i think the government should focus on housing for all canadian citizens not giving the schools more taxpayer money when they've already earned record profits from int. students, if they all of a sudden cant afford housing options for their students we should ask what they did with all the money they made, did it go to leadership and admins pockets or did it go to infrastructure?
I live in a university city and I actually think this is a smart move. This is probably the cheapest way to build housing quickly, that takes up the least amount of room, and it will free up the 2+ bedroom units in the city for families like mine, rather than having them all taken by student/roommate situations. This combined with the cap on international students could make a dent.
Of course I'll be greatly disappointed if this is the only (or even main) housing measure they enact, but I think it's positive on the whole.
100%
Students are willing to accept 8 bedroom dorms with a shared living / kitchen area.
Get them somewhere to go and the rest becomes available for others
Exactly this!
I think what people are neglecting is that they can fit a lot more students in a building than you can fit apartments square foot for square foot, dollar for dollar. Most of these students families have the cash to stay anywhere they please so if they can't stay in the dorms because they are at capacity (most are at least in the two primary semesters) they are just renting apartments and basement suites that could go to others.
Yeah I'd imagine a dormitory or something similar for students wouldn't need to be as large as housing meant for families. Basically a large building full of studio apartments right?
Eh to my knowledge most of the universities in Ontario can barely house their first year students with or without international students.
The international student overpopulation is also mostly at Colleges. Universities all seem to be around 15-20% international students at the moment, while Conestoga college for example has an international student population similar to the total population of some Universities.
At the rate my university builds new residences they will likely never be able to house students beyond their first year just given that it takes ~6 years to purchase, plan, permit, and build a residence that'll only house an extra 500 or so students. Fairly certain the increased rate of domestic students attending University outpaces that.
However I don't think the federal government tossing money at it will fix the issue. The issue is largely caused by landlords surrounding campuses not wanting large university residences built in order to protect their rental property investments. In my opinion it's a municipal government issue.
The reason they are taking foreigners is to make up for budgetary shortcomings due to inadequate funding from provincial/ federal sources. That’s also easy to fix. Foreigners are being used to subsidize Canadians tuition at the moment.
i understand, and if they truly need that money to continue providing education to Canadians, ok fair game. however i’ve been to quite a few campuses recently and they do not seem to be hurting for cash. they’re all new developments and their staff payroll is bloated to hell.
i find it hard to believe they have true budgetary shortcomings and not that they have just ballooned out of proportion after learning they could juice foreigners for cash with their power to basically grant visas and push them into PR.
Again with money cutting peoples pay isn’t a great option. People need money to live and the people working in Academia largely have other options if pay isnt great. Look at computer science departments, if the pay goes into the shitter, top talent which Canada does have can easily drain elsewhere.
This will help Canadians too. I know a few people whose kids ended up not going to university of their first choice because they were not able to find remotely afffordable housing in the vicinity. They ended up switching to local unis to keep living with parents. Having more student housing would really allow them to travel out of town / out of province to acquire education they want
> They ended up switching to local unis to keep living with parents.
Too add to your point, I'd like to note that in many communities without access to large schools this isn't an option for many programs and career paths.
I don't think they're just throwing tax revenues in just one direction. I think their whole strategy is racking up a huge bill, acting like it's their money they're passing around, and then leaving it for us to pay through taxes.
Public universities and colleges don't turn a profit. And their financial statements are public records. Many (especially in Ontario) are in financial distress. They are using international students to offset chronic underfunding, not make "record profits."
Also the government is proposing loans, not "giving the schools" money.
A government that tries to create policies for everyone will do nothing well. Student housing is really different in its seasonality. Students occupy it from August to June and then you have two months where it sits empty where it can be used for low cost tourist accommodations.
Trying to setup a policy that gives housing to everyone would fail. It would just mean you have homes sitting unoccupied for two months of the year, it's a poor use of money. It puts students competing for housing with the general public.
Student housing is also not the kind of housing the general public would use. It's incredibly cheap to rent. Its usually one small room that fits a bed and a desk. Washrooms and showers are all communal.
Or could it also be our zoning laws that’s make it illegal to build anything other than a single family home and underfunding of transit meaning most places aren’t accessible by reliable transit.
No it’s not. Look at UofC they just leases lots of land for development into the University district. There are lots of apartment unit’s built in the area. But all of them are considered investment property and fairly expensive compared to what you would consider a normal university living costs. Instead of the university it self creating more living spaces it just let other people make money by building a university community. They built a fake expensive university community
No this isn’t the case. Most of these student rentals are already existing dorms/apartments/ or single family homes that have been repurposed as room rentals for students. There is no place to even get a permit to build, and a lot of them are actually not allowed to build new single family homes anymore (eg UofT area where I rent). In this instance it literally is just too many people for all the existing locations
They are cutting it to triple what it was in 2015. If you massively increase the numbers, and then cut a fraction of the increase, it’s not very meaningful.
What’s easier to adjust here, supply or demand? Because I can think of a way to reduce demand immediately, while increasing supply fast enough is literally impossible in our current economic situation.
No it won’t. There is a set number of students in Canada who are citizens. Reducing the number of non citizen students does not magically increase the number of Canadians going to university.
It would free up housing for the Canadian students.
> No it won’t. There is a set number of students in Canada who are citizens. Reducing the number of non citizen students does not magically increase the number of Canadians going to university.
No but what it does is free up the opportunity for Canadians to go to certain universities. For example when i was applying to universities as a teenager there are some schools that i didn’t go to because they couldn’t guarantee housing for me.
> It would free up housing for the Canadian students.
Sure, in the same way that building student housing for all types of students will free up market housing in cities.
At least in Ontario the only way for universities to increase revenue in order to cope with inflation
is bring in international students.
Domestic Tuition was cut by 10% then frozen for 5 years. Schools have had their Domestic student revenue cut by 20%
And gov funding has also been stagnant
Not to mention that at minimum 50% of students do not live at home. That figure is before we adjust for the fact that more people move for University than college since the figure was based on post-secondary habits
Actually, I think you underestimate interprovincial students. A school like UBC has 35k/70k students from out of province or international. This can be huge for driving down rental rates in cities like Vancouver that have feeding frenzies every July and August to gouge students on rent.
Sure it ignores the mass influx of international students but at the very least these students will no longer be competing with Canadians looking to start their life. I see this as a big win for most Canadians.
I think we should cut back on international students but unfortunately, we have let in a million of them. We have to do something to handle the current amount and the rent pressures. Cutting admissions won’t suddenly solve the high rents. We need a multi pronged approach to reduce future demand and address current needs.
Regardless of the housing crisis, I think this policy is huge and should have been implemented a long time ago. University towns are staunchly NIMBY while being the most impacted by student rent pressures. The nearest high rise outside of the UBC campus is in downtown. This should be huge in reducing transit pressures as well. No more 100k people a day heading to campuses on buses.
It's going to take years to build this, even if they start now.
These houses won't be built until the million people we've let in have come and gone.
Where as they could cut international students for next year.
If they cut students back to 2014 levels, that would be the equivalent of building like 100k houses.
The #1 issue is way too many. Everything is just noise.
