So it has finally come, the last week of the “Living In Kennesaw” series. This week is all about renting a house. If you missed any of the other articles, follow the links at the bottom of the page to see what it is all about. Living out your college years is supposed to be filled with fun, mistakes and a bunch of new adventures, and your living decisions shouldn't be anything other than that.
Renting a House: These days there are so many different companies and families to rent houses from, but certain laws in Cobb County make it nearly impossible. Last year, I decided to move into a house with two other roommates because we thought, “Why would we pay the same amount of money to live in an apartment when we could have a yard, garage, 1,200+ square feet and a space that all of us could do almost anything we wanted,” and so we were sold. We spent the majority of our summer running around Kennesaw trying to find a place to live without breaking any laws and let me tell you, that was one of the hardest things we did that summer.
Within the cities of Kennesaw and Marietta, they still abide by the old laws; “Two or more unrelated people cannot live in the same house, and four or more girls cannot live in the same single-family housing unit because it is considered a brothel.” With these old laws, we were limited in where we could live. Application after application, house after house, we searched for three months looking for a place to live. By the end of July, we were running out of options when we finally found the place we had been looking for. The only downside to living in the house was, we were 15 minutes away from campus, without traffic, which meant we were farther away from places and friends. While the rent was excellent and the house itself was nice; the commute was not so pleasant. Each day we would spend almost 30 minutes driving each way because of traffic. We had to go so far out to avoid the laws that we ended up spending so much extra time in the car that wouldn’t have been necessary if Kennesaw would just accept the fact that it is turning into a college town and change the laws.
So what is the move for next year? Where do all of the students who are currently at Kennesaw live, and where do the new students choose to live? With the way Kennesaw is going, a cardboard box is looking like a nice cozy place to stay- no rent, no utilities, no worries right? If Kennesaw State University and the city of Kennesaw can’t get on the same page with housing, they will lose all of the students they have worked so hard to get. All of the hard work and employees they have seen come and go will be for nothing. The football team will be playing in an empty stadium, the Commons chefs will be cooking for no one and the teachers will be giving lectures to empty seats because the students will be too busy paying for housing to be going to class and learning. Is that something this institution wants? To just throw away everything they have worked for to make some extra money off of these students? Something needs to change, and if they don’t fix these living situations, I don’t think the change they want to happen is going to be the thing that changes.
http://www.theodysseyonline.com/living-situations-kennesaw
http://www.theodysseyonline.com/living-kennesaw-campus-student-housing
http://www.theodysseyonline.com/living-kennesaw-renting-apartment
