It is easy to point the finger at international students amidst the struggle to find affordable rent in urban centres across Canada. Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada welcomed 551,405 new international students into Canada last year. This number has steadily increased over the past decade, notwithstanding the pandemic years.
But adequate student housing initiatives, either from universities or various levels of government, have not accompanied this increase.
Some are calling on universities to reduce the number of student visas as rental rates continue to make headlines. The argument goes like this: students are almost always renters. As they arrive at a Canadian university, they compete with local workers and families to find a place to live. This makes housing harder to find, and drives the price up.
Excluded from the neighbourhood community
“Whenever these conversations come out, they do come with with a tinge of xenophobia,” said Luisa Sotomayor, professor of Urban Planning and Director of the City Institute at York University.
In public discourse on Canada’s housing market, international students are often put in a single category and then pitted against all other kinds of renters. These discussions, Sotomayor notes, also rarely consider the interests of international student renters themselves.
There is very little political will to consider those interests – international students are seen as temporary, and do not have any voting power.
The issue also is not totally exclusive to university students without Canadian citizenship.
“Student housing often gets framed in local politics [as] this very conflictual relationship between students and residents. You’ll notice that students are kind of considered to not be residents,” said Nick Revington, researcher at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique.
This framing trickles into public policy. It encourages more emphasis on preserving existing neighbourhood characteristics, and implicitly restricting where students can live, Revington explains.
International students are a vulnerable population
A stereotypical image might pop into one’s head at the mention of international students in Canada – a young person who is privileged, rich, cosmopolitan, and does not have much interest in integrating into their larger community in Canada.
After conducting focus groups with 233 international students in the Toronto region, however, Sotomayor says the stereotype is inaccurate.
“You find a number of very diverse and difficult life stories,” she said.
There are students who indeed come from privileged backgrounds. But there are also some who work two or three jobs to make ends meet. There are also mature students who are supporting family in Canada and abroad.
READ MORE: International students’ advantages and challenges
“It’s not a unified front. Being a student is not a class. Everyone becomes a student, if they can, at some moment of their lives,” Sotomayor said.
Furthermore, she noted, international students are some of the most vulnerable clients in the rental market. They are often unfamiliar with local laws and procedures. They might lack cultural competency. They might face language barriers. They might not have a valid credit score and guarantors in Canada to sign onto their lease. And if they are just arriving in Canada before the school year begins, students may have to race to find a place to live within the span of a few days.
International students are tools for university profits
Students without Canadian citizenship must also pay vastly higher tuition rates compared to domestic students.
Funding and policy guidelines for universities are under provincial jurisdiction. They might include restrictions on tuition increases, as BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, and Ontario have in place.
However, these restrictions do not apply to students from outside of Canada. Universities can increase international tuition rates as much as they want each year. Universities often turn to international student enrolment and tuition rates in order to cover shortages of government funding and inflating operating expenses.
“Student higher education is [viewed as] sort of an export,” explained Revington. “If you want to grow, you’ve got to attract international students.”
Of course, Revington notes, this view misses the fact that students come into Canada and become part of local communities.
“The rise in international recruitment has been done without any understanding of what the student needs to thrive, and to be integrated during their education years in Canada, said Sotomayor.
Everyone’s fault, no one’s responsibility
“As it stands, universities are incentivized to take on international students and not incentivized to build residences,” explained Revington.
Provinces have the power to set grants and funding models that encourage universities to focus on housing initiatives. But right now, those incentives are all but absent.
The federal government also has responsibility here, Sotomayor notes. The Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation used to provide low-interest loans and special grants for universities to build student housing, but they were discontinued in the 1960s.
Furthermore, since public funding for education has dropped around 40 per cent since the 1960s, Sotomayor notes, universities are not very likely to take on the task of creating adequate student housing themselves. When they do, they are likely to partner with for-profit developers, and turn out expensive units which many of their students cannot afford.
Solutions will come through cooperation
Sotomayor points to student-housing plans in Boston and across California as examples to follow.
The city of Boston aims to create 18,500 new dormitory beds, and reduce students living off-campus by 50 per cent, by 2030.
One key aspect of Boston’s initiative, Sotomayor notes, is that it was created in conversation between universities and the city. Planners work with projections of how many students to expect coming into the city, and how different trends such as remote learning impact where students live.
In Canada, Revington points to the city of Waterloo as a rare example of a Canadian city that has “taken the issue to heart.”
In 2012, the city launched a special urban development plan for the Northdale neighbourhood, which sits between Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier university. It changes zoning laws to allow higher density developments to address significant numbers of students living in the area.
The plan is not ideal, Revington notes – it depends on for-profit developers to provide housing for students, which still exposes them to unaffordable market rates.
Student unions can also take leadership in student housing initiatives. Revington points to the Concordia Student Union’s partnership with UTILE (L’unité de travail pour l’implantation de logement étudiant), a non-profit developer in Quebec. The student union collected a fee from its members, and leveraged other financial partnerships, in order to raise funds to develop accessible student housing with UTILE.
As politicians lack the willpower to consider international students’ interests, student unions and non-profits are one potentially promising way forward.
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