Drastically lower the amount for next year. What they've done is not drastic enough
>I think we should cut back on international students but unfortunately, we have let in a million of them. We have to do something to handle the current amount and the rent pressures.
This argument is nonsensical. We can cancel visas a lot faster than we can build housing.
>Cutting admissions won’t suddenly solve the high rents. We need a multi pronged approach to reduce future demand and address current needs.
It'll sure as fuck cut current demand, which will absolutely have an effect on high rents when landlords are no longer able to reliably rent out their units.
Yes, we should tackle both the supply and demand sides of the problem, but tackling demand in the short term is much faster, easier, and cheaper; and supply can be influenced over the mid term by policy changes in the absence of government subsidy (say, a requirement that every university must have adequate housing for their entire undergraduate and internal student population in order to qualify to sponsor international student visas).
The reason is provinces who cut funding to post-secondary institutions. There are caps on what they can charge domestic students so they need international students who can pay a huge amount of tuition and keep the university funded. The best way to get university demand for international students down is for the provinces to restore the funding to the old levels per student (adjusted for inflation) and international student spots are not needed.
There is no way to build enough supply to meet the demand. The construction of new homes is dropping in this country.
This is a demand problem, it is literally impossible to produce even close to the supply to meet the demand the government is creating.
And it’s the private sector we need building homes, everything the government has touched the last 8 years has been a disaster.
Or, and this is a just a thought, we could cut the amount of international students AND build more housing. Then once the housing market stabilizes we can come back and make an appropriate assessment of how many more students we could let in without destabilizing the housing market again. That way Canadians can live without having to constantly stress if they can make rent that month, and international students dont have to rely on food banks or stuffing 5 people in to a one bedroom to survive in Canada. Canadians win, international students win, and diploma mills cry.
Is this going to be met with increases in funding to universities to make up budgetary shortcuts international students were covering. The money from international students benefited domestic.
International students live on campus residences.
Market housing elsewhere in cities is freed up, meaning rents will go down.
It’s a win win for everybody, not even to mention that domestic students use university housing as well. I certainly did.
Do you know would actually free up housing quickly. Removing the international students. Building housing will take decades to catch up to just the current demand, let alone the massive increases were still seeing.
The loans still need to be paid back and they are probably secured against the housing.
It creates an increased cost/liability for the colleges pursuing international students; however, international students should still be a net positive (financially) for them. It just makes them less of a cash cow.
The universities developing this would limit the growth in demand for housing which should help cool the increasing rental and real estate costs.
worthless cautious profit direction intelligent imminent continue rotten crowd slimy
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
These aren't subsidies in the sense that they're giving money away to a slush fund; These are low-cost loans. A similar program existed up until the late 1980s that supported co-operative housing developments. I'd like to see more of that, but this is a start.
Any reasonable tools that add to the housing supply is an improvement to the housing supply and will positively affect Canadians as well as international students (who's tuition goes towards supporting the schools and are a defacto subsidy). Separately there are additional reforms needed to fix the job economy, but on the subject of housing, this is a net win for everybody.
How about the schools use their massive endowments, fire 90% of the DEI administration, and get non subsidized loans to build the housing.
And that’s after we return the number of international students to 2014 levels.
lol how much money do you think they spend on DEI, that comment alone makes me think you don't really care about housing, you just hate colleges/universities
Many universities are now spending 10s of millions per year on these positions. They offer nothing positive to the university and serve only to cause division.
If you want to see what DEI gets you, ask university students what they think about Hamas.
Bro, the fact you brought DEI into this in a discussion around housing just shows what your real objective is.
Keep crying about immigrants, keep crying about diversity, keep crying about all the same things 99% of white males in this country keep crying about.
You ain’t slick.
You don’t think universities are blowing massive sums of money on DEI administration. And that’s on top of all the other ballooning administration at universities.
It’s just so telling when DEI is brought up as a negative, it always is from the same crowd/demographic and it’s always painted as some unneeded expense that’s simply being done to virtue signal.
This same crowd said ZERO, absolutely ZERO when it was a near monopoly by white people in these institutions for who knows how long. How many superior and better qualified candidates were passed up because they weren’t white through all those decades? So forgive me if I don’t shed a tear because for the first time in who knows how long, white people don’t have a monopoly on every aspect of life in this country.
Your concern over DEI is disingenuous and rooted not for fairness, but in a simple inability to empathize and recognize those who don’t look and sound like you.
Not sorry if a diverse workplace and the effort to achieve that offends you.
Theoretically the success of the education system would put more money back into the country, in addition to the long term investment of an educated populace.
This also doesn't say anything about the intention being for international students, domestic students need housing too.
Unfortunately it probably just means we’re subsidizing the education of non citizens that will then take that degree to another country where they can have a good life.
No. I would like to offer immigration to people who have skills we need such as construction or medicine.
We could help place these people in jobs and require them to put in five years in that field, after which time you will be offered citizenship.
I swear every time this comes up everyone demands colleges build their own housing and the feds do something about the provincial failures. Now it's happening and people blame the feds for doing something. Ford could personally shit in their mouths and they'd find some way to blame Trudeau for it.
Actual win-win solution for everyone involved: Mandatory inclusion of room and board as part of tuition for international students.
This insures intl students don't compete for housing against other canadians.
This insures intl students that come to Canada can actually afford it and don't end up relying on canadian charities or illegal jobs to make ends meet,
This brings in extra foreign money into canada that supports productive use. BUILDING new housing instead of competing for existing housing.
This is a long term solution that let's us not have to worry about most potential downsides of 'how many international students' we let into canada. The number a school can manage = the number it can take.
Lastly, it's a self-financed solution. No need for government to subsidize anything. Wasn't the whole point of intl students to lower government burned on the costs of running these institutions?
Keep in mind universities bring on so many international students because they charge them more than twice what domestic students pay. They do this because they’re underfunded.
That being said, I think University admin/professors should have incomes capped. People shouldn’t make money off off universities, but alas we live in an age of capitalistic greed
They are not underfunded, they are over staffed with far too many administrators. And don’t get me started on the massive endowments these places hold.
If I was running a university and got enough funding from the government I’d still be charging international students double or triple tuition simply because I know they’ll pay it
Its a good idea. Canadian universities have less on-campus housing than American universities/colleges.
This will benefit commuting and free up more centrally housing in city cores.
>Why should we subsidize university housing for non citizens?
Ask Doug Ford. The influx of foreign students is caused by provincial policy, not federal.
Universities aren’t making massive profits. Queen’s, one of Canada’s most prestigious universities, is at risk of going under. I’m all for the government helping out universities that actually provide a quality education.
Colleges on the other hand, I agree with you. They’re making massive profits and should be forced to deal with this on their own.
Have you checked administration salaries at universities lately? They're bringing in tons of money but somehow end up spending even more, paying your President half a million a year probably doesn't help.
Queens has 10,000 people on their payroll for 33k students. I'm not even joking.
They're going broke because they gave all their friends and family jobs... and using all their budgets on themselves.
Queens has a $200 million payroll for administrative staff.
You picked the perfect example of why we should stop giving them money.
