With law school housing options slim, students turn to the Concord community to take them in

When Teddy Miele started taking classes at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce Law School, he lived just around the corner on Washington Street in Concord.

The apartment was not worth its fairly high rent, he said. At the end of the year, he moved out in pursuit of a better option. That search brought him back to his home in Massachusetts for the fall 2021 semester. With nothing affordable in Concord, he took his classes online.

Then, in a UNH Law Facebook group, Miele saw a post for a student sublet in a Victorian house on Rumford Street that provides rooms for students. He moved into Arnie Arnesen’s house for the spring semester.

“The process has been frustrating, to say the least,” he said. “I got lucky when I saw the advertisement for Arnie’s house.”

Arnesen’s home is three houses in one. The first floor is an Airbnb rental, the second floor houses students from the University of New Hampshire law school, and the third floor serves as Arnesen’s attic apartment.

It’s a puzzle of communal living – which is exactly how Arnesen intends it.

“I feel like my house is shrinking the world, one bedroom at a time,” she said.

For years, Arnesen has housed students from across the globe. Her bedrooms have served as bridges to understanding different cultures. She’s made an unfamiliar city and country feel like home, she said.

It also provides housing for law students at a time when housing shortages are impacting enrollment decisions. With no official housing provided by the school, students are turning to the Concord community to serve as their dorm.

Where to live?

A housing shortage in Concord is not a new narrative. With a 0.3% rental vacancy in Merrimack County, apartments can feel nearly impossible to come by.

Ahead of the school year, Megan Carpenter, the dean of the law school, saw some students defer their acceptance a year – the common reason: housing.

“Limited housing isn’t new to us, but it’s gotten worse over the last couple of years,” she said. “This year we’ve seen some serious challenges, which in some cases have dissuaded students from joining us.”

The law school, which is located in Concord by White Park, owns a small number of houses for students. Typically, students rely on renting from the same pool of landlords each year.

The school has a partnership with Places4Students.com, which allows landlords to post available rooms, as well as students looking to sublet a room or advertise their need for a roommate.

But in recent years, Carpenter said a few landlords that were reliable renters have sold their properties. For students moving to the Concord area for law school, it can be a blind leap of faith.

When Emily Bensadoun moved to Concord for school, she’d never been to New Hampshire before. She packed her car with all the belongings that would fit and hit the road from Tallahassee, Fla.

Bensadoun found her house on Facebook Marketplace. She’d seen pictures online and convinced her landlord to give her two weeks to find roommates to fill the other bedrooms.

“I had to blindly take it,” she said. “You’re kind of just settling when it comes to housing here.”

In hindsight, Bensadoun says she got lucky with her housing – the house is spacious and she found two other law students to live with her.

But the struggle to find a place, in addition to increasing costs, does not incentivize students to come to the school or stay after graduation.

“It makes it difficult when there is no housing,” she said. “How do you plan to live here if the most important thing is lacking?”

This is exactly what Carpenter fears. In an aging state that is trying to retain a young workforce, the law school holds a unique opportunity to attract new hires.

“The law school can be an economic engine to keep educated young professionals in the state,” she said.

Especially at a time when the state is facing a lack of attorneys, there are readily available jobs for Franklin Pierce graduates.

“We’re a really important economic driver to bring in talented individuals and train them to be future lawyers in the New Hampshire state bar,” she said.

Typically, there are houses that are passed down among law students, Bensadoun said. But as new class sizes grow, the number of students looking for housing has outpaced the rooms available from recent grads.

In 2022, the school welcomed its largest class, with 143 residential and 76 hybrid students enrolled. It is also the most diverse class the school has seen, positioning Franklin Pierce as the most diverse school in the University of New Hampshire system.

“As a law school, we are helping to change New Hampshire for the better,” Carpenter said. “If we can’t provide the housing that we need, as we make a legal education accessible to increasing numbers of people and types of people, then we need to be able to provide the infrastructure to support the change that we want to see in our state.”

Bensadoun wishes the school would provide housing infrastructure directly. She sees development of low-income housing in Concord and wishes the law school school would take on a similar project for its students or buy nearby properties.

The school has no such immediate plans, but Carpenter hopes that developers will see opportunity in housing law students.

Without enough housing for students, the onus falls on the Concord community, said Arnesen. She wishes other homeowners in Concord would consider taking in students in their spare bedrooms, like she’s done.

“It’s important that if (the law school) doesn’t have a dorm, then we become its dorm,” she said.

Life on Rumford Street

Standing in a downstairs bedroom, Arnesen said if her walls could talk, they’d have a lot to say.

“It would speak in many languages,” she said. “We’ve had people from China; we’ve had people from Norway.”

In housing law students over the past decade, she’s encountered people from all corners of the globe.

“I’ve learned about their culture because I had no choice. And I also learned how to accommodate my life and their lives,” she said. “Some of them have been very remote, and I know nothing about them. I know they sleep here, and I know they go to school. And then some become like my children.”

One of those students is Taskeen Aman, who graduated from the law school in May, arriving in 2019 as an international student from Pakistan.

She found Arnesen’s house through word of mouth – a friend suggested she move into a vacant room. She emailed Arnesen from Pakistan to inquire. They spoke on the phone, and Aman was convinced to move in.

“She is not only a landlady; she grew into a guardian, a mentor and eventually my friend,” she said.

Aman now calls Rumford Street her second home.

“The experience ended up being nothing short of just beautiful,” she said.

The second floor of Arnesen’s house is comprised of four bedrooms to house students. They have access to a shared bathroom and kitchen, as well as a living room.

She’s also decorated every inch of the home – from re-purposing her late aunt’s furniture to framing mementos of past politicians that have come through the house. Her walls remember stories of people past and present. It reminds her students of the people who once occupied the space and how they, too, will add to the memory bank.

“It’s important that they know that they have a home here, because I want them to take care of it as much as I care about it,” she said. “Therefore you can’t treat them like they’re just renting a room.”

She charges rent based on the size of the room, but she is also sensitive to a student’s income needs, so the price she sets for one guest may differ from another.

Opening her home isn’t new for Arnesen. Since her late husband Marty Capodice died of cancer in 2013, it’s served as a tribute to him and focus for her.

“In a way, I’m doing this for my husband, because my husband was such a social animal,” she said. “They help financially. They help emotionally. They keep you young.”

In the past few weeks, though, the increase in calls she’s received with pleas to house students is alarming.

“In the last eight days now, I’ve been called probably 14 times,” she said. “In one day, four people called. People need a place to live.”

With the increase in demand for student housing, Arnesen hopes other homeowners in Concord are willing to step up. She hopes her house can serve as an example for the benefit of taking students in.

“I want to role model what I do for other people to know they have an extra room to look at it that way,” she said. “It won’t be the end of your life if you rent to someone. It might actually enrich your life.”