Editor, The story “Varsity students: Coping with housing shortage” (The New Times, August 13), was spot on. I was very pleased to see your newspaper bringing this issue to the attention of Rwandans. I think Rwanda’s real estate industry sees no attractive business opportunity in putting up accommodation facilities for students since it’s not profitable.Students demand inexpensive accommodation. In rooms designed for two students, sometimes you find as many as eight students in the room – six of those reside there illegally. The owner of the dormitory needs to collect rent from all eight of these students in order to make a profit. Instead, the owner gets rent from only two students as the other six are “ghosts” who do not officially even exist. This amount of rent is inadequate to even maintain the now-grossly-over-taxed dormitory in a state of good repair. Toilets meant for a small group of occupants are made to accommodate four times that many students. Of course, they break down four times as often. The real estate industry will find this market unattractive; legally, in terms of potential liability, and financially, in terms of revenues it will be able to collect from students.The solution to the problem lies with a piece of Japanese technology. Japan has invented what it calls “capsule hotels”. These are low cost per night, high-density hotels where each occupant is provided a capsule in which to spend the night that is not much larger than a single bed, with no space to even stand. The capsule is easy to keep clean. It contains all the basic facilities – electric outlet, shelf, storage cabinet. Its great advantage for a university administration is that it is too small for a student to invite friends to “squat”. SFB is currently working on a proposal to JICA, the Japanese cooperation agency, requesting that it funds a pilot project for capsule dormitory housing at SFB. Professor Reid E. WhitlockRector, SFB
