Everything is booked up. This is the sentence that María Valderrey, a university student, has had to deal with since she started looking for accommodation in early July. That was when she learned that she had been admitted to the double degree in Early Childhood and Primary Education at the Palencia campus of the University of Valladolid and that, therefore, I had to find an apartment to rent or a student residence where to spend the four years of your degree. But since then, it has been “an odyssey,” explains María, originally from a town in León.
“The university residences had been full for a long time and the only option was to stay on the waiting lists,” he explains, because his first option was to be able to access one of those accommodations that students usually choose in the first year of university either to make friends or to get to know the city’s atmosphere a little before moving to an apartment. But these spaces have seen how, in recent times, the number of renewals of those who were already their guests has increased, which reduces the places for those who intend to enter in the first year.
Reservations were also made in advance, so that anyone who knew very clearly which degree they were going to take could visit the facilities even in April, taking advantage of the Easter holidays and leaving an economic signal for book a room well in advance at the risk of losing it if the student is not subsequently admitted due to his grade to be able to pursue this degree.
So, seeing what he had seen and the doors of the residences closing one after the other, he opted for his second option: looking for rental accommodation. “Impossible”. And the fact is that most of the rooms rented were also “full” and those offered for a single tenant asked for amounts “unsustainable for a student”: “From 600 euros”, in small spaces. For rentals, the problem that arises is that the supply has collapsed. And this, while the demand has remained stable. So, the immediate effect of this equation is that prices have increased.
Faced with this complicated scenario, he even tried consider residing in Valladolida city very close to the capital Palencia and well connected by transport to be able to go to class every day. “I didn’t care about having to stay there because I was desperate,” she admits.
But there weren’t many options either. Again, specific accommodation for university students that had been full for some time and the only alternative they could offer them was to sign up on the waiting list in case there were last minute cancellations that left a spot available.
Thus, the university course began on September 9 in the city of Palencia and the first days were spent going back and forth to his house in León. Four hours since he left his home I even got to the Faculty of Education and the same thing when I returned. Luck came when he finally managed to enter the Castilla de Palencia student residence thanks to his status as a “high-level” athlete in Rescue and First Aid.
“Complicated”
Maria now breathes a sigh of relief, but she assures that there were times when she thought she would be left without a roof over her head to spend her university years in Palencia. It was “very complicated,” she insists, and even says that “I was already thinking about posting her situation on social networks to see if anyone knew of an option where I could stay because “I asked everywhere, my colleagues, but nothing”he remembers.
Less dramatic is the case of a student from Valladolid who was looking for an apartment to rent in Ponferrada and who prefers that her name not be published. It is clear that It was thanks to “luck” and having been “very attentive” to one of the applications to look for a house, so today he has found a house that he now shares with people he knew before. This is her third year as a university student in the capital of Bierzo and she has decided to take the step to live more independently in a shared apartment. But “it’s difficult” to find it, he says, after seeing some in which he was put on a waiting list “of eight or nine people”. “Sometimes they don’t want to rent them to us because we are students”, he explains, and other times, those that are rented to university students are in worse conditions, but “that’s how it is”. “We have no choice but to settle”, he laments.
