Students: ‘No More Than Four’ discriminates

More than two months after the city’s “No More Than Four” ordinance went into full effect, landlords and students continue to call it unfeasible and discriminatory.

The ordinance, pioneered by City Council President Michael Ross and passed in March 2008, prohibits more than four unrelated undergraduate students from living together in an off-campus apartment. Ross, who represents District 8, which includes Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Fenway and Mission Hill, has said the policy is intended to reduce disturbances in residential areas and protect students from substandard conditions.

“It is a way that we are working to increase the quality of living for students and residents,” Ross spokeswoman Amy Derjue said.

Landlords and students, however, said they feel that the policy is entirely unjust and uncalled for.

“It does not help the students,” landlord Anwar Faisal of Alpha Management said. “It is not helping the parents or the landlord.”

However, Derjue said the policy is beneficial to tenants. She said if a landlord were to allow three students to live in a two-bedroom apartment, for example, he would charge an additional rent fee for the added bedroom, which would ultimately raise the real estate value.

“It is not a cure-all, obviously. The issue of housing prices in Boston is out of control,” she said. “The ‘No More Than Four’ is part of a strategy to bring the cost of housing down.”

Faisal disagreed, saying that regulating the number of undergraduate students in an apartment will have no affect on the prices of real estate.

“Real estate is going to go up anyway,” Faisal said.

Some students and landlords said they are doing what they can to circumvent the policy.

Boston University College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Mike Levy, who lives off campus, said he’s living with seven people and knows ways around the policy.

“For example, we had two separate leases for the one house . . . with those two leases for the one house,” he said. “We had seven people living there, but technically there were four people on one lease and three people on the other.”

Derjue said students could face potential consequences for violating the policy.

“They are in violation of the law,” she said. “We are working on ways where we are not forcing students to move mid-semester, but it is in violation of the law.”

Though Derjue said Ross has been trying to look out for the student population and meet with them to get a better understanding of how to improve their lives, including a visit to BU Oct. 20, many students said this new policy does nothing but make their lives more difficult.

Tim Compernolle, a CAS sophomore, said the city is treating students like children.

“You are a person who is over 18 years of age, so you are an adult and if you have the money, you should be able to live wherever you want,” he said. “It should not matter if you are an undergrad, a graduate student.”

Some said they feel the policy unfairly singles out the undergraduate population.

“I think that with the allowance for blatant discrimination against one very specific group of people the government is setting a scary precedent,” Suffolk University sophomore Alex Starks said.