The Housing Amenities Students Want This Year

It’s impossible to provide everything students want out of a housing unit.

The dreamy wish list is long: jacuzzi, free laundry service, room cleaning. Though of course, many of these demands are illusions conjured up since childhood of our ideal home. Maybe a water slide that starts at our apartment window and leads all the way down to the pool below!

And then there are the more practical amenities students look for, that would serve to improve our living area, and our happiness there.

The following is a list of amenities students are looking for from their housing units. While every housing site probably cannot provide all of these services, providing any one or two of them would make your housing a better place for students to live.

Laundry machines that work

Sure, most apartment buildings and housing units provide washing machines and dryers for their residents (and we do thank you for this). But all too often those machines are expensive, unreliable, and unavailable. With only one or two machines for an entire housing complex, it is a difficult affair finding a time when they are not in use. This is especially true when one of them breaks down and stays “Out of Service” for weeks.

Image via Farmhorizons.com

Your residents are looking for machines that will work and be available when they need them to, not a whole lot to ask. If you are looking to make residents even happier, find a way to subsidize the cost of laundry. Two dollars per load per machine may not seem like much, but it adds up if a student wants to separate their laundry into multiple loads.

Parking

Street parking near university campuses is often hard to come by — and when it can be found, there are meters or other time constraints forcing students to move their car from spot to spot every few hours. By offering parking spots to your residents, you allow drivers peace-of-mind knowing they have a guaranteed place to keep their vehicle.

Image via Grist.org

And of course, parking free of charge is always a plus! Perhaps instead of charging residents monthly for a parking spot, you could assign them odd jobs around the housing unit for a certain number of hours per month. Speaking as a student, I would gladly clean stairwells, take out trash, etc. for free parking.

Bike racks

For those residents who do not drive, bikes are a great alternative. But then, we need a place to store them. We don’t want to have to carry our bikes up the stairs and store them in our apartments, but we also don’t want to leave them chained up down the street where they could be stolen or damaged.

Your bicycling residents are looking for racks to lock their bikes up within the gated housing complex.

Image via Reddit.com

Wi-Fi

By now, 2016, nearly every college student in the country survives off the Internet. We carry our laptops everywhere, submit assignments online, and use search engines and online books for research. Without Wi-Fi, our schoolwork is pretty much put on hold. So having Wi-Fi in our homes is invaluable, it allows us to complete assignments at our leisure, from the comfort of our apartment, without running out to the library or nearby coffee shops for Internet access.

Image via Blogspot.com

Now most of us do have our own Wi-Fi for our apartments, because we set it up and pay for it month to month on our own. But Wi-Fi is no longer a luxury amenity for most American college students — it has become a necessity of our schooling. Providing Wi-Fi for all of your residents will save them the hassle of setting it up and move your housing unit forward in the Internet age.

We know housing sites cannot provide all of these amenities, and we don’t expect them to, but these are the ways housing could be improved for students this year.