How excess furniture during student housing transfers has impacted Davis
By NOAH HARRIS — features@theaggie.org
Many students at UC Davis choose to live off campus after a year in the dorms, dealing with the often-daunting task of finding and living in an apartment or house. For many students, their new residences are not furnished before they move in.
During the fast-paced graduation season and the new school year, it is likely that Davis residents will see furniture on the street, discarded while students hurry to move out and make way for the next batch of students who need their apartments to be furnished. One business trying to combat this problem is Community Mercantile, a non-profit organization that takes in secondhand items such as furniture, tools and books.
Lois Erhartic, a board member of Community Mercantile, described their company-wide mission.
“[We want to] keep things out of the landfill, to find ways to repurpose, reuse,” Erhartic said. “Anything but the landfill, because to reduce the waste and the toxins that come from that, [we need] to reduce the need to manufacture because of the waste that comes from manufacturing.”
Erhartic further described what their aim has been for the shop.
“Our point is not to have a thrift shop, our point is not to accumulate funds from a thrift shop,” Erhartic said. “Our point is to keep things out of the landfill.”
In late August and September of this year, Stephanie Koop, one of Community Mercantile’s founding members, held a garage sale outside. Erhartic was shocked at the garage sale and how quickly its contents were acquired.
“[There is] a video that I took probably around the last week of August, and it was things that Stephanie collected off the streets of Davis in one week, and I took a video of it,” Erhartic said. “It filled her garage, her driveway and […] her whole courtyard.”
While it might create a business opportunity for some, it is a violation of the city code to leave furniture and other items, such as mattresses, out on the street or sidewalk, according to the city of Davis. This can create hazards for bikers and pedestrians, and it can be visually appealing for the community.
However, there are options to move items that do not require selling or giving them away. At the end of May, the city of Davis sends out mail to every resident, giving them a one-time voucher to bring a car’s worth of discarded items to the county landfill to be recycled. However, while the Yolo County Landfill does have a thrift store, they do not take items such as upholstered furniture, mattresses and large appliances.
Last year in the U.S., about 900,000 fewer homes changed ownership than they do in a typical year, according to The New York Times, and the average American relocates 11.7 times in their lifetime, according to Nasdaq. However, Davis is different from most places, as first-year students tend to live in the dorms, while returning students are not guaranteed a spot in the residence halls. Many returning students live in off-campus apartments.
In one article from 2022, UC Davis asserts that 38% of students live on campus, including The Green at West Village, where first-year students do not typically live. Regardless, this means that a significant portion of UC Davis students will have moved at least twice — once into the dorms and again into a residence outside the dorms.
Kelli Ann O’Day, the assessment program manager with UC Davis Sustainability, explained what this means for the city.
“The turnover rate of people moving in and moving out with Davis is especially high because of the student population,” O’Day said. “When you’re [first] going to school, you think about [going] and then leaving. You don’t really think about the fact that there’s thousands of students every year kind of doing the same thing.”
Koop had an idea that the university could implement to save large items from going to the landfill.
“What I would like them to do is to provide a space for the students between graduation and when the new students move in in August, September and October, for the students moving out to place […] their used stuff there so that the new students can come in and either purchase them for a low price or just have them free,” Koop said.
When asked about implementing a space for secondhand items, O’Day had a positive reaction but was unsure about how that could become a reality.
“It feels like we have a really big campus,” O’Day said. “But as far as places where you could safely leave furniture and maybe protect it from the elements, could it be an outdoor place, or would it need to go inside? That would be a larger conversation.”
On Community Mercantile’s website, they state that they are not accepting donations until mid-November. There’s a simple explanation for their inability to do so, according to Erhartic.
“It’s space. It’s simply space, and we would like to find some bigger space that works within our budget when our lease is up, but nothing is a given,” Erhartic said.
Davis is certainly not the only place where this problem can be found. At UC Los Angeles, there are over 1,500 bulk pickup requests in late August during move-out time. This has created piles of large items laying outside, even blocking sidewalks with the sheer amount of furniture.
There are several options for giving away secondhand items in Davis, including Goodwill, the Yolo County SPCA and Facebook Marketplace. There is also an on-campus thrift store called the Aggie Reuse Store which is an option for secondhand clothes, school supplies and small appliances. However, they are a very small store and do not accept large appliances such as electronics or furniture.
Right now, there seems to be a slight disconnect in effectively reusing and giving away secondhand items in Davis. In the future, many residents such as O’Day, Erhartic and Koop hope that positive change will occur with collaboration between local businesses and local government. Hopefully soon, there will be a more productive solution to furniture-based waste in our community.
Written by: NOAH HARRIS — features@theaggie.org