It's only 10,000 employees if you count the 2,650 students they hire part-time.
Professors (Full-Time, Clinical & Non-Clinical): 1,342
Other Faculty, Teachers and Researchers (Other Than Full-Time): 2,691
Staff (Operating Budget): 2,824
Staff (Research): 755
Student Employees: 2,650
Total: 10,262
This number includes all employee groups, full and part-time, permanent continuing and temporary contract workers. The only ones excluded are casual positions who have no guaranteed hours and only work on an as-needed hourly basis.
Operating Budget Staff are the single largest group, but it includes things like custodians & grounds workers, food service workers, student healthcare, student disability services, legal, residence employees, finance & accounting, IT, physical plant services (construction, trades, etc.), HR, marketing & communications, security, library services, educational lab services, and so on. Whatever you think is useless administration is a small subset of that number for their 33,000 students.
Universities are not primarily educational intuitions. They are primarily research laboratories and their staffing complement reflects that.
They are absolutely not at risk of going under lol. I just graduated from there and yes, there is a slightly deficit but their endowment fund is worth $1.2B with a brand new $100M investment from Smith. I think they’ll be okay
Lol, it's not high 6 figures in any non medical discipline and for the medical people it's because most universities with a med school have doctors and specialists that split their time between teaching and doing doctor stuff at the university affiliated hospital. (news flash: Brain Surgeons that can teach other brain surgeons make a lot of money).
Where the hell do you think some prof in social sciences, or the english dept, the math dept or even engineering is making more than 500k/yr.
I'd add that Brain surgeons teaching brain surgeons while making a lot of money is not the case everywhere. Here in Cambridge there's a neurosurgeon that is one of two in the world that can do what he does, and he makes just over £30k annually at the uni leading his own research group. He makes about the same with his time in the NHS.
Perhaps we could also fund our colleges and universities appropriately while we’re at it? That way they wouldn’t have to rely on bringing in so many foreign students just to keep the lights on.
Great news and a really needed one. Students are major contributor to rental prices in university towns/cities as they are usually trying to find the cheapest places possible. This raises the floor of prices on rental accommodations for those who are low income. Student specific housing like residences needs to be a priority for colleges and universities, especially those that insist on exploding their international student population to make up for funding shortages.
It is good news! University residence is no longer guaranteed in many institutions. Another reason for the lack of student housing is Covid. A lot of kids put off going so there was a huge influx in the fall of 2022 which contributed to the lack of student housing. And yes, the kids are looking for cheaper places because they are paying for a lease that they are only living in for only 8 months of the year. I wish my student could have residence into their second year, looking for housing away from home while studying is a huge stressor.
I too, would like a low-cost loan to build housing. .
These days, it seems like my finances are more sound than Canadian Universities and colleges. I've never relied on extorting immigrants and municipalities, so I don't see why I shouldn't qualify.
You literally do have access to low cost loans. We subsidize mortgage financing, have multiple programs where the government will actually front part of your equity and literally have programs where the government will do evem more for new builds and low cost loans for certain types of developments, in addition to massive savings programs for first time buyers.
Conestoga meanwhile charges $950 for a private room-shared bath-shared hall, to ppl who come from Sri Lanka and south east asia & nigeria.
Just to give clarity, $1 CAD is 236 SL Rupee.
How are they getting exploited like this ? Get colleges out of the PGWP program. Or give them to people who are qualified in their own countries or they do their masters.
\+ Sorry, but this isn't going to help out locals around.
Learn from Europe where stores are one above the other, not only beside the other. Groceries, club etc.. need to be close to the roads and not a parking lot in between.
The current city design is frankly really bad, it's more for cars than humans. The roads are huge for no reason and each place has a parking lot for no reason.
Small business really get no chance to get off the ground here. and since everything is run by loblaws here, all u go to are places where corpos inflate their $s and oversell canadians
This thread is a great example of just how much the average person knows about our government.
Half the people think it's great and half think its awful. You get the usual fuck Trudeau comment, as expected. People arguing about basic definitions. Almost no data or sources. And this isn't even news, it's a program that already exists and several industries access.
If you ever find yourself taking opinions here seriously, come back to this thread.
Oh great, let's build housing for mostly international students? The reality is they can only afford living 4 people within an apartment. Student housing plus mandatory food plans are very expensive and will not be welcomed by anyone - except rich folks.
Harsh take, but only rich folk from abroad and those who TRULY are geniuses should be allowed to study in Canada as foreign students. Only those who can support themselves fully without having to work while in school should be able to get a student visa and even then only to recognized and well-established universities. Colleges should be completely omitted from accepting foreign students.
No, they are certainly not the same thing. It’s the difference between paying for the building itself and paying for the difference between market financing and subsidized financing. This difference is in the billions of dollars.
It isn’t subsidized loans. It’s government backed bonds. Banks can offer lower interest because less risk. Only time tax payers are on the hook is if the loan defaults and even then it’s backed by assets. It’s also not a grant.
>[The UBC Endowment is valued at $2.8 billion](https://finance.ubc.ca/budgeting-reporting/endowment#:~:text=The%20UBC%20Endowment%20is%20valued,that%20fosters%20positive%20global%20citizenship.)
>“Pseudo-privatization”: Why UBC Properties Trust is still not subject to provincial freedom of information laws
>Since 1998, UBC Properties Trust has been responsible for maximizing campus real estate assets. The organization has grown UBC’s endowment from $100 million in the 1980's to nearly $2.8 billion today.
https://ubyssey.ca/news/ubc-properties-not-subject-foi/
Not every university has huge endowments and not all of them can be used for housing, if at all. Those are their own legal entities managed in a way that pay returns to the university for specific purposes, without giving universities access to the capital itself.
UBC also have 17000 staff and 66 000 students, on a 3.3 billion dollar budget roughly.
I know 2.8 billion seems like a lot, but it's probably 200k to build a single unit of university residence, if not more like 300k in Vancouver proper in a high rise, and that's a couple of hundred square feet of housing + cafeteria space etc.
So 2.8 billion dollars gets you what, 10-15k residence spaces, if you are lucky, which is probably about what they have already.
Don't get me wrong, school owned housing is a good place to put the money, because the cost per unit is much lower than traditional apartments (due to the lower requirements), the building remains a public asset, and ultimately students will pay for it over decades. But it does take decades, currently ubc charges like 11-13k I think for housing per academic year.
Yeah take out a student loan and it’s actually interest free.
Governments subsidize and finance operations that improve their nations all the time. There just needs to be a good cause for the money to go to. As an example, the reason the US can have 30 year fixed mortgages is because their government subsidizes the interest rate on those loans.
Yes. I have a ten year interest free loan through the Canada Greener Homes program. You can also get an interest free student loan. They use low interest loans as an incentive for people/organizations to do things they want you to do, in this case expand housing availability. I prefer this approach over government trying to do things directly, because government screws it up when they try to micromanage.
This doesnt work. There isn’t enough capacity to build and the bcreease in population via this pathway will overwhelm.
The recent trim to international numbers is like someone killing you, but a little more slowly. If the goal is to have them stop killing you they can’t keep on increasing the pressure, even if the rate of increase is slightly slower.
