Metro Atlanta college students facing housing shortage as classes set to begin

ATLANTA - The new school year is about to start, and a lot of college students in metro Atlanta are still trying to figure out where they're going to live.

Schools like Georgia State and Georgia Tech say enrollment rates, coupled with Atlanta's hot housing market, have created a perfect storm.

Right now, Georgia State University has more than 1,000 students waiting to get into housing, but the problem isn’t just isolated to here at GSU. 

 It’s really really expensive to live in housing, and it’s actually hard to get on the waitlist," Georgia State senior Amar Shivers told FOX 5's Rob Dirienzo.

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Georgia Tech's website says the university is at capacity, so kids will have to join a waitlist. This is leaving some college students scrambling to find places to stay.

"It’s very limited around here. It’s really full," junior Brittany O'Neal said.

A similar situation is happening at both Kennesaw State University's Marietta and Kennesaw campuses.

At Georgia State, the waitlist got so long they had to turn it off for the fall semester.

"Once I found out that numerous people were struggling to get into housing, I kind of just swapped out and didn’t even want to do it and just look for other options," Shivers said.

He says he just went and found an off-campus place of his own, but with Atlanta's housing market, it hasn't been cheap. The spots near the university can start at $1,800 a month.

"I know that rent prices are crazy, and it’s just a very competitive market, so I have a lot of friends that post-graduation had to move back home because they couldn’t afford to live in Atlanta," recent graduate Nicole Jacobs says.

O'Neal eventually decided to stay with her family in Decatur and commute to campus.

"It’s very comfortable feeling, and you don’t have to feel like overwhelmed," she said.

Colleges across the country say they're dealing with similar issues post-COVID, with many students looking to get the in-person experience the pandemic deprived them of.

"We’re just stepping in the world like, this is our launching pad getting into the world and inflation is really bothering that. So we have to do better," Shivers said.

A lot of the students are up against the clock - especially at GSU's campus where classes begin in a little more than two weeks.