Only one in ten college and university students across Canada are able to access a residence provided bed, a new study has found.
The shortage has aspiring students wrestling with the difficulty of the finding a place to stay amid a nationwide housing crisis — especially in Hamilton.
For Bebongnchu Folefac, a first-year student at McMaster, it means he’ll have to stay at home with his family this year as he wasn’t able to find housing.
“There’s two struggles the prices are too high and there’s just not a lot of options,” he says. “I didn’t realize that when I was looking for a place, so I had a lot of pressure.”
The report, released by Desjardins, says residence beds are available to only about 1 in 10 students across the country leaving roughly 1.2 million students to rent, locally.
Alexander Wray, a housing researcher from Western University, says one of the reasons students are facing this shortage issue is because of an increase in internationalization.
“The public colleges … were never set up with the intention of serving anyone but local students — that were living at home,” they said. “They’ve now all of a sudden transformed into institutions where people are traveling not only across the province, but from around the world in order.”
At Brock University, more than 2,700 students moved in over the weekend — filling up all eight of its residences, and at Niagara college, all 450 spaces between the Welland and Niagara-on-the-Lake campus are full.
The same goes for McMaster University in Hamilton, but the university is hopeful the construction of its new residences will change that for future first year students who want to live on campus.