The Future of Jorvik

From Politiurgist

basoloo dronzelre

Due to the insanity of the Ann Arbor student rental market, the time to renew our lease is coming up. This would be for the Summer 2006 - Winter 2007 period! That doesn't mean we'll definitely lose the house if we don't, but Madison says we can expect them to start showing the house in October, and the chances of someone signing for it will increase as time goes on. It also means that if there's no chance of keeping at least part of the house, we should make that clear now so that those of us who are staying in town have lots of time to find someplace else to live.

Here are the positions of the various residents:

• Andra: Cara says Andra wants to live with / near her if possible

• Bober: don't know

• Bolly: definitely moving out (and soon)

• Cara & Murph: Planning to get a house somewhere, but could also decide to stay another year while Cara finishes school. No certainty. If they do stay, Cara wants another room.

• Elizabeth: Might stay through next summer, but hopes to have found a job by then, at which point she will be moving away. In any case, not interested in staying past next summer.

• Michael: Definitely wants to say here.

• Richard: Should have candidacy next year and might want to move into seclusion for working on his dissertation. Also might stay.

• Rob: Might want to move to his own place next year, but also might stay.

Richard and Rob both commented that they wanted their own places, but if they were going to live in a group, this is the best group they could imagine.

It looks to me (MC) like we have a pretty difficult situation here. Lots of "maybe"s and few firm decisions. One solution might be to start recruiting new members until we're able to sign for half the house, and see if we can use that as a bargaining chip to get a deferral from MPC on signing for the rest of the house. We could probably get a similar concession by signing just for next summer.

Here are the leasing options:

• Lease all or part of the house. The part of the house we take could have 2, 3, 4, or 5 rooms.

• Lease for next summer now, and fall later or not at all

• Don't lease; give it up

And here, options for recruiting new people if we have spaces left to fill:

• brand-new Craigslist Ann Arbor
• suck more of our old co-op pals
• advertise in our departments
• ...?

Murph: Unless we've heard from MPC that they want us to start thinking about signing, I think we've got some time. I expect no reason for alarm until October or November (nor do I plan to spend any time seriously considering my location past next May until about that time). I assume that F. will contact us to ask whether we want to stay before trying to advertise to anybody else; if he can fill 8 bedrooms with existing tenants, it means a lot less effort on his part than advertising, showing, paperwork, cleaning, transitions, blah blah blah. (We have, of course, already seen evidence that MPC is not the most rationally run place in the world...) I would personally prefer to let him come to us to ask whether we plan to stay, so that we can say, "Well, we don't know quite yet; when do you need an answer?" rather than going to him and saying, "Hey, we really want to stay; let us sign before anybody else looks at it!" One of those two approaches says, "Hey, you can raise our rent by at least inflation, because we're eager to sign!" The other says, "How much is it worth to you to not have the overhead of finding new tenants, especially considering a 7%-12% vacancy rate?" (MPC's website currently lists several properties as "Availability: Immediate." and 8 or 10 with "Availability: September." They're not hurting for places to show people.)