The cold, mean streets. They’re a home to the homeless.

And in Campustown, from roughly August 10 to August 20, that’s pretty much everybody, including me.

It’s called the housing gap, and it affects everyone on campus who isn’t renewing an apartment lease from one school year to the next.

Essentially, the logic reads that because every student on campus moves back to school the third week of August, every apartment must be cleaned during the second week.

So while, for instance, my lease from the 2006-07 school year ended Aug. 11, my new lease didn’t begin until Aug. 17 – that’s five days lacking shelter for me and my stuff.

My solution (and it was a horribly inconvenient one) was to pack up my stuff and move out a few days early, store my things at my parents’ house two and a half hours away, fly to Boston on vacation, fly back, then move all my stuff back to Champaign.

Whew. I’m exhausted.

Landlords need time to repair and clean apartments, of course, which is the excuse for the gap between leases.

But massive realty companies, firms in charge of 100 or more domiciles, own most of the property around campus. The math simply doesn’t add up – it would be impossible to have all the apartments on campus cleaned, painted and repaired with only one week turnaround.

And so it is. Every August students move in to filthy, yellowed, dilapidated apartments, even after spending a week or more with nowhere to live in expectation of a clean, safe home.

Like many of the other policies collectively devised and enforced by Champaign-Urbana’s landlords, the August turnover period comes at the expense of student renters.

The same can be said for the yearlong leasing system that is the cause of the housing gap.

Because while students have many different needs for housing – semester-only leases, early move-in dates and even safe, clean apartments – landlords have a one-size-fits-all lease designed to maximize their profits at the expense of students.

This is true of most college campuses, but most campuses have something that Urbana-Champaign does not. They have May moving dates, a system with advantages for students.

The gradual movement of students from campus following finals and graduation means staggered move-in dates that allow renters to move from old apartment to new apartment, without the weeklong stop at their parents’ house.

Another advantage to May moving?

Aside from the unpleasant experience of carrying boxes up and down stairs in the 90 degree heat of August, May leases also mean that graduating seniors don’t have sublessors or double the rent payments to worry about, a welcome thing for people concerned about securing jobs and joining the real world that exists far from Campustown.

A little flexibility would go a long way.

Semesterlong or yearlong leases would not only give poor college students a break, they would also help alleviate nightmares like the paperwork of multiple subleases on a single room.

They’d even give landlords the opportunity to properly clean and repair domiciles, a move that would benefit them in the long term because well-maintained properties are worth more.

Most importantly, a shift to flexible lease options by campus landlords would end the phenomenon of August homelessness.

So landlords, let me write in my own lease dates, and do your part to keep college students off the cold, mean streets.