The strange paradox of student apartments
If you’ve ever lived in a student apartment, you already know the script: the shower that you can never quite get clean, the landlord who ghosts you once rent is paid, the mysterious smell that no amount of Febreze can fix. My place, the bottom half of a creaky house five minutes from campus, hits all the marks. Rats scratch in the walls like clockwork, garbage piles up in the front yard, and the fire alarms are more for decoration than safety. Every morning, construction rattles us awake before class. It’s loud, messy, and probably unsafe. Yet, somehow, it’s my favourite place.
Student apartments are less ‘starter homes’ and more ‘obstacle courses.’ First, there’s the cost. Somehow, we all end up paying champagne prices for tap-water conditions. The rent is always too high, the square footage always too small, and yet, the demand is always surging. Finding somewhere to live in the first place is a nightmare. Back in first year, I had alerts set up on Apartments.com and Condos.com, was on multiple realtors’ email lists, and refreshed Facebook Marketplace like it was my job. I’d be in the middle of class, frantically clicking through blurry photos of basements with “tons of natural light” (one window) or “cozy living space” (a kitchen table shoved against a wall). After weeks of scrolling and stress, I finally landed on the house I live in now. Finding it felt like winning the lottery, even if the prize was… rats.
Somewhere along the line, student apartments stop being just places to live and become badges of honor. We complain endlessly about the rats, the rent, and the broken
appliances, but we also tell these stories like campfire legends. Surviving a winter with no real heat? That’s not a tragedy – that’s character development. Part of it comes from pop culture. The image of the messy, chaotic student flat has been immortalised in sitcoms, TikToks, and half the novels about college life. It’s not glamorous, but it’s familiar. Everyone knows someone who’s lived in a house where the bathroom door didn’t close properly or the Wi-Fi only worked if you stood on one leg by the window.
For all the complaining, the truth is, we have a fantastic time in our chaotic house. When you and your roommates are woken up by construction at 7 a.m., or when you all crowd into the kitchen to debate whether the oven is actually safe to use, it brings you closer. Shared suffering becomes shared memory. The same stories that make your parents shake their heads are the ones you and your friends will laugh about years later.
That time the fire alarms all started going off and 20 firemen showed up to your house in the middle of the night. The time you woke up to ankle-deep water and promptly realised the basement your entire life’s belongings are in had flooded. The kitchen that always smelled vaguely like burnt toast, but was also where you cooked your first successful ‘adult’ meal. For many of us, this is our first real taste of living away from home. Sure, the fridge leaks water onto the floor every other day, but it’s /our/ fridge. The mess, the noise, the broken things: they’re proof that we’re figuring out adulthood, one clogged drain at a time. The rats in the walls? Honestly, at this point, they’re part of the friend group.
We romanticise the mess because it means we’re living through a particular kind of chaos that only happens once. Years from now, nobody will get nostalgic about condo fees or perfectly functional dishwashers, but they will laugh about the apartment where the ceiling leaked every time it rained. Of course, this all raises a bigger question: should we really be okay with this? Is it actually charming that student apartments double as pest habitats and fire hazards, or have we just convinced ourselves that it’s normal? Maybe the late-night laughs and inside jokes don’t cancel out the fact that so many of us are living in spaces that are unsafe, unstable, and wildly overpriced.
Cities like Toronto have far more students than they have safe, affordable housing, and universities aren’t exactly rushing to fill the gap. Demand is sky-high, so landlords know they can charge premium prices for basements that barely meet code. This setup isn’t accidental; it’s systemic. Students are a captive market: most of us want to live close to campus, we don’t have long rental histories, and we don’t always know our rights as tenants. It creates the perfect conditions for overcrowding, under-maintenance, and a sense that we should just be grateful to have a place at all. At the same time, there’s a cultural expectation that struggling through bad housing is simply part of the student experience, like pulling all-nighters or eating instant noodles. That narrative makes it easy to dismiss unsafe or exploitative conditions as a rite of passage instead of a problem worth fixing.
So while we might laugh about our messy apartments now, it’s worth asking: should we? The nostalgia is real, but so is the fact that many students live in spaces that are unaffordable, unstable, and sometimes unsafe. The bigger paradox is that what feels like a temporary adventure in your early twenties is, for the housing system, business as usual. The more we romanticise the dysfunction, the easier it is to ignore that reality. Our horror stories turn into punchlines, but they also normalise a level of neglect we’d never accept in other parts of the rental market. If a family with young kids was renting an apartment full of rats, it wouldn’t be funny, it would be unacceptable. The fact that we expect students to tolerate it says more about the system than it does about us.
And yet, even knowing all this, I still find myself saying I love my apartment. It took me a while to realize why. It’s not the location, though being five minutes from campus is nice. It’s not my queen-size bed, though stretching out in it does feel like luxury after living in residence. And it’s definitely not the rats, the garbage, the floods, or the alarms that only pretend to work. It’s the great friends I have inside. Scarlett, Hannah, Wynne, and Ruby make the house we live in a home. Without my friends, it would just be another overpriced, half-broken rental in a city full of them. That’s the real secret of student apartments: we don’t love the conditions; we love the people we’re enduring them with. And we deserve better than to keep confusing the two.