I am one of those homeless students, and I will say that BYU does have the ability to fix the situation, but the refuse to do so. The contract signed by most apartment complexes is actually provided by BYU Housing, and BYU has the ability to enforce strict regulation of the BYU Approved housing in the Provo area.

So BYU prefers to have it's students homeless for over a week, which is dangerous, and not good for students who have enough worries, and now to include being homeless.

Provo's Homeless population of students should be a major concern for the university, city and residents of the town.

Can the general public help? What if we have a room available?

How and when do people propose that the landlords clean, paint, and make repairs? Or would people prefer that none of that is done?

BYU students need to follow the Spirit. The Spirit will lead them to suitable housing arrangements.

"BYU spokesman Todd Hollingshead explained that BYU has no responsibility regarding the contracts students make with private entities."

What a crock. No responsibility, except to force those private entities to comply with the BYU Approved Housing program or not be able to rent to BYU singles. Ridiculous. This is why the system doesn't work: BYU forces wacky living rules on private companies, but then won't protect the students when they get pushed around by those companies who have already bent over backward to appease BYU into letting them do business. How is BYU's arrangement not illegal?

Here at the MTC, there are many empty rooms which could be used !

This is a HUGE problem. My daughter is at BYU. Students are "forced" to abide by the terms of the contracts. They cannot always find contracts or apartments which allow them/their belongings to stay during the break. The campus requires students to stay at their on-campus jobs during the break because it's a busy time during Education Week. My daughter is there - 1200 miles from home - with no car. What is a student to do? Something needs to be done. Come on Saints, have a heart!

Seems like an enterprising hotel could offer a "gap" deal to students. They officially are not in school during that time and are expected to stay wherever so there should be no problem with having to meet single student housing requirements.

The reason for the contract gap is simple; it allows the landlords to rent the rooms out to Education Week attendees for a much higher rate than students can pay.

What a bunch of morons. I went to and graduated from BYU and it is not a problem for those with common sense and a brain. There is plenty of hotel space. Have a clue...have a plan.

I will knock and put down BYU (and mock any and all Cougars) any day of the week, but leaving students homelss is an absolute travesty!!!!!

Do yourself a favor -- seek professional help.

Sincerely,

Cosmo

If the student read the contract they knew prior to the start of the spring and summer term that this was coming, so please don't ask me to cry for you. You had plenty of time to make other arrangements. That being said, I would have thought that a stop-gap measure could have be arranged by the landlords, that is just good business. And last, but not least, no one is "forced" to live by the housing standards, each and every one of you could choose to go some where else, although then you wouldn't be able to be quite so condescending of everyone else.

I attend the U of U and have never had problem with homelessness- the freedom of choice allows me to live anywhere that I approve of.

Wait, hold on, landlords in Provo "clean" and "maintain" the student apartments? Are you sure?

maybe the should all put of tents on the quadrangle
out side of the presidents office. then the spirit will be stronger and help them solve the problem.
they can "follow the spirit" to there tents at night.

Blame can be shared among all parties. BYU can loosen up their excessive restrictions and worry more about homeless students than making more bucks on Education Week. Distance and standard restrictions don't guarantee or stop problem situations from happening - too much micromanagement. Property owners can work with local cleaning companies to be efficient in their cleaning or look into regular smaller cleanings on rotation. They can specify specific days per unit since I doubt all units are being cleaned every one of those 7 days. Students can plan ahead of time and be less messy so there is less to clean each year.

Ed Week has filled all the hotel rooms within 20 miles of campus

Our kid had to sign a year-round contract, even though he was coming home for the summer! He had to pay rent for 4 months for an unused apartment he couldn't re-sale to anyone. So a lot of his summer job profit was going to his Provo landlord!!!

BYU itself made me move out of the dorms between summer term and fall semester so that they could house people for Education Week even though I was coming right back to the same room. Fortunately, I was able to store my stuff at my sister's apartment and then I was able to go home for the break. It seems to me that students should take priority over people attending Education Week.

