Animal McMansion: Students Trade Dorm for Suburban Luxury

With hundreds of homes standing empty, many of them likely foreclosures, students willing to share houses have been “a blessing,” said Ellie Wooten, a former mayor of Merced and a real estate broker. Five students paying $200 a month each trump families who cannot afford more than $800 a month.

The university’s free transit system, Cat Tracks, stops at student-heavy subdivisions. There are also limitless creative possibilities, with décor ranging from a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority bedroom motif to an archetypal male nightstand overflowing with empty bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Not all neighbors are amused.

“Everybody on this street is underwater and can’t see any relief,” said John Angus, an out-of-work English teacher who paid $532,000 for a house that is now worth $221,000. “This was supposed to be an edge-of-town, Desperate Housewifey community,” he said. “These students are the reverse.”

Mr. Angus pays $3,000 a month, while student neighbors pay one-tenth of that. “I think they’re the luckiest students I’ve ever come across,” he said somewhat bitterly.

Nevertheless, students quickly learn that the cul-de-sac life is not risk-free. Lance Eber, the crime analyst for the Merced Police Department, said vacant houses were frequent targets of theft, most recently of copper wiring. They also attract squatters, who sometimes encamp beneath covered patios, he said.

Ms. Wooten related a cautionary tale about four students living in a house foreclosed by a bank who continued to send rent checks to an owner who had skipped town. When the bank gave them two weeks’ notice to move out, the students went into Erin Brockovich mode and researched their legal rights. “It bought them at least three months,” Ms. Wooten said. “By golly, they’re still there.”

She added, “There are some odd scenarios going on around here.”

They include the case of absentee landlord parents like Rhonda Castillo and her husband, who bought a house for their son, Jason, when times were flush in 2005. Jason was in the first class at the Merced campus.

The untimely investment was ultimately less important than “an investment in our son,” Mrs. Castillo said. “It gave him a preview of real life: buying groceries, preparing food, doing the laundry and taking care of the yard.” (He is now in medical school, and four female students rent the house.)

Indeed, managing a four- or five-bedroom house — not to mention all the cars — can be tricky business for young people.

Sitting in her kitchen, a planet of granite, Katilyn McIntire, a human biology major, explained how she and her four roommates rotated cars — one parks on the street, two park in the garage and two in the driveway. Whoever is getting up for an 8 a.m. class parks last. After an unsuccessful attempt at tending the yard with a hand mower, they now pay $50 a month to a gardener.

The student equivalent of “keeping up with the Joneses” has emerged, too.

Jaron Brandon, a sophomore and a senator in the student government, does his homework in the Jacuzzi in his six-bedroom house, on a waterproof countertop that he rigged over the tub.

Seeking housemates, he posted a beguiling ad on Craigslist: “For a small amount more than a nameless house in the suburbs,” it read, “you could be living in a mansion right by school.”