Opposition calls for more rooms and summit on student housing

If Montreal wants to stay on top as the world’s best city for students, it needs to create 5,000 new rooms in student housing in the next seven years, the municipal opposition party said Thursday.

Opposition leader Lionel Perez said that while Montreal still compares favourably with many other cities for affordable housing for students, its rising popularity with international students is making it harder and harder for them to find decent places to live.

“There’s a shortage and we want to avoid it becoming a crisis,” Perez said at a news conference at city hall, where he and housing critic Karine Boivin-Roy called for a summit on student housing at the September start of the next academic year.

The Ensemble Montreal party will present a motion at Monday’s council meeting asking the city to hold the summit and adopt a plan for adding 5,000 rooms for students.

In a 2016 study, the Unité de travail pour l’implantation de logement étudiant (UTILE) found that students account for 20 per cent of the residents of the central Ville-Marie borough, visited by 150,000 students daily.

About a third of downtown students live in shared rentals with three or more bedrooms — a form of housing that is becoming increasingly hard to find, UTILE found.

And when it comes to large units, it noted that students are competing with families — a group Mayor Valérie Plante’s administration has vowed to attract back to the city centre.

Perez said there are 350,000 CÉGEP and university students in greater Montreal and that there’s a need for at least 4,000 new rooms to house those who don’t live with their parents.

Rosannie Filato, the executivecommittee member responsible for social and community development, said the administration is studying the opposition motion.

Last year, the U.K.-based higher-education analysts QS Quacquarelli Symonds named Montreal as the best city in the world for students, knocking Paris out of the top spot and beating London, Berlin, Boston and Tokyo. Vancouver was No. 10, while Toronto was No. 11.