Eleven per cent of University of Alberta students in Edmonton are skipping meals more than twice a week (another 13 per cent skip at least one meal a week), and the campus food bank is spending $10,000 on food per month to supply the demand, twice what it was last year, according to Abdul Abbasi, the vice-president of external relations for the school’s student union. A survey conducted by the union also found another 17 per cent of students had unstable housing situations in the last year, including evictions, homelessness and even sleeping in campus common areas because they have no place else to go. Mr. Abassi himself was working two jobs while attending U of A, and said that in the past two years the average rent of a two-bedroom house jumped more than $350 dollars per month.
“I spoke at city council last week that what needs to happen is there needs to be more money into affordable housing: students need two- and three-bedroom housing,” said Mr. Abbasi. Multiroom housing allows for roommates to share costs.
Meanwhile, in response to provincial budget cuts, U of A is raising tuition and planning to increase enrollment by as much as 20,000 students by 2033, which will create further demand for housing. The combination of costs is making it harder than ever to live and study according to Mr. Abbasi: “You want education to be a right instead of a privilege.”
From Vancouver to Halifax schools have faced education budget cuts, a shortage of on-campus housing and an increase in rental scams that prey on desperate students.
“We’ve seen a huge jump in people who were scammed, mostly international students who tried to sign a lease from abroad and then realized that person was fraudulent,” said Adia Giddings, a Masters student at Montreal’s Concordia University and an assistant manager of the Concordia Students Union’s Off-Campus Housing and Job Centre. The past two semesters have been particularly bad.
Ms. Giddings has also seen students unwittingly signing on with so-called “co-living” rental operators that pitch dorm-like living. “They say ‘I’m not living in a room; there’s a split book-case between two beds!’” she says.
Ms. Giddings said the CSU office tries to educate students on tenant rights in the province. For instance, landlords may demand upfront payments months in advance, despite rental deposits not being legal in Quebec.
Across the country rents of all types have been rising: The CMHC’s rental market report for 2023 found that purpose built rental apartment vacancy in Canada’s major population centres reached new all-time lows of 1.5 per cent with rents rising an average of 8 per cent (a new high).
Edmonton saw a 6.4 per cent increase in rental costs for two-bedroom units, while Montreal saw homes of that type surge 7.9 per cent. In Halifax, they rose 11 per cent.
Small art and design school NSCAD University made headlines in Nova Scotia last summer when it sought help finding housing for students from an emergency shelter organization that typically works with domestic abuse survivors.
“There’s a few things we’ve learned from last year,” said Andy Murdoch, with NSCAD’s office of university relations and advancement. Mr. Murdoch said the school – with just 900 students and no residence spaces – began reaching out to students much earlier than it did in 2023 to guide them through their house hunt.
“Over the last year Nova Scotia universities have really banded together on this,” he said. One of the new initiatives NSCAD undertook was to prebook a number of beds in a private residency company, which it holds in reserve for students struggling to find their own accommodations.
To relieve some of the pressure on local housing markets the Nova Scotia government included a mandate in its 2024 budget that all the higher education campuses needed to create on-campus housing space for 15 per cent of their student populations as part of a new education funding formula, something NSCAD is still negotiating on how it will achieve. A statement from Halifax’s largest university, Dalhousie, said the school has a 10-year plan to add more residence beds to it’s current total of about 2,700 for its more than 21,000 undergrad and postgraduate students.
Not that more residence beds necessarily solves a housing crisis: Over the past 15 years the University of British Columbia has continued to build out the largest on-campus residence system in the country – with about 14,000 beds – and still it faces a waiting list of more than 6,500 students seeking to live on campus.
According to Andrew Parr, associate vice-president of student housing and community services, the waitlist is actually down from the 8,000 looking for housing at this time last year.
“Fifteen years ago we had a waitlist about 3,200 students, and between 2010 and today we’ve built over 6,000 beds invested $700-million to do that,” said Mr. Parr, who said the days when students viewed residence as just an option for their first year is long gone. “Almost 75 per cent want to live on campus for the duration of their studies.”
Mr. Parr acknowledges UBC has had advantages many schools lack in terms of access to capital to fund its residency building: it’s been able to borrow against capital it gained by leveraging its land endowment through in a mix of neighbourhood developments in West Vancouver and uses residence fees to pay down construction loans, a process it continues today. “We have a pretty ambitious growth plan of another 4,800 beds in total at the two campuses,” said Mr. Parr.
However, last year the school raised its residence fees by as much as 5.5 per cent for some units – after the pandemic years where fees were frozen – and has plans to keep that rate of increase up for another couple years. The raises are another pinch on students, but at least UBC’s on-campus living is cheaper than the surrounding neighbourhood, which is part of Canada’s most expensive rental market.
SHANE DINGMAN
REAL ESTATE REPORTER
The Globe and Mail, July 10, 2024
