The Buffalo News – Roughing it on campus

The Buffalo News – UB camper decides to retreat from nature

The Spectrum – Homeless, not hopeless

The person I interviewed for this piece, we’ll call him Jim, is a college student at an American public university. He is an academic, comes from a family who lives in a small town, and previously lived in a sizable apartment. In this recession the college students have not been spared entirely – Jim has no job and could not afford to live in his apartment anymore. When his lease ran up he moved out – with an interesting plan.

Jim planned to live temporarily on a mattress in the stairwell of an academic building. As the weather got better, he planned to build himself a shack in the woods – just a very small place to stay. It has been a few weeks that he has been living now in the stairwell. He stands the mattress up against the wall during the day and no one seems to mess with it. He has tried to remain an unknown guest in the building – but some construction workers know of his presence, although they don’t seem to bother him.

I asked whether he ever thought this was an insane move. He recounted a story to me of a couple of days ago – Jim had fallen asleep in a couple of chairs in a lab room, and woke up around 4AM. It was at this time he questioned the sanity of it all – he expressed his train of thought to me: “This is madness, you just woke up at 4:00am in a lab, you are about to go sleep in a mattress you loaded into a 4th floor stairwell, you are building a cabin in the woods.” He said it reminded him of a MAD TV sketch.

None of this seems to change his mind about what he should be doing though.

Jim did have some entertaining stories to tell about his living in the stairwell though. One day he approached his mattress – set off to the side of the stairwell as usual – and he found written on the side in black permanent marker “Lowest Budget Student Housing” and a dollar twenty-five left on top of it. Perhaps stairwell living is profitable he thought.

We at The Recession Blog would like to wish Jim the best of luck, and will be checking in with him in the future to find out how his living arrangements are progressing!