More than 8,000 new and returning University of Kentucky students arrived on campus between August 16 and 19 as Big Blue Move-In got underway, part of a total enrollment now topping 38,000, according to WUKY. The university has just over 8,500 on-campus beds, meaning the majority of that enrollment growth lands directly in Lexington’s off-campus rental market, a market the city says is already short more than 22,000 housing units overall.
That shortage isn’t an abstraction being debated in a planning document. It played out in public last November, when Lexington’s Urban County Council voted 8-7 against a zone change that would have allowed Core Spaces, a national student housing developer, to build a 322-unit, eight-story complex at Maxwell and Rose streets, a few blocks from campus. The vote followed a six-hour hearing that drew more than 50 public speakers and split the council almost evenly.
The arguments on each side of that vote map onto the exact tension defining college-town housing fights nationally. Vice Mayor Dan Wu voted for the project specifically because of the citywide shortage. “I voted yes for that zone change because I absolutely believe, and I don’t think anybody argues with this, we are in a housing crisis here in Lexington,” Wu said. “We’re nearly 23,000 housing units short of where we need to be. This proposal would have put about 1,000 beds in between downtown and campus.” District 4 Councilwoman Emma Curtis voted against it, arguing the project wouldn’t have addressed the actual affordability problem. “The University of Kentucky needs to spend less time finding new and innovative ways to discriminate against marginalized students and spend more time focusing on fixing the affordable student housing crisis that they have created in our city,” she said. Charlie Lanter, the city’s housing advocacy commissioner, summed up the bind both sides were navigating: “We could have benefited from these units, but also we would have benefited from any units of housing because our shortage is that dire.”…