Something about my apartment junior year didn’t sit well with my mom.

Maybe it was the ancient, stained, dirty carpet. Maybe it was the broken mini blinds, or the way the dishwasher dug into the wall anytime you tried to open it. Maybe it was that the toilet seat was worn through, or that the linoleum was chipped and dirty, or that the overhead lights filled with water every time it rained.

My apartment that year was sadly typical of what many you find at the University. I signed a lease with what may be the biggest landlord on campus, and when we arrived in August, the four-bedroom apartment only had two dressers, two desks, and smelled like pigeon poop and cigarettes. It was disgusting, to say the least.

Fast-forward two summers, and I found myself apartment hunting in another college town. I recently got a job in Ames, Iowa, the home of the Iowa State Cyclones, and took a road trip with my dad through the cornfields to seek out my new home.

Our approach consisted of a fairly fruitless Google search and a lot of cruising around town looking for apartment buildings. At one point during the afternoon of our first day in Ames, we pulled up to a large, clean, inviting-looking complex with a community center and lots of open space. It was near campus, and reminded me of the complexes springing up on North Lincoln Avenue and South First Street.

A woman in the community center told us that the complex was for undergraduate students only. It was a branch of University housing, built a few years back to create competition for the landlords of Ames. The school built well-kept and reasonably priced housing which drove up the quality and affordability of other student housing options.

Illinois’ Campustown apartments have a reputation for dangling on the brink of condemnation. I remember a friend whose “leather” couch, provided by the landlord, turned your clothes pink when you sat on it. A girl I know arrived on campus last August to find the window frame in her bedroom completely separated from the wall and hanging perilously over a construction site next door. And some boys I know live in a house with bedsheets tacked to the ceiling where sheet rock should be.

Students here can choose from a few nicer buildings, but many are off-campus or cost twice as much as shabbier alternatives. Some of the new buildings in Campustown cost upward of $700 a month per bedroom. That’s closing in on what friends of mine pay in Chicago. For anyone on a student budget, it’s hard to splurge on housing when you could easily save a few hundred dollars by living in a rat hole. Aside from University Residence Halls, the other alternative is moving a mile or two away, but with inconvenient bus service and the prices of car upkeep and parking, that option is also uninviting.

The University needs to enact eminent domain, and fast. The Board of Trustees would do well to shut down some of the dilapidated apartments on this campus, replacing them with University-run apartments like the ones in Ames. Not only would I rather be paying the school for my housing than some of the landlords around here, but competition could net the school added cash and create a happier, less broke or broken-hearted student body.