Would you like to see our new house?

To my knowledge, most universities try pretty hard to buy up a bunch of property all around themselves, including houses. These houses are then occasionally made available for rent to people affiliated with the university; I have heard here at the UW that visiting scientists and other professionals in transit can get hooked up with such an abode, if you know the right people. It seems for the most part to be a kind of under-the-table thing -- I would imagine this is because the demand would be unbearable if it were made more public.

Well, they have this at the University of Delaware, too, only even better from our point-of-view. Their rental houses are actually organized into a program that specifically caters to new faculty or staff hires. Dad says that a newer professor in the Geography Department actually lived in one of these places for the past two years while he saved up a down payment to buy his wifey and two babies a place to live. The university, being big and rich and beneficent, can offer these houses to rent apparently way below market value. The coolest of all? They've organized all these houses into a web page that has pictures of them, descriptions of the rooms, and even floorplans for some. And, to my understanding, all of them are within walking distance of the University. How cool is that?