Two years ago, when the BC Liberals were still in power and refusing to address the housing crisis, I wrote in to the Times Colonist calling on the provincial government to at least get out of the way and allow universities to build more on-campus student housing.
I had recently met with two UVic students, whose story brought home to me just how critical the rental housing situation had become. These two young men couldn’t get into on-campus housing and were forced to take a basement suite with unacceptable living conditions. They showed me a picture of the “wall” separating their bedrooms. It was a piece of plywood, hastily slapped up to make one bedroom into two. That image stayed with me.
Institutions like UVic, UBC and SFU had been pleading for years with the provincial government for the greenlight to build more on-campus housing. They had the land and the projects were entirely self-funded, but provincial accounting rules prevented them from borrowing the money for construction.
It should have been a fairly easy fix, but the BC Liberals weren’t listening, and not only refused to allow universities to address the housing crisis but in 16 years only built 130 student housing spaces across the entire province.
Meanwhile, vacancy rates plummeted, rents skyrocketed, and too many students, families and others struggled to find an affordable place to live. Many of them were forced – like these two UVic students – to accept unsafe and inadequate housing.
It wasn’t always like this. When I attended UVic in the 1990’s my roommate and I paid $500 per month for a 2-bedroom apartment, and with the vacancy rate at 4% it was easy to find a place on a bus route. Victoria’s vacancy rate is now just over 1%, and the average cost of a small bachelor suite is over $1,000 per month. It’s worse in places like Vancouver.
This has been a struggle not just for students, but for most renters in Greater Victoria and other university towns, who have to compete with students every year for a limited number of rental units.
If you rent in Victoria, you’ll know that the worst time to look for a new place is in August and September, when thousands of out-of-town students pour into Victoria looking for a place to live. In fact, 75% of UVic’s 22,000 students are from outside of Greater Victoria.
And with such huge demand, rents have gone way up, and it has tempted some landlords to “renovict” tenants in order to make cosmetic upgrades and further jack up the rent.
This happened to the woman in her seventies who came to my office several years ago to tell me her story. She had been renovicted from the apartment where she had lived for twenty years, but on a fixed income, she was unable to find anything in her price range. Shockingly, she was reduced to living in her van.
When our grandmothers find themselves homeless, something has gone seriously wrong.
The previous BC Liberal government should have acted on the crisis much sooner. Allowing universities to build more on-campus housing would have been an easy step to take. It is self-financed through student rental fees and literally costs the taxpayer nothing, so it should have been a no-brainer.
But, like the rest of the housing crisis in BC, student housing was never a priority for the previous BC Liberal government. We can only speculate as to why.
So I was thrilled to be at UVic on November 15th when our government announced that the university would be using our new BC Student Housing Loan Program to expand on-campus housing by 25% – a net gain of 620 units.
Excitement was all around as @UVic students celebrated Premier @jjhorgan announcing new on-campus housing that will accommodate 620 new students, easing the stress to find housing to allow for more focus on school #BCpse https://t.co/8soF3P5GbL
— Rob Fleming (@Rob_Fleming) November 15, 2018
This is huge news for students at UVic – where 4 out of every 5 applications for on-campus housing are turned down due to lack of space. But it’s also important news for other renters because giving colleges and universities the tools they need to build more student housing will help free up housing for other renters.
When both UVic residence buildings are complete by fall 2024, over 600 units of housing will be freed up in Greater Victoria. These buildings will be built to passive house standards, one of the most energy efficient building standards in the world. The residence buildings will use 75% less energy for heating and cooling and 50% less overall energy than a typical building.
And it’s not just one bedroom apartments that will become more available; currently, many students rent full houses together, reducing the availability of family-friendly rentals. This new on-campus housing will release a pressure valve right across Greater Victoria’s rental market.
What frustrates me though, is that this housing at UVic could have – and should have – been built years ago. Had the BC Liberals taken the housing crisis seriously, it would have.
The BC Student Housing Loan Program is part of our 30-point plan to build tens of thousands of units of housing across BC and provide some relief to those searching for an affordable home. These 620 new units at UVic won’t fix the housing crisis on their own, but they are an important, and long overdue, step forward.