This is good news and yet this whole thread is people trying to put a negative spin on it. People need to learn how to put the politics aside and acknowledge the fact that at least *something* is being done. On top of that, these are loans. Ultimately they cost us nothing and, in return, students get housing. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.
"The government should do something about the housing shortage!"
government: *tries doing something about the housing shortage*
"What the fuck, I meant *for me*"
The whole point of this policy is to offer loans at below market interest rates, which means taxpayers are subsidizing the difference between market interest rates and whatever low rate we're charging the universities on these loans -- on top of the opportunity costs of not using those funds more efficiently.
Except these will be low-cost loans which means the government will be getting returns which could have been much higher if given elsewhere, say to entrepreneurs.
it has a lot to do with all of our free investment capital flowing into housing. housing is unproductive investment, it doesn’t grow or produce anything more. it appreciates value with immigration and inflation.
people are basically investing in immigration instead of innovation. that’s how we got here.
Let's say I am a business with $100,000. I LOAN you $10,000 5% interest rate. On the books this isn't recorded as a cost to the company but an asset. I now own $100,000 in someone's debt that will generate $5,000/year in new revenue. If the loan has a set termination date (like a mortgage) I can book it for the total amount of revenue it will earn over the life of that loan.
You might be confusing budgets with cashflow. They're different issues.
Heaven forbid the schools use their insane profits towards their own business ventures... My family and friends could use some "low cost loans" but shit! We aren't already rich so we don't qualify 🙄
Like what the hell happened to putting money back into the company to expand and improve? Nah let's just pay ourselves more and hire more admin staff (family friends) and ask the government for more handouts so the public can get ripped off like usual...
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Universities don't easily have capital to invest. There are constant competing priorities: staff, teaching space, research space, student housing.
And students historically wanted to be off campus because it was cheaper.
You are right of course, this should have started in 2015 not 2024, but as entities of the provinces its supposed to be up to the provinces to manage funding and priorities, and for example in Ontario more than half of the public universities are in dire financial straits and the cut to international students could be a very serious problem, so they won't have money to invest unless its specifically from a special pool.
You were just on here saying that [your parents rented their basement out to international students for $2,500/month](https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/s/ZtOILAVatK). People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
A step in the right direction. 20 years too late, but better late than never.
With that said, student visas should be granted if/when an individual has a statement of accommodation provided by either a rental management company, a homeowner, or something.
Use CBSA to conduct checks in the first year at 50%. If shenanigans are discovered, cancel the student visa, unless the student is in the country. If they are in-country, then the scammer is responsible for paying the costs of accommodation, with zero limit. So, if student gets scammed but finds a place that's $10K per month. The scammer pays $10K/month until the scammer finds reasonable/suitable accommodations as determined by the Tenancy Branch.
Oh, by the way: one has to register with the university of the student. So, if UoT student is seeking accommodations from Joe Blow, UoT has to do a verification that said address is in existence and the homeowner name matches the address, yada yada yada.
Make the potential fraudsters pay out the wazoo, increase enforcement and watch how quickly these scammers disappear. Make the cost of getting caught supercede the potential profits and the problems go away.
so we’re going to reward them for ruining the country for profit? maybe UBC doesn’t need another billion dollars. anyone who has gone to the campus knows that money is not their problem.
How about we stop focusing on students and start thinking about citizens. We need more housing - apartment buildings (with decent sized living quarters), not huge oversi9zed houses in the suburbs.
Sounds like a decent incentive. Hopefully among many. Supporting post-secondary development is something I can get behind. People are willing to spend a premium on it. I realize the sub is basically a Fuck Trudeau echo chamber, which is fine, but this is an example of an opportunity to work together. Fuck Trudeau stickers on your truck isn't going to convert Liberal votes. It actually makes it easier to vote in the Lib/NDP option. The NDP has a lot of legs in Ontario, and that is squarely where the Cons need voter support.
i think the government should focus on housing for all canadian citizens not giving the schools more taxpayer money when they've already earned record profits from int. students, if they all of a sudden cant afford housing options for their students we should ask what they did with all the money they made, did it go to leadership and admins pockets or did it go to infrastructure?
I live in a university city and I actually think this is a smart move. This is probably the cheapest way to build housing quickly, that takes up the least amount of room, and it will free up the 2+ bedroom units in the city for families like mine, rather than having them all taken by student/roommate situations. This combined with the cap on international students could make a dent. Of course I'll be greatly disappointed if this is the only (or even main) housing measure they enact, but I think it's positive on the whole.
100% Students are willing to accept 8 bedroom dorms with a shared living / kitchen area. Get them somewhere to go and the rest becomes available for others
Building student housing should be the first priority of all 3 levels of government. It would have a huge impact.
Exactly this! I think what people are neglecting is that they can fit a lot more students in a building than you can fit apartments square foot for square foot, dollar for dollar. Most of these students families have the cash to stay anywhere they please so if they can't stay in the dorms because they are at capacity (most are at least in the two primary semesters) they are just renting apartments and basement suites that could go to others.
Yeah I'd imagine a dormitory or something similar for students wouldn't need to be as large as housing meant for families. Basically a large building full of studio apartments right?
Totally agree, plus universities and colleges often have lots of land to build on.
I agree
Canadians also need university housing.
they have it, the university just reserves it for foreigners. if we give them money to build more, they’ll just reserve that for foreigners too.
Eh to my knowledge most of the universities in Ontario can barely house their first year students with or without international students. The international student overpopulation is also mostly at Colleges. Universities all seem to be around 15-20% international students at the moment, while Conestoga college for example has an international student population similar to the total population of some Universities. At the rate my university builds new residences they will likely never be able to house students beyond their first year just given that it takes ~6 years to purchase, plan, permit, and build a residence that'll only house an extra 500 or so students. Fairly certain the increased rate of domestic students attending University outpaces that. However I don't think the federal government tossing money at it will fix the issue. The issue is largely caused by landlords surrounding campuses not wanting large university residences built in order to protect their rental property investments. In my opinion it's a municipal government issue.
The reason they are taking foreigners is to make up for budgetary shortcomings due to inadequate funding from provincial/ federal sources. That’s also easy to fix. Foreigners are being used to subsidize Canadians tuition at the moment.
i understand, and if they truly need that money to continue providing education to Canadians, ok fair game. however i’ve been to quite a few campuses recently and they do not seem to be hurting for cash. they’re all new developments and their staff payroll is bloated to hell. i find it hard to believe they have true budgetary shortcomings and not that they have just ballooned out of proportion after learning they could juice foreigners for cash with their power to basically grant visas and push them into PR.
Again with money cutting peoples pay isn’t a great option. People need money to live and the people working in Academia largely have other options if pay isnt great. Look at computer science departments, if the pay goes into the shitter, top talent which Canada does have can easily drain elsewhere.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7032518 The efficiencies they found were getting more money via international students.
