Hard for Kelowna's students to find shelter By Jennifer Smith - Kelowna Capital News Published: October 19, 2010 6:00 PM Updated: October 20, 2010 11:42 AM Under the guidance of UBCO professor Carlos Teixeira, graduate student Jamie McEwan says he came up with an idea to create a housing liaison for students who need to find off-campus accommodation in Kelowna’s tight rental market. Students thrust into high-end housing markets need someone to help them find shelter before hitting the books, a UBC Okanagan graduate says. In conducting research for his masters degree in human geography, Jamie McEwan said he unearthed horror stories on the lengths some students need to go to find a place to live in Kelowna. McEwan conducted 30 interviews in an exploratory case study of students aged 18 to 30 searching for rental housing in 2009 and was told by his interview subjects they knew of six to eight people sharing a one-bedroom apartment and even one person who pitched a tent off campus while attending UBCO. “Students are coming here thinking that within two weeks to a month they will be able to find housing for the year and it’s simply not happening,” McEwan said. Today the rental rate within the city is returning to a more normal vacancy of four to six per cent, but once the housing market heats up again, McEwan figures the affordability crisis—which saw the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation peg Kelowna at a zero vacancy rate in some years—will only be worse. With development in a slump and numbers on both the UBCO and Okanagan College campuses rising, McEwan sees an unprecedented supply and demand problem on the horizon within the next five years. This could send prospective Okanagan post-secondary recruits to easier housing markets to seek a degree or push even more of those students who do attend school in the area to leave immediately after graduation, he warned. And he is concerned there is not enough being done to address the problem. “It’s great you can guarantee on-campus housing for the first year, but there’s a responsibility to let people know…there are some affordability issues in the housing market,” McEwan said. He noted that he spoke with international students who were blown away by the difficulty of attaining a home when they arrived in town. The UBCO Student Union has tried to offer an online, off-campus housing service, but manager Rob Nagai said the union couldn’t make it fly. “We poured quite a bit of money into it…(but) it didn’t work in this kind of housing market,” he said. The union couldn’t find landlords ready and willing to list; subsequent efforts to operate a manual posting board at the UBCSCO have brought similar results. “We haven’t seen a lot of postings because they do get snatched up pretty quick,” Nagai said, adding “It’s definitely a problem.” McEwan believes the situation is creating a negative stereotype of student renters in the valley. With students cutting corners by adding extra bodies into apartments and some admittedly treating university with a fraternity-type party mentality, this demographic now comes with a stigma for landlords, he said. UBCO says it is trying to address the problem and has, in fact, just commissioned a study to look at all of their students’ housing needs. When the university opened in 2005, a commitment was made to expand campus housing by 1,000 beds and as of this September the institution has exceeded the goal by 465 beds and hope to have 1,700 open by August of 2011 with the new $15-million student residence building currently under construction. Associate director of public affairs, Bonnie Bates Gibbs, said the market housing study commissioned should help inform the community as a whole what the best nextsteps should be to fulfill student housing needs. “We have heard some of the challenges, but we also have a lot of students who are interested in on-campus housing,” she said. “The speed of the build-out has been extraordinary.” Bates Gibbs said housing is an ongoing issue for the university and one the institution does not take lightly; though any decision making will have to wait for completion of the study. McEwan suggests it will likely take more than just the college and university’s attention to solve the problem. He suggested the city’s politicians need to seriously consider a blanket legalization policy for secondary suites and that both the provincial and federal government need to step in an help communities burdened with an affordable housing crisis. In the meantime, he’s suggesting a housing liaison for students should be put in place—perhaps even one operated as a non-profit organization—so newcomers to the area might find Kelowna a fruitful place to stay-on after graduation. jsmith@kelownacapnews.com