<p>It’s a simple question of supply and demand. Lots of students want rental housing, most want it within easy walking distance of Central Campus, and there just isn’t that much space available. High demand + low supply = high price. Partly it’s just a physical footprint issue. The university itself takes up a lot of space with the Central Campus, Medical Campus, and South (Athletic) Campus, hard up against downtown Ann Arbor where most space is given over to commercial uses. The river forms a natural barrier to the north. The Arb and the cemetery form a barrier to the northeast, and there are high-end residential neighborhoods to the east and southeast that don’t want to absorb a lot of student housing. That leaves a pretty small footprint for rental housing development in the vicinity of Central Campus. The logical move is to make the available area more dense, but I suspect there’s a lot of opposition to density, too, because the city just doesn’t have the infrastructure to support high density. So you’re stuck with high prices for the limited rental housing that’s available.</p>
<p>But it’s not as bad as New York or San Francisco.</p>