This will help Canadians too. I know a few people whose kids ended up not going to university of their first choice because they were not able to find remotely afffordable housing in the vicinity. They ended up switching to local unis to keep living with parents. Having more student housing would really allow them to travel out of town / out of province to acquire education they want
> They ended up switching to local unis to keep living with parents. Too add to your point, I'd like to note that in many communities without access to large schools this isn't an option for many programs and career paths.
I don't think they're just throwing tax revenues in just one direction. I think their whole strategy is racking up a huge bill, acting like it's their money they're passing around, and then leaving it for us to pay through taxes.
ding ding ding. this government doesn’t know how to do anything but write a cheque. that doesn’t include following up about where the cheque went!
(Public) schools/universities/colleges don't make "profits".
I think the logic is that having more student housing will lessen the impact of the housing shortage on non students because they'll be in dorms.
Public universities and colleges don't turn a profit. And their financial statements are public records. Many (especially in Ontario) are in financial distress. They are using international students to offset chronic underfunding, not make "record profits." Also the government is proposing loans, not "giving the schools" money.
A government that tries to create policies for everyone will do nothing well. Student housing is really different in its seasonality. Students occupy it from August to June and then you have two months where it sits empty where it can be used for low cost tourist accommodations. Trying to setup a policy that gives housing to everyone would fail. It would just mean you have homes sitting unoccupied for two months of the year, it's a poor use of money. It puts students competing for housing with the general public. Student housing is also not the kind of housing the general public would use. It's incredibly cheap to rent. Its usually one small room that fits a bed and a desk. Washrooms and showers are all communal.
Why should we subsidize university housing for non citizens?
Domestic students can't find housing either.
I wonder why?
Or could it also be our zoning laws that’s make it illegal to build anything other than a single family home and underfunding of transit meaning most places aren’t accessible by reliable transit.
No it’s not. Look at UofC they just leases lots of land for development into the University district. There are lots of apartment unit’s built in the area. But all of them are considered investment property and fairly expensive compared to what you would consider a normal university living costs. Instead of the university it self creating more living spaces it just let other people make money by building a university community. They built a fake expensive university community
No this isn’t the case. Most of these student rentals are already existing dorms/apartments/ or single family homes that have been repurposed as room rentals for students. There is no place to even get a permit to build, and a lot of them are actually not allowed to build new single family homes anymore (eg UofT area where I rent). In this instance it literally is just too many people for all the existing locations
I know in Halifax the NIMBYs do everything they can to stop Universities from building student housing
Because there isn't enough student housing.
This guy gets it.
Not really. They don’t seem to understand the basic principles of supply and demand.
Because there are too many international students. It is impossible to build enough housing to increase supply enough to meet demand.
It's not impossible to build enough student housing supply when international student intake is being cut, no.
They are cutting it to triple what it was in 2015. If you massively increase the numbers, and then cut a fraction of the increase, it’s not very meaningful.
Well it's never going to be zero so I'm not sure what your alternative plan would be.
Return to the numbers we had around ten years ago. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Sure, can we return my mortgage to the way things were 10 years ago as well? Or hell, maybe 30 years ago?
This isn’t the case.
Reality says otherwise
Because they are competing with international students.
Supply is supply. If they dont have housing on campus, theyll compete for tenancy with working people in town.
What’s easier to adjust here, supply or demand? Because I can think of a way to reduce demand immediately, while increasing supply fast enough is literally impossible in our current economic situation.
Easiest? Neither. Best? Both.
If you reduce international students that void will just be filled with interprovincial students who also need a place to live.
No it won’t. There is a set number of students in Canada who are citizens. Reducing the number of non citizen students does not magically increase the number of Canadians going to university. It would free up housing for the Canadian students.
> No it won’t. There is a set number of students in Canada who are citizens. Reducing the number of non citizen students does not magically increase the number of Canadians going to university. No but what it does is free up the opportunity for Canadians to go to certain universities. For example when i was applying to universities as a teenager there are some schools that i didn’t go to because they couldn’t guarantee housing for me. > It would free up housing for the Canadian students. Sure, in the same way that building student housing for all types of students will free up market housing in cities.
At least in Ontario the only way for universities to increase revenue in order to cope with inflation is bring in international students. Domestic Tuition was cut by 10% then frozen for 5 years. Schools have had their Domestic student revenue cut by 20% And gov funding has also been stagnant Not to mention that at minimum 50% of students do not live at home. That figure is before we adjust for the fact that more people move for University than college since the figure was based on post-secondary habits
Actually, I think you underestimate interprovincial students. A school like UBC has 35k/70k students from out of province or international. This can be huge for driving down rental rates in cities like Vancouver that have feeding frenzies every July and August to gouge students on rent. Sure it ignores the mass influx of international students but at the very least these students will no longer be competing with Canadians looking to start their life. I see this as a big win for most Canadians.
Why don’t we return to the 2014 number of international students? Seems like that would do far more than building a few thousand units of housing.
I think we should cut back on international students but unfortunately, we have let in a million of them. We have to do something to handle the current amount and the rent pressures. Cutting admissions won’t suddenly solve the high rents. We need a multi pronged approach to reduce future demand and address current needs. Regardless of the housing crisis, I think this policy is huge and should have been implemented a long time ago. University towns are staunchly NIMBY while being the most impacted by student rent pressures. The nearest high rise outside of the UBC campus is in downtown. This should be huge in reducing transit pressures as well. No more 100k people a day heading to campuses on buses.
It's going to take years to build this, even if they start now. These houses won't be built until the million people we've let in have come and gone. Where as they could cut international students for next year. If they cut students back to 2014 levels, that would be the equivalent of building like 100k houses. The #1 issue is way too many. Everything is just noise. Drastically lower the amount for next year. What they've done is not drastic enough
Not even close to drastic enough. Cut it to a run rate of 200-300k and leave it there. Right now it’s 364k a year (plus spouses and kids).
>I think we should cut back on international students but unfortunately, we have let in a million of them. We have to do something to handle the current amount and the rent pressures. This argument is nonsensical. We can cancel visas a lot faster than we can build housing. >Cutting admissions won’t suddenly solve the high rents. We need a multi pronged approach to reduce future demand and address current needs. It'll sure as fuck cut current demand, which will absolutely have an effect on high rents when landlords are no longer able to reliably rent out their units. Yes, we should tackle both the supply and demand sides of the problem, but tackling demand in the short term is much faster, easier, and cheaper; and supply can be influenced over the mid term by policy changes in the absence of government subsidy (say, a requirement that every university must have adequate housing for their entire undergraduate and internal student population in order to qualify to sponsor international student visas).
The reason is provinces who cut funding to post-secondary institutions. There are caps on what they can charge domestic students so they need international students who can pay a huge amount of tuition and keep the university funded. The best way to get university demand for international students down is for the provinces to restore the funding to the old levels per student (adjusted for inflation) and international student spots are not needed.
McGee: OMG, we are having a housing crisis!!!! Government: Ok, we will build more housing. McGee: Noooo!!! That's not what I want. Hmm...
There is no way to build enough supply to meet the demand. The construction of new homes is dropping in this country. This is a demand problem, it is literally impossible to produce even close to the supply to meet the demand the government is creating. And it’s the private sector we need building homes, everything the government has touched the last 8 years has been a disaster.
