Housing crunch stymies students
If they can’t find housing, it can impact our applications and our enrolment. It’s a retention issue for us as a university.
Thousands of students heading back to college and university who couldn’t get into residence are struggling to find housing in an increasingly hot rental market.
The University of B.C. has a waiting list of around 6,000 students for a spot in residence, said Andrew Parr, managing director of student housing and hospitality services.
Officials won’t know the exact number until late September, but at this time last year there were 6,300 more students in need of housing than the university could accommodate, he said.
Parr expects that number to be down slightly this year because UBC will open a new 1,047-bed residence called Orchard Commons on the weekend.
Because UBC guarantees every first-year undergraduate a spot in residence, the demand is mostly from second, third and fourth-year students.
Demand for residence spots has increased in recent years both because the UBC student population is growing and because there are fewer and fewer affordable offcampus options, as homes with rentable basement suites on the west side of Vancouver have been torn down and replaced with homes without suites, Parr said. The few suites that remain are often unaffordable for students, he added.
A quick look at online rental listings suggests students can expect to pay at least $800 to $900 a month for shared accommodation on the west side of Vancouver, if they are able to find a room. That compares with between $630 and about $850 for residence.
Across town on Burnaby Mountain, Simon Fraser University’s housing director describes residences as “beyond full.”
Waiting lists for residence spots have skyrocketed to more than 800 this year from just 100 in 2014, said Tracey Mason-Innes, SFU’s director of housing and residence.
As housing in the region becomes less affordable, students are hoping to stay in residence longer, she said.
“It’s no longer first years, it’s everyone looking for housing. It used to be … people would just want to live here for their first and second years, but now everyone needs something.”
The housing shortage can also affect the university’s competitiveness, she added.
“If they can’t find housing, it can impact our applications and our enrolment. It’s a retention issue for us as a university.”
In Victoria, Green party MLA Andrew Weaver, who represents the Oak Bay-Gordon Head riding that is home to both the University of Victoria and one of the campuses of Camosun College, analyzed every Craigslist rental listing in the area on Aug. 9 with the help of his staff.
He found 106 listings, of which 29 fit his “vaguely affordable cutoff” of less than $1,000 a month per person.
This is concerning given that the University of Victoria alone enrols more than 21,000 students, but has just 2,300 residence beds and 180 family housing units, he said.