The idea behind the editorial “Owner strain:student gain,” (Sept. 7,1990) is that as the vacancy rate of student apartment complexes goes up, due to new units coming on stream, such as Polarbek’s proposed complex at Hillcrest and Annie Glidden, owners (including Polarbek) will strain and students will gain.

How? Vacancies are a cost along with taxes, insurance and interest payments. Owners have been “under strain” from rising vacancies and other costs for at least three years. Yet, student’s rents have not come down.

Students have more choices to what and where they rent, not cheaper rent. Short of some catastrophe triggering world-depression, so that students can’t go on paying at the going rate, I don’t think student rents are likely to come down in the future, either.

In fact, the cost of new money, not to mention additional vacancies these new complexes create, should drive student rents up soon and smartly.

The Star editorial, unlike the scenario sketched in this letter, presupposes owner panic, i.e. rounds of rent reductions as the vacancy rate goes up.

So let’s suppose these owners are panic-stricken with every million dollars they plunk down. On top of shouldering their share of the rising vacancy rate, they’ve got to deal with such things as, say, a recent sharp rise in the price of concrete. Poor owners!

Just picture it. NIU students lounging around in saunas, bouncing tennis balls on brand new courts, swimming their laps in a new Olympic-size pool after a hard day at the computer lab.

Best of all, waving rent reduction slips under their parents’ noses—slips issued to them by stressed-out panic-stricken vacancy-plagued landlords who got caught in a deteriorating DeKalb student housing market.

Possible? Sure. Likely? I don’t think so. New student apartment complexes get built when money from in or out of town spots a chance to jack-up existing student rents.

The principle at work here is not that when a new player comes to town an old player folds. This principle applies when the traffic won’t bear more. Rather, the principle is that everybody plays and prices escalate.

So new student apartment complexes are built despite a rising vacancy rate, and everybody—taxing bodies, insurance companies, bankers, developers—wins. Everybody, that is, except students. The editorial caption should have read: “Owner gain; student pain.”

E.W. Van Steenburgh

DeKalb Citizen