High rent, low vacancy rates, and intense competition for rental units in cities like Vancouver and Toronto are making it increasingly difficult for students to find affordable housing.
A Globe and Mail article published Aug. 5 reported that students at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver had been forced into homelessness—sleeping on campus at night after being evicted from their rental units, unable to find new housing at reasonable prices.
Kerry Gold, a real estate journalist who wrote the article, said most people aren’t aware that student homelessness is an issue.
“I don’t think that the problem has been recognized. From talking to the students, they said they feel pretty invisible and nobody really knows what’s going on,” Gold said.
Whether it’s paying rent to a friend to sleep on their couch, living at home, or commuting hours to school, the Globe and Mail article states that many students are finding themselves forced to seek out non-traditional living arrangements to afford housing in expensive and competitive rental markets.
Tamara Jones, vice-president (equity) at the Ryerson Students’ Union, said that while she hasn’t encountered fellow students forced into homelessness, she knows many people living in less-than-adequate housing arrangements in the Toronto area.
“I’ve heard of like three, four people sharing two bedroom condos, or people having the living room as their bedroom just to cut costs on rent,” she said. “Personally, I pay around $720 a month for a room in a three bedroom apartment, and my room is the size of my office at the [Ryerson] student union.”
The rental apartment vacancy rate in central Toronto, where Ryerson is located, is 1.7 per cent, according to a 2015 rental market report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom unit in the area is $1,365.
Lack of affordable housing is a structural issue that contributes to homelessness, according to Stephen Gaetz, director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, a non-profit research institute.
“If you’re living with a partner and going to university and the relationship breaks up and you don’t have the resources to get a new place, you may wind up homeless,” Gaetz said.
“So it’s usually for individuals a confluence of a number of factors, but it all comes down to this—they don’t have enough money and they don’t have enough support to remain housed,” Gaetz added.
Jones said she feels students in major urban cities like Toronto are particularly vulnerable to housing insecurity.
“You’re 18, 19-years-old and you’re looking for a place downtown. There’s so much that we don’t know, and it’s so easy to take advantage of students in those situations,” Jones said.
Two of the students Gold interviewed about their homelessness for the Globe article said they were forced out of their rental accommodations by landlord “renoviction,” which means evicting tenants in order to upgrade a unit so the landlord can charge higher rent.
To evict a tenant on these grounds is a violation of Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, according to CMHC market analyst Andrew Scott.
“You can’t evict someone for the purpose of renovating and charging higher rents,” Scott said. “I think if tenants do know their rights, it is possible to fight these things.”
Jones said she feels that while most students aren’t aware of their rights as tenants, even those who are might be hesitant to exercise them.
“The rental market is so competitive that you might be kind of nervous that if you voice your concerns, you might get evicted, or they might not want you to re-sign the lease,” she said. “Or they’ll find someone else who isn’t going to make a fuss about certain things.”
However, Jones and Scott both agree education about the rental market and tenancy rights is an important first step for students looking for housing.
“I think that schools should be more involved in giving us the education that we need to live downtown, or to rent in general, maybe through workshops or seminars,” Jones said.
The CMHC provides information for renters on its website, including an outline of tenancy laws by province and data on average rents in different areas, so tenants know what appropriate rents to pay should look like.
Gold said her article on student homelessness was shared about 10,000 times.
“I think for millennials, it really spoke to that demographic. They don’t often get spoken for in the whole housing issue, because they don’t have a lot of money,” she said.