Nothing has changed in the last 30 years. Why is this suddenly such an earth-shattering problem?

To the very few planless, clueless students:

Stop being such babies. You signed a contract and have known for at least 2-4 months when your spring/summer contract ends and when your new contract begins. Anybody with half-a-brain could plainly see if there was a gap between contracts.
Make a friend locally so you can crash at their home for a couple of weeks (remember to be a courteous guest). Go back home to see your parents. Take a break to visit some of the National Parks in Utah.

Most of all, learn to take a little personal responsibility.

College life is supposed to teach you how to be independent and not rely on mommy and daddy to do everything for you. Stop expecting BYU to be a surrogate parent.

I'm having the same problem. I'm supposed to move out on the 25th, and move in on the 29th. I live off campus, so it has nothing to do with the school itself, its the apartment management, but the BYU Administration should step in and help.

I love the BYU experience, the classes, students, and professors, but the BYU administration is terrible. Probably one of the worst in the country, and very stubborn and will not help you. I just try to work around them.

I have to say, as a BYU grad who lived in off campus housing for four years, this is not a big problem. Most people who experience this never bothered to read the contract to begin with, and those that did, put off dealing with until they had to move out. I was always able to find an easy solution, but then again I didn't put off the problem until the week I had to move out. People need to start accepting responsibility for their lives instead of expecting other people or institutions to solve them.

BYU's housing policy harms the students. The approved housing limits (both numbers and distance) create an artificial shortage in housing, which drives the price up.

Then for BYU to say that the contracts are totally between the resident and the owner, is a further policy error.

If BYU has the right of approval for single housing, shouldn't they also demand a right of approval for the contracts? (A single approved contract form would do nicely.)

Otherwise the students are paying more for housing, and getting nothing in return.

My son and his family experienced this several years ago. I thought this problem would have been solved by now. I am surprised that no one seems to care about the student at BYU these days. When I attended there in the 1960s, people talked to each other and contracts took into consideration the student's schedule and housing needs. How did that change?

Sounds like poor planning on the students part.

You will! Shortly after graduation... ;)

If your smart enough to go to BYU you should be smart enough to figure this one out.

I have a room available in my basement, free of charge, for any BYU student left without a place to stay during the break. If you need a place you can contact me by email. I have a gmail account and my user name is dosmetros57. I am a professor at the university but I live about 25 miles south of campus.

It does not take 7 days to clean and paint an apartment! BYU should force BYU approved housing to do apartment maintenance in alternating units, so that apartments can be made available for students who don't have family in the area. It is ridiculous for BYU/Provo City to allow Apartment owners to throw students into the streets for 7 days twice a year!

Provo makes a financial killing from Education Week, but to make BYU students homeless at the same time is inexcusable!

I too am one of those homeless students. Yes, I have known for sometime that I would have to move out and would have a 12 day window before I would be able to move into my new place. However - I am from the East coast and have no family members in the area besides 2nd cousins that I do not know.

Live in a hotel for 12 days on a students budget? Have you nay-sayers forgotten what it is like to live on such a budget? Last year I moved into my apartment early because I had nowhere to go - the "so-called" maintenance and cleaning never took place. No one ever came to lift a finger and clean, paint, or replace appliances. I know that is not the case in all apartments and that some landlords do actually care about maintaining their units, but living out of a car or crashing on someone's couch for 10 or more days is ludicrous.

I worked at one of these complexes years ago and know firsthand how stupid the system is, and how equally stupid the students are. The fact that BYU and UVU have different starting dates only compounds the scheduling issues. That BYU claims no responsibility while also enforcing a residential living standard is ridiculous. As long as the university has this arcane residential living standard apartment complexes will continue to act as monopolies and the students will always end up on the short end of the stick.

...you do NOT have to be "protected" by "approved housing".

College-aged students are adults. They do not need to be treated like kindergarten students.

If you haven't been in the situation then you cannot critique students for being angry. You cannot empathize or sympathize, so keep your comments to your little bitter selves.

