Landing a room in a university residence after first year is like winning the lottery: celebrate if you get it, because your odds are slim to none. Sometimes, it actually involves winning a lottery, held by the university housing office.

Most universities fill what residence rooms they have with first-year students, and most universities don’t even have enough residence rooms for them, let alone for upper-years. That means that the average student probably won’t be living in res, even if he or she wants to. So prepare yourself now: unless you keep on boarding with Mom and Dad, you will(eventually or immediately)be living off-campus.

Most university towns have an area where high concentrations of students live in houses near the campus, informally known as student ghettos. One of the most famous is the Queen’s Ghetto in Kingston. A large area bordering the north of the Queen’s campus, it is a neighbourhood of Second World War-era housing whose population consists almost exclusively of Queen’s students. Landlords rent to groups of students, with four to 16 per house. Some houses convert dining rooms, living rooms, salons and basements into bedrooms to maximize the number of tenants in each house. Some student housing in the Queen’s Ghetto is great. And some is very, very not great.

“Students need to better educate themselves,” says Kaitlyn Young, municipal affairs commissioner for the Alma Mater Society, the undergraduate student union at Queen’s. The AMS is one of the more active student unions in educating students and the community at large about housing issues. And one of their initiatives to improve the quality of housing is the Student Property Assessment Team(SPAT).

SPAT members are student volunteers, trained by city officials to recognize bylaw and housing standard violations. The service is free of charge and designed to make it easier for students to get housing problems fixed. The team inspects housing and writes a report of all violations they find. “Students can then take that report to their landlord to get them to fix the house,” says Young. If that does not work, they can call the city inspector who can issue an order for the landlord to fix the rental property.

Each year, the Queen’s team also awards two prizes: the Golden Cockroach for the worst rental property in the Ghetto, and the Key to The Ghetto for the best. During the winter months, students are invited to send in their nominations. Last year, SPAT volunteers found students living in rooms with mould, exposed radiators, cockroaches and mice. Many places also suffered from broken windows, missing screens, missing handrails, slanted floors, unsafe staircases and other instances of disrepair.

The awards, and the negative attention they bring to a bad landlord, may be having an effect. Take Peter Holmes, a 2006 runner-up for the Golden Cockroach. This year, he wanted people to know that he’d received the message. “[He] came in the next year with completed work orders,” says Young, “to show that he had vastly improved his properties.” This year, a Holmes home was a nominee for the Key to the Ghetto.

Phil Lam, winner of the 2006 Golden Cockroach, is a whole other story. His property at 286 Queen Street was deemed the worst student rental by the AMS—for the second year in a row. Tenants complained of a mouldy bathroom, cracked and slanted floors and a fly infested fan.

Lam, in emails to the Queen’s Journal, has repeatedly denied that he is a poor landlord. He says that he believes “the service I offer is as good as any other landlord,” and says that none of his tenants have complained. Lam says that he just gets more attention than other landlords because he owns many properties.

But in part because of the Golden Cockroach, Lam’s name has become synonymous with poor housing. The AMS website even has a page advising students to call them when dealing with Lam—perhaps because both of last year’s runners-up for Golden Cockroach were also properties owned by Lam. “We are really, really hoping that he doesn’t win it again,” says Young.

Not everyone believes that the stigma of the Golden Cockroach is enough to improve student housing in Kingston. “Students won’t get better housing until they learn what housing entails,” says Anna Mehler Paperny, editor-in-chief of the Queen’s Journal, the student newspaper. “Because people call it the ‘Ghetto’ [students] assume that should be living in bad housing.” Paperny says the real challenge is getting students to stop accepting sub-standard, below-code housing. She says students have to stop jumping into leases because they believe that there is a housing shortage.