Iced Out

An investigation into Columbia Housing student-tenant’s rights violations.

By Rocky Rūb

Illustration by Ben Fu

Kimberly Boateng, CC ’25, returned to River Hall on Jan. 20 to a room without working heat. The entire building was facing a heating outage. In the following days, the temperatures dropped so low that Boateng, who is anemic, had to put on gloves just to step out into the hallways. She at one point went down to the laundry room, assuming that the dryers might dispel some extra heat. But the space was, same as the rest of the building, quite cold. Down the hall, in the building’s lounge, a thermostat was screwed into the wall just to the right of the door. Despite someone’s attempts at cranking the thermostat to the highest setting, the device recorded that the room’s temperature was in the 50s. 

Columbia Housing is responsible for the residences of 94% of the undergraduate population, meaning that they are the landlord to the roughly 5,600 students living in on-campus housing. The dormitory buildings are part of Columbia’s vast real estate portfolio as New York City’s largest private landowner. However, with a great architectural index, comes great responsibility.

By New York City law, all landlords must maintain an indoor temperature of 68 degrees from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. during the winter heating season. From the time a landlord is notified about heat issues during this period, they have 24 hours to fix the problem. Theoretically, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development “can fine the landlord $250–$500 per violation per day” for living conditions like those in River Hall. But since there was no way for students to individually check the temperatures of their room without a Housing Representative (or without individually purchasing a thermometer), there was no explicit evidence to prompt urgency from the city. Boateng made a futile call to NYC’s 311, the non-emergency hotline for city residents, but she never received a response.

Every student is familiar with housing horror stories. But lurking beneath each of these anecdotes are the legal responsibilities that our shared landlord seems to evade. 

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Temperatures in River Hall were ultimately stabilized this winter when the University hired a contractor to insulate the dorm room windows with tape and styrofoam. But before that, students were faced with complicated dilemmas: Another resident of River Hall, Muna Ali, CC ’25, described weighing the pros and cons of purchasing a space heater to combat the cold. Space heaters are a prohibited item in the Occupancy Agreement, and her housing status could be terminated if an accident were to occur. 

She recounted to me the story of Gianna Deveney, BC ’25, who in 2021 accidentally started a fire in her dorm while working on a class project. The Barnard Administration, found Deveney guilty for violating the fire safety and student conduct code, and her housing was revoked for the rest of her time at Barnard. (As it turns out, Brooks Hall was not equipped with an automatic sprinkler system when the fire broke out—the building hadn’t been substantially renovated since New York began requiring residential buildings to have a sprinkler system, so Barnard dodged all liability through the grandfather clause.)

In cases of student misconduct, the University is ready to throw the book but when the University is in violation, accountability seems to be little more than an ideal. The Barnard College Housing Contract reads, “The College, in its sole and absolute discretion, shall have the right to reassign a resident or cancel a Contract at any time when in the best interest of the residential community”. Barnard, in other words, can independently evict students from their on-campus housing should they choose to do so. Furthermore, these evictions can take place immediately, sometimes before disciplinary action takes place. And for students with nowhere else to go, the eviction becomes synonymous with academic suspension. The Columbia Housing Agreement, which The Blue and White obtained from Hartley Hospitality, has similar provisions. In a New York State tenant-landlord agreement, the language typically asserts that all parties agree on the established rules and responsibilities in the tenant-landlord relationship, executed with signatures from both parties. The Columbia Agreement astutely replaces all parties with you. Moreover, the University doesn’t sign this agreement; only the student who electronically marks with their initials and autograph is bound to the form. 

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When a student submits a service request, the order goes first to the Facilities Service Center to be logged in the management system and then assigned to the appropriate trade shops, prioritized depending on the severity of the issue, and then finally scheduled for work. 

For Alexandra Cochon, SEAS ’26, it all started with a leak trickling from her bathroom ceiling above the unit’s toilet. At first, the issue left her with little reason for anxiety: “It was just normal drops of water coming from the ceiling.” Housing came to look at it, saying they would send someone else to address the problem, and the leak seemed like it would be resolved before excessive damage could occur. But no one ever arrived. After four or five days of silence, the leaking water collected above the ceiling paint, causing the ceiling to sink in on itself. So Cochon called Housing, again, to report the issue. Days later, again with no response, the ceiling collapsed. When Cochon returned from winter break, she found her kitchen sink and the surrounding cabinets engulfed in water that had backed up in the pipes, drowning the kitchen while she was away. While waiting for Housing’s answer to the disaster, their kitchen sink began to flood again. Cochon did receive a response when she called the emergency housing line, and a representative came and fixed the pipe that was causing the water to back up and flood their residence. But they left pools of brown water in the kitchen that weren’t resolved for more than a week.

With State protections like the Warranty of Habitability, tenants can use their rent as a negotiating tool—either withholding it or suing for rent reduction to demand livable conditions—if the landlord demonstrates willful negligence. Instances of this legal obligation include but are not limited to, “no heat,” “water leaks or floods,” “mold,” and “peeling paint or plaster.” The Warranty is supposed to extend to students in on-campus housing. But tenant housing rights for students are complicated by the non-traditional rent payment structure of a student and their university compared to traditional tenant-landlord relationships. Students pay for their housing along with their tuition. They cannot withhold rent even if they experience these violations, and the Columbia Occupancy Agreement states that “Failure to make timely payments may result in cancellation of the Occupancy Agreement at the discretion of Housing.” Moreover, even in the instance of “system interruptions including but not limited to electrical, plumbing and elevator outages,” there will be no reductions in the cost of housing.

What follows these tumultuous service requests is a resounding silence at the other end of Housing’s phone line. Despite Housing providing around-the-clock assistance, students are often left in the dark on the status of their requests.

One resident of East Campus, CC ’25, who requested anonymity to maintain her privacy on campus, told me about mold growing from two different vents in her suite, alongside paint peeling from the bathroom ceiling. When the building super arrived almost a month after the service request, he came in to look at the bathroom, informed the residents he was only there to fix the peeling paint, put an “in-progress” sticker on their bathroom door, and never came back. Both service requests were marked as completed when neither requests were resolved.

The New York State Attorney General’s Office’s Residential Tenants’ Rights Guide maintains that all landlords fix damages to the tenant’s unit in a timely manner in accordance with the severity of the situation. In a rental unit, mold growth is classified as a “hazardous” condition, providing a landlord thirty days to exterminate the growth from the date they are notified. By marking the East Campus suite’s service request as complete, Housing pacified their own records of outstanding requests. But in reality, the requests were never resolved, and Housing failed to adhere to the timeline required by State law. 

It is assumed that Federal and State housing laws apply to universities located in these respective jurisdictions. But there rarely seems to be any record of upheld accountability. While the Tenants’ Rights Guide asserts that “tenants should bring complaints to the attention of their local housing officials”, there seems to be no clear outlet for students to report incidents like heating outages, recurring water damage, and mold growth, or to assert their rights as tenants, besides by bringing complaints to the very body committing the violation. Our local housing official has guaranteed, through the absence of rent-leverage and with provisions in the Columbia Occupancy Agreement, that if complaints go unresolved, the extent of tenant legal action is sparse. Without a clear framework of accountability, students have to rely on the altruism of Housing to protect them from hazardous conditions. And, unlike housing rights, ideals are not legally binding.