■ LACK OF STUDENT HOUSING:
The B.C. government boasted last week it had lured far more foreign students per capita than anywhere else in Canada — 130,000 — claiming they inject $2 billion each year into the economy, creating 29,000 jobs.
“These students enhance our global perspectives and connections, and their presence helps lay the groundwork for a prosperous and economically diverse future for B.C.,” Advanced Education Minister Andrew Wilkinson said.
What Wilkinson didn’t say about the B.C. jobs plan, however, is it has virtually no strategy to house foreign students, whose numbers have exceeded the government’s targets. The volume of foreign students has jumped by 44,000 in the past five years.
That has many people worried in Metro Vancouver, which is the chosen city for four out of five B.C. foreign students and where municipal politicians say the rental vacancy rate is one of the worst in the world.
The Metro regional district reports the rental vacancy rate dropped for the fourth straight year to just 0.7 per cent in 2016, which means only seven units out of 1,000 are available at any time.
“We have drastically increased demand with foreign students at the same time rental vacancies are almost non-existent,” said Gary Liu, a research scientist and foreign-student tutor who is also a director with the community organization Housing Action for Local Taxpayers.
“Rents are going straight up, but the provincial government is doing nothing. It’s a gigantic failure on their part,” Liu said.
Simon Fraser University urban studies Prof. Wu Qiyan said increased foreign-student pressure on the rental and housing markets is part of the “studentification” of key neighbourhoods in globalized cities, such as London and Metro Vancouver.
“They definitely affect the rental market. Only a small proportion of international students have a family that can afford to buy a place for them in Metro Vancouver,” Qiyan said.
As international students move into neighbourhoods near schools and universities, Wu’s research found rents and housing prices go up and other residents are pushed out due to differences in lifestyle and available services.
Data provided by the Metro district shows foreign students make up roughly two-thirds of the 172,000 non-permanent residents in B.C., a category that includes spouses of foreign students and temporary foreign workers.
Half the province’s non-permanent residents are between the ages of 16 and 24, and four out of five live in Metro, according to Statistics Canada.
Since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has moved to tighten immigration policy, many higher-education officials, including University of B.C. president Santa Ono, have said they expect another hike in the number of international students who want to study in Canada.
B.C.’s public universities and colleges provide campus housing for only a fraction of the 130,000 foreign students, 51,000 of whom are from mainland China, 13,000 from Korea and 12,000 from India.
Even though UBC’s Vancouver campus provides by far the most residential beds at 10,000, they’re divided roughly equally between domestic and international students.
Meanwhile, more than 68,000 additional foreign students attend scores of small private colleges, mostly in Metro, which were created almost exclusively for them.
However, the government agency that oversees these private enterprises, the Private Career Institute Training Branch, has said it doesn’t collect data on where international students find housing.
According to Statistics Canada, about 350,000 of Metro’s roughly one million households are rental units. Metro officials don’t have a breakdown on where international students reside, whether in rental units, with families or in purchased dwellings.
Wu, however, has found the most student pressure on rental housing is in downtown Vancouver, the west side of Vancouver, Burnaby and Coquitlam. Local rental costs, he said, have risen dramatically since 2008.
Since foreign students, Wu said, generally come from offshore families that are more wealthy than domestic students, they’re often able to outbid local students for rental units.
To alleviate the stress on the rental market, both Lui and Wu said they support the City of Vancouver’s tax on empty dwellings. A census-based report last week by SFU city program director Andy Yan said the city contains a record 25,000 empty or underused dwellings.
But the hollowing-out phenomenon is spreading throughout the region. Yan found more than 67,000 empty or underused dwellings throughout Metro, almost seven per cent of the total housing stock.
In addition, Yan’s discovered more than eight per cent of the city of Vancouver’s households are either unoccupied or occupied by foreign residents, with the Metro Vancouver rate over six per cent.
It’s imperative, Lui said, that the B.C. government make legislative reforms to allow all the municipalities of Metro, not just the City of Vancouver, to tax empty dwellings so owners will be motivated to rent them out.
In addition, Wu said he supports encouraging condo strata councils to change more owner-occupied units into rentals.
We have drastically increased demand with foreign students at the same time rental vacancies are almost non-existent.