Tonight, a room full of LOU community members, representing Lafayette County, the City of Oxford, and the University of Mississippi, gathered at Oxford-University United Methodist Church for a Braver Angels debate on affordable housing, organized by Dr. Graham Bodie and his graduate students at Ole Miss. The resolution on the table: Does the partnership between Lafayette County, the City of Oxford, and the University of Mississippi deserve a good grade for how it has addressed the housing crisis?
My answer is that you can't grade a partnership that doesn't exist.
I've been on Oxford's Affordable Housing Commission since its founding, and I currently serve as chair. I've sat in those meetings month after month. And off the top of my head, I can only think of one time that someone from a higher level of the university ever showed up. One time.
That's not a partnership. That's not even an unspoken one.
To be fair to the county and the city, I do believe they make genuine efforts to work together on housing. There are real conversations happening between those two bodies, real attempts to address a problem that gets harder every year. Could our efforts be stronger? Yes. But the direction is right, and there is a genuine push to do more. That deserves acknowledgment. The resolution asked us to grade all three, and when one of the three isn't in the room, the grade has to reflect that.
What makes the university's absence so striking is that the university is central to how we got here in the first place.
Oxford is not a typical market, and honestly, without the university, Oxford would be just another small North Mississippi town like Coldwater or Grenada. The university is the reason Oxford is what it is. It is also the reason the housing market is where it is. Students have always lived off campus to some degree, but it used to be more of a privilege than a given. Freshmen were required to live on campus, upperclassmen had the option to stay, and the university once maintained housing for faculty and international students as well. Over the last 20 years, the university has eliminated both the faculty housing and most of the international student housing. The student dorms are still there, but the options that kept non-student residents out of the rental market are gone. As enrollment grew, as sporting events multiplied, and as the university recruited more out-of-state students from affluent areas, the demand for off-campus housing exploded with it. Those students came into the same market where teachers, firefighters, restaurant workers, and long-term Oxford families are trying to find a place to live.
That's not a criticism of the university's academic mission. Growing enrollment, attracting talented students, building a nationally competitive athletic program. Those are legitimate institutional goals. But they come with consequences for the community around them, and those consequences have names and faces. They're the people who can't afford to live in the town where they work.
Stuart Rutledge, who sits on the Affordable Housing Commission and has been developing affordable housing in Oxford for years, said something similar tonight. He wasn't alone. The room had people from a lot of different perspectives, and more than a few of them named the university's enrollment growth as a core driver of the problem.
What would a real partnership look like? It starts with the university being in the room. Not occasionally, not when it's convenient, but consistently. Sitting at the table where the hard conversations happen. Contributing resources, land, relationships, and institutional weight to the solution. Acknowledging that an institution that shapes the demand curve in this market has a responsibility to help manage the consequences of that demand.
The county and the city can't solve this alone. Developers like Stuart are doing what they can. The commission is working. But the largest institution in Lafayette County, the one whose growth decisions have the single biggest impact on this housing market, is largely absent from the effort to fix what those decisions helped break.
That's what tonight's debate surfaced, at least for me. Not that the partnership deserves a B minus or a C plus. But that the question itself was built on a premise worth sitting with. Before we grade the partnership, we should ask whether it actually exists.
Oxford deserves an honest answer to that question. So does everyone who can't afford to live here.
