Homeless and bedless: students surviving the week between apartments

Every fall semester, apartments, houses and on-campus housing in Logan fill up with students ready to spend their year studying and working at Utah State University.

Students’ lives come and go in semesters — so do the lives of Logan landlords with new tenants cycling in every four months. With this comes the need to regularly clean and prepare apartments for new student arrivals.

Between the end of spring semester and the end of the summer, students still need a place to live, but cleaning and repairs are necessary.

Result: homeless students.

Car Tetris and Camping

“I’ve been homeless before and am getting ready to be homeless for a week,” said Ashley Berrett on the last day of finals week.

Berrett, a graduate with a degree in Nutrition, Dietetics and Food Science, decided to go backpacking and camping with a roommate for the week following finals while they waited to move into their apartment.

“Usually I just couch-surf, but this year we decided to be adventurous,” Berrett said. “Most of the time I just basically live out of my car … I thought that if I didn’t have a place to stay, I decided I could go camping.”

She has tried to couch-surf with more than one friend in order to split up the time during the “week-long homeless period.”

The issue is frustrating largely because landlords usually say they need a period of time to have cleaning done and can’t have anybody living in the apartments while this and repairs are taking place. But nobody knows if those procedures actually take place, Berrett said.

“Every place I move into I think ‘This isn’t clean! They didn’t do anything! Why was I homeless for a week?'” she said. “It’s kind of dumb we have to move out on graduation, but … I don’t know if there’s a solution.”

For now, students across Logan will continue to battle the finals-cleaning-work-packing anxiety of the last week in spring semester, with hopes that they and their grades survive.

“Get really good at car Tetris,” Berrett said, advising first-timer homeless students especially. “Just rely on your friends ’cause people will help you out … it’s just a week, then you’ll be really happy when you do move into your new place.”

Attic Stays and Quadruple-Bunking

Four. The number of times Cade Robinson has experienced homelessness in Logan.

“Every time, I have been lucky enough to know good people who have let me crash on couches, on basement floors and in one case, I stayed in some kid’s attic for three or four days,” Robinson, a 2014 graduate with a degree in international business, said.

Though not always very comfortable physically, Robinson has been able to find plenty of strange places to sleep while waiting for his own roof over his head. Like an attic.

“I was kind of buried in the boxes and had my own little space where I kind of made a bed on the floor,” Robinson said. “And it kind of freaked his roommates out, because they usually use that room for storage, so they’d open the door and see a bunch of boxes and hear me. And they’d be like ‘Who’s there?’ And I’d be like, ‘Sorry! Hi! It’s me. How are you?'”

In regards to preparing for homelessness and bedlessness, there aren’t many things to do besides find friends, network and figure out where you can at least sleep for awhile, Robinson said.

“I can’t tell you how many times I remember getting done with finals and thinking I’m done, only to realize on the walk home that, ‘Wait a minute, I have to be moved out tonight and clean to get my deposit back and still have everything boxed up and moved over to this place so I can sleep on the floor,'” he said.

Another year Robinson was homeless with three other friends, which ended up being more fun than anything else — especially because the only place they could find to camp out was on the couches of a girl’s apartment, he said.

“We all stayed there for, I think two or three nights,” Robinson explained. “We had all of our stuff packed in there, and it turned out to be really fun, ’cause we just had like a party for a few days.”

Finding friends to be homeless with is Robinson’s advice for other homeless students, to “drown out your sorrow with some fun and food and good people.”

It just makes the college experience what it is, learning how to be without home or bed, and that is okay.

Playing with the Kids and Moving Crew

Renee Adams has been lucky enough to have a sister and her family living in Logan, where she can stay and help out for her week of homelessness this year.

“It’s still rough ’cause I’m living out of suitcases and I still have to go to work and everything,” Adams said. “It’s fun being with my nieces, but it’s not fun not having a place to live with all my stuff packed up.”

Adams graduated this May with a degree in exercise science, and also engaged in a finals week balancing battle. She had to be packed and moved on the Friday of finals week, while preparing to take exams and walk for graduation on Saturday.

One option some apartments and landlords offer is being able to move in earlier for a fee. Adams and her roommates were offered to move into their apartment this summer a few days early, but for $15 a day.

“I didn’t want to pay it,” Adams said. “Sometimes you don’t have to be homeless, but if you want to move in you have to pay for it.”

Because most college students don’t have more than the small junker cars that come with hectic lives and small paychecks, people usually need to take multiple trips or borrow trucks to help with the move.

Enter Adams, her big truck and her willingness to help out.

“Four of my friends are gonna move into this apartment with me, and none of them have a very big vehicle, so … I’m basically the moving crew for everybody,” Adams said. “It’s either make 10 trips, or find somebody with a truck. And I’m the friend with the truck.”

Adams looks forward to having a place to call home.

Being homeless will probably happen to the majority of students staying in Logan for the summer. Not having a home can be stressful, but people have been there—and many people have pretty empty couches to offer.

mandy.m.morgan@aggiemail.usu.edu