Forcing usually financially strapped students to pay out the nose to store their belongings, live out of a car, or pay hotel prices for that period of time is heinous. Right now my little Corolla is stuffed to overflowing with my stuff. What if my car gets broken into? Would that help the situation? BYU will only change the system when students start getting injured, arrested, or even kicked out of school because they broke the "honor code" that doesn't actually protect them during the 10 days of homelessness.

There are several possible solutions.
1. Allow students to move in early if they don't mind doing the cleaning themselves. Even if we could move belongings into the apartment and leave them on the bed and out of the way for cleaning it would be better than leaving them somewhere. Storage facilities could give discounts too.
2. Hotels give discounts and reserve a certain number of rooms during education week specifically for students.

Re: Nottyou - It specifically said in the article that students would have to pay upwards of $120 a night to stay at a hotel. I don't know what student has that kind of money.

And how come Provo apartments need 12 days to do cleaning and maintenance when apartments in Salt Lake for U of U students don't? Students are required to do rigorous cleaning checks before checking out. The apartments are already clean.

The reason for the gap is exactly as Bill said. It's so the apartments can be rented out to education week attendees. We were charged a full month of rent only to be kicked out on the 16th. Now that doesn't make sense to me.

so one time the BYU cafeteria closed. and I almost starved. How does BYu expect me to eat if they close their facilities? They knew it was going to close, why didn't they provide me with food.. good thing I had shoe leather at the time or I would have DIED

Like many have stated, it is easy to find a solution to the problem; I'm just not so sure that many of the solutions would be "BYU-approved". One suggestion was to stay in a hotel for a week. That's a great idea, oh, except that most students would want to try to save money, so they would cram as many students as possible into a hotel room: guys, girls, it doesn't matter, let's just have a big week-long sleepover. It can be Provo's version of Spring Break at Daytona Beach.

When I was a student, my roommate and I slept on the floor of his girlfriend's apartment. As far as I know, he actually did stay on the floor the whole time we were there, but, again, that's probably not a "BYU-approved" solution.

Such a petty thing. Most students are in this situation because they decided to move to one of the "higher end" places with more amenities during the spring/summer terms because of the reduced rent and are caught in transition as they move back to a place they can afford. They know the terms up front and decide to live with the week long transition.

With a large amount of students moving to high end places during the summer and then back out, if the complexes didn't take that time to clean and paint etc. it would be a disservice to the students moving in for the fall semester having to deal with unmaintained apartments.

The Desert News missed out by not reporting both sides of the issue. I attended BYU and regularly did this very thing knowing there would be a transition period between move out and move it but it was worth it to me.

BYU controls enough about BYU approved housing they don't need to start setting move in and move out dates.

I attended BYU as an undergrad and now attend as a graduate student, and the housing system - like so many other offices at BYU - is an absolute embarrassment.

BYU supposedly demands landlords manage their complexes using certain contracts. Yet, when landlords violate these contracts time and time again, students who want to fight back are forced into a toothless "mediation" process over and over and over again - toothless because BYU refuses to help the students it is contractually obligated to assist. Why not just let the matter go directly to a small claims court capable of, you know, actually passing judgment and enforcing it?

Yes, BYU students ought to look more carefully at their contracts. But the fact remains that BYU itself has 1) limited the geographical area in which they can live severely and 2) held a large conference with housing demands in that same area. BYU, once again, has harmed its students.

And that's fine by me. I own a house, so I'm unaffected. But when BYU comes around to ask its alumni for donations, I hope the alumni remember what a fair-weather friend the university has been.

I've been there. I was a single 20 year-old woman living in her car, (lucky I even had a car that summer!) I didn't have a relative within 500 miles. This scenario is far too common and something needs to be done about it, starting with the land lords!

It is heartless to leave thousands of students this way. This has nothing to do with "planning" and "students being responsible"! It has everything to making apartment contracts the way the rest of the developed world does.

