Yale owns a lot of New Haven. Not only is the University the city’s largest employer (with over 11,000 employees), but it also lays claim to huge amounts of residential and commercial property, particularly in New Haven’s three major retail areas around Broadway, Chapel St., and Audubon St.

This very sizable real estate is completely managed by University Properties, which was started in 1996 as part of the Office of New Haven and State Affairs. President Rick Levin, GRD ’74, established this branch of the administration with the goal of improving the University’s relationship with—and enhancing its investment—in New Haven. With ownership of over 100 retail locations and over 500 residential units, University Properties pays nearly four million dollars in taxes every year, making it the largest single commercial real-estate payer in the city.

University Properties does not, however, manage most of these properties directly. Instead, a majority of them are turned over to Elm Campus Partners, LLC, a local real estate management company that oversees both retail and residential properties.

“It is very common practice in real estate for an owner to hire a professional property manager to run its properties, someone who specializes in the details of day-to-day management of the tenants and the physical property,” said Abigail Rider, director of University Properties. “Elm Campus does an excellent job for us.”

Although Elm Campus is an independent company hired by Yale to oversee its taxable real estate properties, Troy Resch, SOM ’97, managing partner of Elm Campus, stressed that there is a personal relationship between the company and Yale. “We have a deep appreciation for Yale University. I attended the Yale School of Management and the Graduate School [of Arts and Science] in the ’90s. My business partner, Andrew Lewandowski, [BK ’92, SOM ’02,] attended Yale College and the Yale School of Management. We also employ three recent Yale College graduates,” he said.

All of the residential units that Elm Campus manages are adjacent to campus in the downtown and Science Hill areas. They provide housing exclusively for full-time Yale affiliates—students, faculty, and staff. Priority is given to students, and in fact, graduate and professional school students lease approximately 50 percent of the apartments and undergraduates another 20 percent.

“This distribution isn’t surprising, given that undergraduates cannot live off campus prior to their junior year,” Resch said. “The number of actual occupants varies year to year—for example, a tenant may rent a two-bedroom apartment and choose to live alone—but theoretically, our apartments can house around 900 people.”

The apartments range from single-family homes on Mansfield Street to 44-unit buildings on Chapel St.. The level of amenities available to tenants also varies widely from site to site.

For example, some Edgewood Ave. rentals offer hardwood floors, carpeting, and on-site parking, while some Broadway rentals have neither laundry provisions nor parking spaces. According to Resch, all apartments are priced at market rent, based on amenities and location.

“None of the apartments was built by Yale specifically to provide housing to people affiliated with Yale,” Rider added. “Rather, the apartments were all designed for various purposes by many real estate developers and homeowners over the last 100 years or so. They were acquired as the opportunity arose to add to our apartment inventory close to campus and are not part of the college system at Yale.”

In order to rent an apartment with Elm Campus, a student or other University affiliate must fill out an online application. Therein he lists the residential areas he is interested in, the desired move-in date, and the desired size of apartment. Submission of this application reserves a place in the rental queue, and the applicant will then be invited to a series of apartment showings until he commits to a rental or withdraws from the invitation list. He then submits a ranking of his apartment choices and receives rental offers within the same day. If more than one applicant requests the same apartment, the applicant who submitted his preliminary rental application first will be given priority.

So why do students live off campus? For graduate students, the answer is easy: Since Yale does not provide them with residential college housing, they have to live elsewhere, and the Elm Campus rentals offer the closest accommodations to campus. For undergraduates, however, who can only move off campus after two years of dorm life, the question is a little trickier to answer. Some undergraduates end up off campus by chance.

Ben Long, JE ’11, lives in an apartment in Harrison Court, across from Pierson College. Last year, during JE’s room selection process, he and his roommate got last pick for housing and were double-annexed into an off-campus apartment.

“I think living off campus is great, because it gives you a measure of freedom and independence without making you actually have to find housing for yourself,” he said.

The housing situation is not without its flaws. “The building is really old, and the facilities definitely leave much to be desired,” Long said. “In addition, it has serious pest problems, like mice and cockroaches. One night, I woke up to the sound of a mouse scampering around on the floor, and it turned out there was a hole in the wall through which rodents were coming into the apartment.”

Nevertheless, Long said that Elm Campus is making an effort to address these issues. “They’re trying to ameliorate the situation by scheduling monthly extermination visits, which occur when the tenants are not there. As for maintenance, they’ve always been very timely with their repairs, usually coming within the same day. In general, I’m very happy with the management,” he said.

When asked about the comparison between residential college and off-campus life, Long hesitated. “In terms of housing, JE was recently renovated, so naturally it has better accommodations,” he said. “However, other aspects of living off campus—such as not being on a meal plan—more than make up for it. In terms of the actual social atmosphere of living in a dorm, I actually don’t feel removed from the rest of my college. There are a lot of graduate students and other JE students here, and we’re literally a block away from campus, so it’s pretty convenient.”

Ben Brody, SM ’10, has a slightly different view of off-campus living. He described his choice to live in an apartment as “a little haphazard” and mainly due to half of his junior-year suite, along with many of his friends, moving off campus at the end of last year.

“They were ready for the next step in the college experience, but it was not a coordinated decision,” he said. Brody now lives in a spacious two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Park St. and Edgewood Ave.

“This place is really awesome,” said Brody, when asked to describe his apartment. “The accommodations are fantastic, it gets light all morning, I have my own room, it’s decorated really nicely, we have our own kitchen—it’s just great.”

However, as with Long, the specter of animal stowaways detracts from Brody’s satisfaction with his housing. “Yeah, there have been a mouse or two around, but it’s not a huge problem. I was initially incredibly aggravated by these individual mice that would just show up in the apartment, but I hear that other people have them too, so it’s not just our building that’s afflicted. I’m not that pissed about it anymore—in fact, it gives me an incentive to not leave food on the floor.”

Brody said that even though Elm Campus ostensibly holds monthly exterminations, he has never seen them, and their efforts have so far not taken care of the problem. “I think they’ve only done two cycles of extermination, and the number of mice—which are apparently really hard to kill—has not diminished at all.”

As for the separation from the rest of his residential college, Brody commented that although he does feel separated from many of his friends in Silliman, many others have also moved off campus to locations near his apartment on Park St.. In addition, his whole building is filled with Yale undergraduates, including students—mostly seniors—from Pierson, TD, Davenport, and Berkeley.

“Here, you have full responsibility for yourself and your surroundings—you have to clean up after yourself, find ways to entertain yourself outside your room or entryway, and make or buy food on your own. It works for me, but it’s definitely not for everybody,” Brody said