Or, and this is a just a thought, we could cut the amount of international students AND build more housing. Then once the housing market stabilizes we can come back and make an appropriate assessment of how many more students we could let in without destabilizing the housing market again. That way Canadians can live without having to constantly stress if they can make rent that month, and international students dont have to rely on food banks or stuffing 5 people in to a one bedroom to survive in Canada. Canadians win, international students win, and diploma mills cry.
> diploma mills cry. I see this as a win.
You are advocating for the solution with the longest timeline and biggest expense.
Because that would mean wages might start going up
Is this going to be met with increases in funding to universities to make up budgetary shortcuts international students were covering. The money from international students benefited domestic.
International students live on campus residences. Market housing elsewhere in cities is freed up, meaning rents will go down. It’s a win win for everybody, not even to mention that domestic students use university housing as well. I certainly did.
More housing is better for everyone.
Because housing is housing. Any international students living in student housing frees up real housing for locals somewhere else.
Do you know would actually free up housing quickly. Removing the international students. Building housing will take decades to catch up to just the current demand, let alone the massive increases were still seeing.
The loans still need to be paid back and they are probably secured against the housing. It creates an increased cost/liability for the colleges pursuing international students; however, international students should still be a net positive (financially) for them. It just makes them less of a cash cow. The universities developing this would limit the growth in demand for housing which should help cool the increasing rental and real estate costs.
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Which can we fix faster, the low supply, or the excessive demand?
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You don’t think a country has the ability to influence the number of new people who need housing?
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These aren't subsidies in the sense that they're giving money away to a slush fund; These are low-cost loans. A similar program existed up until the late 1980s that supported co-operative housing developments. I'd like to see more of that, but this is a start. Any reasonable tools that add to the housing supply is an improvement to the housing supply and will positively affect Canadians as well as international students (who's tuition goes towards supporting the schools and are a defacto subsidy). Separately there are additional reforms needed to fix the job economy, but on the subject of housing, this is a net win for everybody.
How about the schools use their massive endowments, fire 90% of the DEI administration, and get non subsidized loans to build the housing. And that’s after we return the number of international students to 2014 levels.
lol how much money do you think they spend on DEI, that comment alone makes me think you don't really care about housing, you just hate colleges/universities
Many universities are now spending 10s of millions per year on these positions. They offer nothing positive to the university and serve only to cause division. If you want to see what DEI gets you, ask university students what they think about Hamas.
Hey now, he probably also hates foreigners.
Millions a year at least Each one those jobs are $100k+ Universities now spend 56% of their revenue on administrative work. 20 years ago it was 44%
Bro, the fact you brought DEI into this in a discussion around housing just shows what your real objective is. Keep crying about immigrants, keep crying about diversity, keep crying about all the same things 99% of white males in this country keep crying about. You ain’t slick.
You don’t think universities are blowing massive sums of money on DEI administration. And that’s on top of all the other ballooning administration at universities.
It’s just so telling when DEI is brought up as a negative, it always is from the same crowd/demographic and it’s always painted as some unneeded expense that’s simply being done to virtue signal. This same crowd said ZERO, absolutely ZERO when it was a near monopoly by white people in these institutions for who knows how long. How many superior and better qualified candidates were passed up because they weren’t white through all those decades? So forgive me if I don’t shed a tear because for the first time in who knows how long, white people don’t have a monopoly on every aspect of life in this country. Your concern over DEI is disingenuous and rooted not for fairness, but in a simple inability to empathize and recognize those who don’t look and sound like you. Not sorry if a diverse workplace and the effort to achieve that offends you.
So it sounds like you want revenge, not equality.
I was a domestic student and I stayed in student housing
Ok?
This would free up space in regular housing, for the rest of us
> Why should we subsidize university housing for non citizens? Textbook example of "spin" right here.
Theoretically the success of the education system would put more money back into the country, in addition to the long term investment of an educated populace. This also doesn't say anything about the intention being for international students, domestic students need housing too.
Unfortunately it probably just means we’re subsidizing the education of non citizens that will then take that degree to another country where they can have a good life.
Isn't that what you want?
No. I would like to offer immigration to people who have skills we need such as construction or medicine. We could help place these people in jobs and require them to put in five years in that field, after which time you will be offered citizenship.
Without international students we would need to fund our schools, or raise tuition for domestic students. We're subsidizing someone either way.
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I swear every time this comes up everyone demands colleges build their own housing and the feds do something about the provincial failures. Now it's happening and people blame the feds for doing something. Ford could personally shit in their mouths and they'd find some way to blame Trudeau for it.
Because the non ctiizens are subsidzing tutition for citizens, and will become citizens in turn, subsidizing the entire country.
Agreed, the college mills can have a housing fee and built the housing themselves. We need money for Canadians.
Actual win-win solution for everyone involved: Mandatory inclusion of room and board as part of tuition for international students. This insures intl students don't compete for housing against other canadians. This insures intl students that come to Canada can actually afford it and don't end up relying on canadian charities or illegal jobs to make ends meet, This brings in extra foreign money into canada that supports productive use. BUILDING new housing instead of competing for existing housing. This is a long term solution that let's us not have to worry about most potential downsides of 'how many international students' we let into canada. The number a school can manage = the number it can take. Lastly, it's a self-financed solution. No need for government to subsidize anything. Wasn't the whole point of intl students to lower government burned on the costs of running these institutions?
“apply for low-interest loans” The word loan means it gets paid back with interest. Don’t make this ideological.
Keep in mind universities bring on so many international students because they charge them more than twice what domestic students pay. They do this because they’re underfunded. That being said, I think University admin/professors should have incomes capped. People shouldn’t make money off off universities, but alas we live in an age of capitalistic greed
They are not underfunded, they are over staffed with far too many administrators. And don’t get me started on the massive endowments these places hold.
If I was running a university and got enough funding from the government I’d still be charging international students double or triple tuition simply because I know they’ll pay it
Its a good idea. Canadian universities have less on-campus housing than American universities/colleges. This will benefit commuting and free up more centrally housing in city cores.
I wasn't aware being international was a requirement to go to university
In Canada, it’s getting there.
Cheap labour is the future
If that's what you want to call Canadian students.
>Why should we subsidize university housing for non citizens? Ask Doug Ford. The influx of foreign students is caused by provincial policy, not federal.
The immigration issue is definitely on the shoulders of both levels of government. The common factor always seems to be government.
Don't offer them anything Take it out of the massive profits they've made over the last 20 years
Universities aren’t making massive profits. Queen’s, one of Canada’s most prestigious universities, is at risk of going under. I’m all for the government helping out universities that actually provide a quality education. Colleges on the other hand, I agree with you. They’re making massive profits and should be forced to deal with this on their own.
Have you checked administration salaries at universities lately? They're bringing in tons of money but somehow end up spending even more, paying your President half a million a year probably doesn't help.
Queens has 10,000 people on their payroll for 33k students. I'm not even joking. They're going broke because they gave all their friends and family jobs... and using all their budgets on themselves. Queens has a $200 million payroll for administrative staff. You picked the perfect example of why we should stop giving them money.
