“It’s an open secret,” said Tayo, a third-year PhD student at the University of Cambridge. “Many PhD students don’t live here,” he continued. He’s right. And it’s no secret.

When I first arrived in the city as a student in 2022, I felt the eerie stillness of buildings that seemed never to be bustling, of forgotten lawns and sad libraries. I thought, Cambridge has a people problem; they’re all holed up in their rooms. But, while this explains some of the stillness, Cambridge has a bigger problem – Cambridge has a housing problem.

“As for a future in Cambridge, they just can’t afford it”

The city’s housing is unaffordable. The Greater Cambridge Housing Strategy declares that the city is expensive for renters and home buyers alike while admitting that its “affordable” housing is anything but. It states there is an “affordability gap,” which is a fancy way of saying that even the middle classes can’t afford to live here. The average house price is just over half a million pounds and rising. A single person would need a £100,000 salary to afford a mortgage on this. And the situation is no better for first-time buyers, who fork out on average £430,000 on their first property. Flats and terraced houses, likely to be most popular with first-time buyers, in Greater Cambridge have the highest annual price increase of any type of home.

All of this in a city that in recent years has earned the unfortunate accolade of not only being the most unequal in Britain but also the most income-segregated. As such, Cambridge is now a city for the rich. The recent announcement of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc looks set to make the housing situation worse, as Cambridge is transformed into the “Silicon Valley” of East Anglia. Though the Minister for Housing and Planning, Matthew Pennycook, stressed the importance of building “essential housing” in Cambridge, if they cost anything like the new builds in Eddington cost, they will only increase inequality and segregation in the city.

No wonder Tayo doesn’t see himself in Cambridge after graduation. “The salaries are very low, and the housing is expensive,” he says. Though Cambridge academic salaries are in line with UK averages, Tayo believes that Cambridge worsens the situation - “you have to deal with a poor salary in an expensive city.” And on this, he is right again. London academics face the same high housing costs, but they are paid more. With academic salaries being what they are, even Cambridge’s top professors would struggle to get on the city’s property ladder. What sort of prospect is that for a young graduate? But it is not just the city’s high house prices that make it uninviting, its high rents and scarcity of rental properties are having that effect too. It was the combination of these two factors that pushed Nathan, a PhD Student at the Judge Business School, all the way out to Peterborough. At £1,755 a month, the average private rent in Cambridge far exceeds national and regional averages. In many places, rents exceed those in London, making most private properties out of the reach of students.

“There was absolutely nothing in the city that was within his budget”

But Nathan notes there are more than just financial barriers. Salary and guarantor requirements are often designed to exclude students, and then there’s what he calls “the rush.” Even if you’re ready to pay the high rent and meet all requirements, “I’d hear that I’m like 24th on the list for the viewing…that was the part that really broke me.” Tasha, another full scholarship holder and a mother, told me that some estate agents even make you pay a non-refundable deposit just to view a property.

Some may say that, as colleges house students, the private market doesn’t really need to be accommodating. But colleges increasingly don’t house all students: many postgraduates are kicked out after two or three years. Tayo’s problems began when he dared to go on fieldwork. He was warned by his College: housing on your return isn’t guaranteed. He heard it, but couldn’t for a second imagine that a student returning from fieldwork would be told by his College tutor to stay in the field or go home (that is, back to Africa) because there was no affordable housing in Cambridge. But that’s what happened to him. There was absolutely nothing in the city that was within his budget.

“In many places, rents exceed those in London”

And framing college landowning as the antidote to a difficult housing market is to misunderstand Cambridge. While it has been debunked that you can walk from London to Cambridge on Trinity College land alone, this useful fiction makes an important point – the colleges are powerful landowners. You almost can’t make it across town on anything but college land. This dominance is what creates the scarcity that drives up private rents.

Tayo’s shock was almost as profound as Tasha’s when she discovered that her College’s “family accommodation” didn’t accommodate children. Under pressure, she began exploring the private sector. She found that many landlords didn’t like students, especially those with children. But even without this, the properties weren’t affordable. “I had to increase my budget significantly,” she said. All of this is because the colleges don’t house all their students, and their land dominance in the city creates a scarcity that makes private rents unaffordable. Colleges must reconsider the ethics of admitting students they can’t house, and must ease their grip on land in Cambridgeshire; freeing up land for development.

Cambridge City Council is aware of the problems, as housing issues not only plague students, who are thrown to the market by colleges but plague the poorest residents of the city. A 2024 report acknowledged that “the affordability problem [is] particularly acute for those on low incomes.” This is difficult to hear given the recent judgement from the Regulator of Social Housing that the city has been overcharging its social housing residents, adding to the sense that both the Council and the colleges don’t understand the extent of the housing trauma experienced by the city’s most vulnerable residents.

The city is a victim of its success, with the Council accepting that the crisis is “fuelled by the strength of the local economy and in-migration of highly skilled workers,” all of this fuelled by the prestige brought to the city by its emerging graduates. It is a sad irony that the very presence of the University is what makes the city’s housing unaffordable for its students and poorest residents, seriously challenging the notion of education as a tool of social elevation.

The Council is building though. Innovative “build to rent” and “rent to buy” schemes will go some way to making the city more attractive to renters and first-time buyers. But the progress is slow and expensive. Some of this is due to planning, which the government is addressing nationwide, but some is due to the Council’s high sustainability standards. According to one house builder, reaching this standard in new builds adds 8% to construction costs, further driving up prices.

It is no surprise then that so many PhD students don’t call Cambridge home. With nowhere to go and rents out of control, many leave for London or Peterborough, or even their home countries. This is no secret. As for a future in Cambridge, they just can’t afford it. The Council talk a lot about place-building, about the need to reduce income segregation - this needs to manifest in real change. The University must think about this too. If postgraduates can’t live here, the city is destined to become one of forgotten lawns and sad libraries - surely not a fitting site for innovation.

*Some of the names in the article have been changed