rent, and her landlord insisted she find someone to take over the lease, or else she would be obligated to pay out the year’s worth of rent. Friendship fallouts happen like this all the time, especially early on in college, but they're more cumbersome when there’s such a costly agreement attached. Maybe if students like Josie didn’t feel pressured to make such an important decision so early, they would be less likely to end up paying for a broken lease.

It’s no secret that the date when many students are asked to sign a lease for the following year is remarkably early, often eight to nine months in advance. The rental market in the greater Lansing-Ann Arbor area is among the most competitive in the country, with around nine prospective renters for every unit and 95.3% of units occupied. High demand for housing off-campus leads landlords to open leasing agreements early and fill their openings quickly. As a result, students are rushed to sign and secure their spot for the following year. 

The sheer amount of unknowns so early in one’s college career mean this decision will inevitably lead to friction between potential roommates. For example, if a student is considering transferring, they might not hear back about their acceptance decision until late spring. Or, if a student is applying to be a Resident Assistant, they won’t hear back until March. Even study abroad plans might not be confirmed until a few months prior. If your roommate might not live with you next year, you’re going to start searching for others, or else you might not get a place to stay. All of these factors up in the air make students terrified of being left without housing, which leads students to make rash decisions. Not only that, but this anxiety can seriously harm relationships between roommates and friends. 

In reality, there are many apartments that have availability in the spring, and not all students sign so early in the year. But the rushed timeline being pushed onto students puts so much undue pressure on fledgling relationships, making them feel forced to make a very important decision rashly. 

Maybe this pressure is a good kind: you become more willing to make it work and resolve conflicts with your friends because you’ll be living together. But oftentimes it can be a bad kind of pressure. The more your relationship develops, you start seeing more flaws, and you begin to panic when they annoy you because you feel trapped. Their shortcomings seem more significant because you made a binding, year-long agreement to live with them.

I have personal experience with this. My roommate and I were very close but went through a bit of a rough patch in the fall of 2025, in our third semester living together. It wasn’t a friendship-ending disagreement, but out of fear that maybe it wouldn’t resolve completely, we chose not to live together the following year. Even though we later worked out our conflicts, that pressure to make such a premature decision ended up harming our relationship, in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It was neither of our faults, just an unfortunate symptom of a hectic rental market. If there wasn’t such a rush nor the fear of having to break a lease later on, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

If students didn’t feel like they had to sign a lease so early on in the fall, not only would they be less likely to end up in difficult lease-breaking situations, but their friendships wouldn’t be hurt in the process. Evidently, landlords are reluctant to change their practices. In 2021, East Lansing passed an ordinance to prohibit landlords from showing their rentals before 150 days into the current lease. Landlords pushed back strongly against this provision, one of their main arguments being that it would merely compress the rush into a shorter period of time. It’s not hard to imagine a springtime rental-search frenzy, with students lining up outside of leasing offices and websites crashing due to overwhelming traffic spikes. But the ordinance, while passed, was rescinded because nearby local governments didn’t pass similar measures. 

On the one hand, if students realized that this rush is partially exaggerated, and usually only applies to the few highest-demand apartments, this issue might be significantly improved. On the other hand, landlords' practice of pushing renters into making hasty decisions is predatory. Not only does it grant landlords the security of contracted tenants, but if students break their lease, the landlords get paid, and afterwards have no issue filling their spot due to the sheer amount of prospective tenants.  Landlords are heavily incentivized to force renters to sign early, because security deposits and high demand make it so they'll profit either way. But this pressure to commit prematurely is damaging to students and their relationships.

The city of East Lansing should impose an ordinance like the one proposed five years ago, and actually follow through this time, getting nearby local governments on board. While it might compact the lease-signing frenzy, the rush will take place when students know their friends better, and are more likely to make responsible rental decisions they will stick to.

Isabella Cucchetti is a sophomore studying Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy and is a columnist at The State News. The views in this article are her own and independent of The State News.