Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
They’re a big part of the rental crisis in cities with rapidly growing student populations. 620k a year (up from 120k in 2000) concentrated in universities that haven’t built nearly enough residential housing is absolutely a problem in small cities like London, Kingston, and Halifax. The CBC has even done stories about it. Weirdly.
Is it really off-base to talk about the how the number of people who need housing affects the cost of housing? Landlords are going to charge what they can. And they can charge more when the number of people who need housing increases faster than new housing is built.
If we want to safeguard students from ‘profiteering’ landlords (are there non-profiteering landlords?), then universities need to build far more student residences. But they haven’t - they’ve dramatically increased their intake of international students in the last 20 years because they can charge three times the tuition as they charge domestic students, without a corresponding increase in student housing capacity. They get the benefit of international students (more $$$), while offloading the infrastructure costs on municipalities and leaving students vulnerable to housing markets that can’t cope with the influx.
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I do feel your pain. Where I work we actually require that students live on campus for the first year (2 years?) or commute from home. That worked great for a while, but we're growing quickly and we had to build 3...yes, 3 new residence buildings in the last 5 years. There are plans to tear down and rebuild another one to increase capacity on the same plot of land (building is also from the 60's and is really not in good shape now too). In order to make it happen faster, we actually partnered with a private company to share the cost of building and then any profit above cost of operations with them. These are the sorts of innovative solutions required to make this work these days, and the only way we can manage it is because we are a fairly small private school (though, not that small anymore).
It's just an issue to do with cost of living across the board. It's hard for schools to deliver affordable housing.