Richard, you crack me up! Having moved into a few "high end places" in Provo, I can assure you that cleaning and painting never happened. It took us two years to get our apartment painted after moving in. The place had holes and crap all over the walls and the last tenants had left piles of their unwanted stuff all over the floor. The management did nothing to clean it up, we had to do it ourselves, even though they had 12 days to do it before we moved in. Management ended up letting us just paint it and taking the cost out of our rent. And this was in what is considered a "high-end" complex.

If being homeless does not violate the BYU code of conduct, it sounds somewhat more fun than living in BYU-approved housing. If you planned accordingly (e.g., bought a VW camper van) it could probably be quite an adventure!

When I was at BYU, I owned my own house. Even so, because I was single, according to BYU's housing policy, I couldn't live in my house because it wasn't "BYU Approved". If BYU wants to be so controlling about, then they certainly DO have a responsibility to see that these students aren't left out in the cold.

I am suprised this is an issue with so many students...as far as I know, most off-campus landlords try to fill their units year round, and tenants who are not leaving the unit---those who have signed another contract with the same landlord---don't get kicked out for a week between contracts, even if there is maintenance and upkeep to be done. When a departing tenant ends up with a "contract gap," their old landlord usually lets them stay a little longer in a unit with people who are not moving out, or their new tenant lets them move in a little earlier.

Maybe I just had uncommonly good experiences...it sounds like there are some landlords who aren't as helpful. That's too bad, because the ones who look out for their tenants' interests get good word-of-mouth advertising and fill up fast.

I think it helps, though, if the tenant maintains a good relationship with the landlord throughout the year, and then is proactive in asking for help, offering services in return.

I do wish landlords would not make their contracts year-long. The nature of college life---internships, study abroads, etc.---makes it hard to know where you're going to be a year in advance.

First of all, the sob story for poor students is really getting old. Have you seen the cars the students drive, the phones they use, and the meals they eat? Back in the '60's there were few students that even had cars. Now they all do, and they bring their boats, scooters, and snowmobiles, too. They aren't exactly in threadbare clothing, either.

I manage several student apartments. We do have a gap between when students are supposed to moved out and when they move in. I have never rented it out for Education week. Instead, I use the time to clean the carpets, paint walls and make other repairs. It doesn't take 12 days to do the repairs and cleaning, but because all the condos in the valley are being maintained that week, it is hard to get the cleaners and installers in. They are booked solid those 2 weeks.

"Students aren't left out in the cold"

You make is sound like it's the middle of winter...students need to be a bit more responsible and plan ahead. Does it suck? Yes. I have a younger brother and sister who are going through this right now (my younger brother is staying with us for 2 weeks). But he planned ahead. Students: use that little brain of yours and come up with a plan. I'm sure you'll be ok.

I've heard of BYU students not allowed to renew their contracts for the same apartment because the landlords want new tenants every year. It's so the landlords can collect (and keep) more deposits every year.

Apparently, long-term students are bad for business. The landlord gets more deposits and never has returning tenants!

I have been in this situation before myself. I didn't plan. Go home, visit your family. Go on a camping trip. Most places here in Provo won't force you out if you are staying through the next year. Regardless of whether or not people are allowed to move into BYU-Approved Housing, there is still a drastic shortage, and property owners can do whatever they want, it's a simple game of supply and demand.

If you don't want to be homeless for, Oh, MY GOSH, 12 days, go to the local junior college for a couple of years, go home during the break, stay in your apartment complex.

If you're worried about your on-campus job, there are plenty of international students that want those hours and you'll still have a job in almost all places when you get back.

One other option is just to get married, and then you won't have to worry about it.

The Church can build a billion dollar super center in SLC but can't even build housing for the educated minds of the future. Now I know their priorities, M O N E Y.

This is easily solved. Byu housing should force housing providers to do Fall and Winter contracts; none of this year long contract crap that forces students to pay for 4 months that they aren't even there. Then complexes can do maintenance on the apartments over that 4 months(summer) on a rotational basis. It doesn't take a rocket scientist; just an administrtion that puts there students needs first.