Assessing the UW-Madison Student Housing Market: Student Preferences and Affordability

Abstract

This paper details the growing challenges of affordable housing for the undergraduate population at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This study seeks to observe how luxury high rise development both in theory and practice affect market rents and the overall student housing market. A mix of GIS spatial analysis, student survey responses, and property data from the CoStar database is used to determine how students make their housing decisions and whether a hypothesized rent gradient (with campus as the epicenter) exists. Our findings conclude that for housing located within 2.5 miles of the center of the UW-Madison campus, (1) a correlation between price and distance from campus is only relevant in 4-bedroom apartments, but still only held an R2 value of 0.1965 (location accounted for 19.65% of the influence on monthly rent), (2) market rents far exceed the price that students are willing to pay, and that students must make sacrifices in preferred accommodations in order to make housing affordable, and (3) while distance from campus did not have an overall effect on rent pricing of housing, close proximity to other luxury buildings does.