Correction appended: A previous version of this story misspelled Emma Forrister's last name. It is Forrister, not Forester.
August Mallos is trying to squeeze everything he owns into his car.
“There’s stuff all over, stuff from every part of your life,” he said.
There’s a vacuum cleaner, kitchen utensils, a whiteboard.
“Oh, and a memory foam mattress,” he says. “Those are tough to pack because they expand. They're very greedy for space.”
Mallos is a senior at the University of Florida who lives at On20, an off-campus apartment complex in Gainesville that’s advertised as student housing.
Every year, summer students like Mallos who don’t renew their leases have to move out of their apartments mid-semester in July. This allows student housing sites to clean up apartments before the next cohort of tenants move in, usually students returning for the start of the fall semester. But it leaves summer students without a place to stay for one to two weeks while they wait for their next lease to begin in August.
“It leaves a lot of people without an option for a roof over their head, essentially,” said Mallos.
He’s moving out of his 3-bedroom apartment at On20 due to a rent increase of $100 a month. That lease ended on July 31. His next lease, on a 4-bedroom apartment also at On20, begins on Aug. 16. Mallos used to live in a two-bedroom at On20 but has been downgrading to apartments with more roommates for the past two years because of rent increases.
Last summer, Mallos spent the entirety of what students call “homeless week” at his parents’ house three hours away, near Tampa. This summer, he’s spending a few days staying on a friends’ couch in Gainesville before driving down to his parents.
“But if I didn't have that option, I would have had to live in my car,” said Mallos. “I would have had to sleep next to my mattress somewhere, like a Walmart parking lot.”
This has been happening in college towns across the US for years and Gainesville is no exception. Because there are so many students here, it’s easier for property managers to set aside a cleaning period than it is to coordinate move-outs with each student. And, because the rental market here revolves around the school year, they need to get these properties cleaned out right away.
April Strickland is the owner and broker of Golden Rule Real Estate. She says the amount of work involved in turning these homes around is epic. In fact, the industry has its own name for it: “turn week”.
“Depending on what has to be done, we will have painters work through the night,” said Strickland. “I've worked through the night. I have slept on my office floor a number of nights before.”
Strickland estimates there are 10,000 properties in Gainesville that’ll have to get fully cleaned in just two weeks. On Aug. 1, she does a walkthrough of a single-family home in Florida Park that was rented out by two college students. It’s not in the best of shape. There are tiny dead bugs in the freezer, the hallway door has fallen off its hinges, and it smells like pee.
“So, essentially what I'm seeing is yellow staining down the entire baseboard where urine has dripped down the wall, down to the baseboards, onto the carpet, and it's actually eaten away the paint in some areas because urine is very acidic,” said Strickland.
Not all of the homes are this bad, Strickland says. But it’s still tough. She has her own name for it, too: “turn-pocalypse”.
“I would love to figure out a way that we don't have to do all this in a mad dash because it is hard, it is punishing, it is brutal at times,” she said.
Strickland guesses it’ll take at least a week to get this home fully cleaned. She says there’s just no way to do it without this cleaning period.
While that may be understandable to some, it's little consolation for students like Emma Forrister. She’s a junior at UF whose lease on a 4-bedroom apartment at Campus Circle ended on July 28, a few days before final exams. With rent increases and extra fees, her total rent went up from $776 to $1049 in two years. Forester said she had to be on campus every day for classes until Aug. 9 and couldn’t get her next lease to start until Aug. 16.
She considered sleeping in her car for ‘homeless week’, but her parents talked her out of it. Instead, she stayed at a friend’s house with three other students who were all going through the same thing.
“It's very stressful to move all your stuff out and find a place and then, like, living with all these people. Your routines get mixed up and it's just, yeah, it's a lot,” Forrister said.
But she's trying to look on the bright side. She tells herself she can make it through two weeks, even if it means students like her might have to do it all over again next year.