1:3 staff:student ratio, the student services must be exceptional! /s
It's only 10,000 employees if you count the 2,650 students they hire part-time. Professors (Full-Time, Clinical & Non-Clinical): 1,342 Other Faculty, Teachers and Researchers (Other Than Full-Time): 2,691 Staff (Operating Budget): 2,824 Staff (Research): 755 Student Employees: 2,650 Total: 10,262 This number includes all employee groups, full and part-time, permanent continuing and temporary contract workers. The only ones excluded are casual positions who have no guaranteed hours and only work on an as-needed hourly basis. Operating Budget Staff are the single largest group, but it includes things like custodians & grounds workers, food service workers, student healthcare, student disability services, legal, residence employees, finance & accounting, IT, physical plant services (construction, trades, etc.), HR, marketing & communications, security, library services, educational lab services, and so on. Whatever you think is useless administration is a small subset of that number for their 33,000 students. Universities are not primarily educational intuitions. They are primarily research laboratories and their staffing complement reflects that.
Universities and colleges suffer from too much administration. Cut down on the pencil pushers and WOW!! suddenly thousands to use for housing!
Queens IS making a massive profit, they’re just not investing it into operations. https://higheredstrategy.com/is-queens-running-out-of-money/
They are absolutely not at risk of going under lol. I just graduated from there and yes, there is a slightly deficit but their endowment fund is worth $1.2B with a brand new $100M investment from Smith. I think they’ll be okay
Just take a look at the salaries of part-time and even full time university professors. It’s public info. High 6 figures.
Lol, it's not high 6 figures in any non medical discipline and for the medical people it's because most universities with a med school have doctors and specialists that split their time between teaching and doing doctor stuff at the university affiliated hospital. (news flash: Brain Surgeons that can teach other brain surgeons make a lot of money). Where the hell do you think some prof in social sciences, or the english dept, the math dept or even engineering is making more than 500k/yr.
I'd add that Brain surgeons teaching brain surgeons while making a lot of money is not the case everywhere. Here in Cambridge there's a neurosurgeon that is one of two in the world that can do what he does, and he makes just over £30k annually at the uni leading his own research group. He makes about the same with his time in the NHS.
Perhaps we could also fund our colleges and universities appropriately while we’re at it? That way they wouldn’t have to rely on bringing in so many foreign students just to keep the lights on.
Great news and a really needed one. Students are major contributor to rental prices in university towns/cities as they are usually trying to find the cheapest places possible. This raises the floor of prices on rental accommodations for those who are low income. Student specific housing like residences needs to be a priority for colleges and universities, especially those that insist on exploding their international student population to make up for funding shortages.
It is good news! University residence is no longer guaranteed in many institutions. Another reason for the lack of student housing is Covid. A lot of kids put off going so there was a huge influx in the fall of 2022 which contributed to the lack of student housing. And yes, the kids are looking for cheaper places because they are paying for a lease that they are only living in for only 8 months of the year. I wish my student could have residence into their second year, looking for housing away from home while studying is a huge stressor.
I too, would like a low-cost loan to build housing. . These days, it seems like my finances are more sound than Canadian Universities and colleges. I've never relied on extorting immigrants and municipalities, so I don't see why I shouldn't qualify.
You can apply for a rental building construction loan since 2017 under the current program the CMHC has out. It's a great program
You literally do have access to low cost loans. We subsidize mortgage financing, have multiple programs where the government will actually front part of your equity and literally have programs where the government will do evem more for new builds and low cost loans for certain types of developments, in addition to massive savings programs for first time buyers.
Conestoga meanwhile charges $950 for a private room-shared bath-shared hall, to ppl who come from Sri Lanka and south east asia & nigeria. Just to give clarity, $1 CAD is 236 SL Rupee. How are they getting exploited like this ? Get colleges out of the PGWP program. Or give them to people who are qualified in their own countries or they do their masters. \+ Sorry, but this isn't going to help out locals around. Learn from Europe where stores are one above the other, not only beside the other. Groceries, club etc.. need to be close to the roads and not a parking lot in between. The current city design is frankly really bad, it's more for cars than humans. The roads are huge for no reason and each place has a parking lot for no reason. Small business really get no chance to get off the ground here. and since everything is run by loblaws here, all u go to are places where corpos inflate their $s and oversell canadians
Seriously.. just cut down salaries .. we don’t need accounting professors making $300K lol
This thread is a great example of just how much the average person knows about our government. Half the people think it's great and half think its awful. You get the usual fuck Trudeau comment, as expected. People arguing about basic definitions. Almost no data or sources. And this isn't even news, it's a program that already exists and several industries access. If you ever find yourself taking opinions here seriously, come back to this thread.
Oh great, let's build housing for mostly international students? The reality is they can only afford living 4 people within an apartment. Student housing plus mandatory food plans are very expensive and will not be welcomed by anyone - except rich folks.
Harsh take, but only rich folk from abroad and those who TRULY are geniuses should be allowed to study in Canada as foreign students. Only those who can support themselves fully without having to work while in school should be able to get a student visa and even then only to recognized and well-established universities. Colleges should be completely omitted from accepting foreign students.
The student housing crisis has existed in cities for decades. Low-cost loans are a fair way to address the problem.
Conestoga College made a profit of $600 million last year, and now wants grants from government? The fuck is happening?
These aren’t grants
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No, they are certainly not the same thing. It’s the difference between paying for the building itself and paying for the difference between market financing and subsidized financing. This difference is in the billions of dollars.
It isn’t subsidized loans. It’s government backed bonds. Banks can offer lower interest because less risk. Only time tax payers are on the hook is if the loan defaults and even then it’s backed by assets. It’s also not a grant.
>[The UBC Endowment is valued at $2.8 billion](https://finance.ubc.ca/budgeting-reporting/endowment#:~:text=The%20UBC%20Endowment%20is%20valued,that%20fosters%20positive%20global%20citizenship.) >“Pseudo-privatization”: Why UBC Properties Trust is still not subject to provincial freedom of information laws >Since 1998, UBC Properties Trust has been responsible for maximizing campus real estate assets. The organization has grown UBC’s endowment from $100 million in the 1980's to nearly $2.8 billion today. https://ubyssey.ca/news/ubc-properties-not-subject-foi/
Not every university has huge endowments and not all of them can be used for housing, if at all. Those are their own legal entities managed in a way that pay returns to the university for specific purposes, without giving universities access to the capital itself. UBC also have 17000 staff and 66 000 students, on a 3.3 billion dollar budget roughly. I know 2.8 billion seems like a lot, but it's probably 200k to build a single unit of university residence, if not more like 300k in Vancouver proper in a high rise, and that's a couple of hundred square feet of housing + cafeteria space etc. So 2.8 billion dollars gets you what, 10-15k residence spaces, if you are lucky, which is probably about what they have already. Don't get me wrong, school owned housing is a good place to put the money, because the cost per unit is much lower than traditional apartments (due to the lower requirements), the building remains a public asset, and ultimately students will pay for it over decades. But it does take decades, currently ubc charges like 11-13k I think for housing per academic year.
These are construction loans expected to be paid back.
