Students’ off-campus residences may be sitting empty for nearly two months due to the University’s extended winter break, since the spring semester’s start date has been pushed back to mid-January.
Because of the prolonged break, some students are trying to sublease their unused rooms from the end of the fall semester in November until the spring semester’s start date in mid-January to offset the cost of rent.
Noor El-Baradie, a sophomore economics and political science major living in an off-campus house, said she and her housemates are trying to sublease their entire house over winter break, as well as summer 2021.
She said when they signed their lease last year, they weren’t anticipating having to pay for an empty house for this long.
“Three weeks, we could justify that,” she said. “But six to seven weeks is really hard to make that financial investment in the space you’re not even going to live in.”
Veronica Ortiz, a junior majoring in biology, said she is living in a Carrboro apartment complex and facing a similar dilemma. She said the process has been extremely stressful because there are fewer students in the area right now.
“There's not as many students on campus that are probably going to be looking for housing, just because a lot of them did go home,” she said.
Ortiz said she successfully sublet her room over the summer but wants to make sure that her roommates, who will be in the apartment over the break, aren’t put at risk.
Audrey Kayser, a junior majoring in public policy, is one of Ortiz’s roommates. She said that in past experiences with subleasing, people had different levels of caution.