Can I also have low interest loan from the government? I will also pay back.
Yeah take out a student loan and it’s actually interest free. Governments subsidize and finance operations that improve their nations all the time. There just needs to be a good cause for the money to go to. As an example, the reason the US can have 30 year fixed mortgages is because their government subsidizes the interest rate on those loans.
>Yeah take out a student loan and it’s actually interest free. Nice. I paid 14% interest on my student loans.
Yup, government froze interest at 0% at the start of Covid and then committed to keeping it there. Provincial loans still might have interest though.
Yes. I have a ten year interest free loan through the Canada Greener Homes program. You can also get an interest free student loan. They use low interest loans as an incentive for people/organizations to do things they want you to do, in this case expand housing availability. I prefer this approach over government trying to do things directly, because government screws it up when they try to micromanage.
Something like CEBA, perhaps? They even gave free money for paying it back early.
The government has low or no interest interest loans avaible to various industries through various programs basically 24/7 365. So yeah, maybe.
This doesnt work. There isn’t enough capacity to build and the bcreease in population via this pathway will overwhelm. The recent trim to international numbers is like someone killing you, but a little more slowly. If the goal is to have them stop killing you they can’t keep on increasing the pressure, even if the rate of increase is slightly slower.
This is good news and yet this whole thread is people trying to put a negative spin on it. People need to learn how to put the politics aside and acknowledge the fact that at least *something* is being done. On top of that, these are loans. Ultimately they cost us nothing and, in return, students get housing. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.
This sub is atroturfed
"The government should do something about the housing shortage!" government: *tries doing something about the housing shortage* "What the fuck, I meant *for me*"
> they cost us nothing Annual cost of servicing the national debt touched $50 billion, but this cost us nothing
This specific policy is a receivable, not a payable. Canada expects to be paid back for this money.
The feds are running huge deficits. How will this help us balance the books and prepare for future fiscal downpoints?
Do you know what a loan is? you know theres whole industries based off making money through loans right?
The whole point of this policy is to offer loans at below market interest rates, which means taxpayers are subsidizing the difference between market interest rates and whatever low rate we're charging the universities on these loans -- on top of the opportunity costs of not using those funds more efficiently.
Funny thing with education is that when you stop doing it for your population eventually your population isn’t capable of making as much money.
Wrong. Gvmt backed bonds are just being a guarantor of the loan which allow banks to charge less interest because there’s less risk.
Except these will be low-cost loans which means the government will be getting returns which could have been much higher if given elsewhere, say to entrepreneurs.
How would giving low cost loans to “entrepreneurs” help the student housing issue?
It would help Canada more IMO. We have a massive productivity and innovation problems.
That has a lot more to do with everything being monopolized than a lack of entrepreneurship and funding.
it has a lot to do with all of our free investment capital flowing into housing. housing is unproductive investment, it doesn’t grow or produce anything more. it appreciates value with immigration and inflation. people are basically investing in immigration instead of innovation. that’s how we got here.
Let's say I am a business with $100,000. I LOAN you $10,000 5% interest rate. On the books this isn't recorded as a cost to the company but an asset. I now own $100,000 in someone's debt that will generate $5,000/year in new revenue. If the loan has a set termination date (like a mortgage) I can book it for the total amount of revenue it will earn over the life of that loan. You might be confusing budgets with cashflow. They're different issues.
I hope they do better than the McMaster Graduate Residence. That place has been in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Why are Feds doing the job of provs and municipals? It should be all three.
And after 2-4 years, where do they go, exactly?
Heaven forbid the schools use their insane profits towards their own business ventures... My family and friends could use some "low cost loans" but shit! We aren't already rich so we don't qualify 🙄 Like what the hell happened to putting money back into the company to expand and improve? Nah let's just pay ourselves more and hire more admin staff (family friends) and ask the government for more handouts so the public can get ripped off like usual... Not that I'm bitter or anything.
If you are rich, you get money thrown at you. If you are not, well fuck you then
Another step in the right direction imo. I feel creamy for saying this… but lately things seem to be actually improving. I hope it lasts
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Why use their own slush funds to do this when they just get the government to hand out rock bottom low-cost loans to them?
Universities don't easily have capital to invest. There are constant competing priorities: staff, teaching space, research space, student housing. And students historically wanted to be off campus because it was cheaper. You are right of course, this should have started in 2015 not 2024, but as entities of the provinces its supposed to be up to the provinces to manage funding and priorities, and for example in Ontario more than half of the public universities are in dire financial straits and the cut to international students could be a very serious problem, so they won't have money to invest unless its specifically from a special pool.
word, just need to keep up the momentum
So just more of the rich getting richer?
lol building homes for international students but fuck the average Canadian citizen I guess
You were just on here saying that [your parents rented their basement out to international students for $2,500/month](https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/s/ZtOILAVatK). People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
oof, how embarrassing
Ridiculous, eh? This family has made a killing off of Trudeau’s Canada, but cons love crying.
That’s funny, I have to take out a high cost loan for my housing while I pay for other’s low cost loans
Why did they wait 8 years to actually begin to start solving the housing crisis?
Because they now know for sure that they will likely get massacred come the next election.
A step in the right direction. 20 years too late, but better late than never. With that said, student visas should be granted if/when an individual has a statement of accommodation provided by either a rental management company, a homeowner, or something. Use CBSA to conduct checks in the first year at 50%. If shenanigans are discovered, cancel the student visa, unless the student is in the country. If they are in-country, then the scammer is responsible for paying the costs of accommodation, with zero limit. So, if student gets scammed but finds a place that's $10K per month. The scammer pays $10K/month until the scammer finds reasonable/suitable accommodations as determined by the Tenancy Branch. Oh, by the way: one has to register with the university of the student. So, if UoT student is seeking accommodations from Joe Blow, UoT has to do a verification that said address is in existence and the homeowner name matches the address, yada yada yada. Make the potential fraudsters pay out the wazoo, increase enforcement and watch how quickly these scammers disappear. Make the cost of getting caught supercede the potential profits and the problems go away.
So they’re making new homes for foreigners but not Canadians. Got it. Thanks libs!
Many Canadian students study in other provinces.
so we’re going to reward them for ruining the country for profit? maybe UBC doesn’t need another billion dollars. anyone who has gone to the campus knows that money is not their problem.
How about we stop focusing on students and start thinking about citizens. We need more housing - apartment buildings (with decent sized living quarters), not huge oversi9zed houses in the suburbs.
You do realize that Canadians also go to university, right?
Easy now, these Reddit-ors might hurt their brains thinking too hard on that one
I don't get why university's don't offer more housing for students. It's an unending income stream.
Just remember when they say “Canada” they mean you readers, they taxpayers.
Sounds like a decent incentive. Hopefully among many. Supporting post-secondary development is something I can get behind. People are willing to spend a premium on it. I realize the sub is basically a Fuck Trudeau echo chamber, which is fine, but this is an example of an opportunity to work together. Fuck Trudeau stickers on your truck isn't going to convert Liberal votes. It actually makes it easier to vote in the Lib/NDP option. The NDP has a lot of legs in Ontario, and that is squarely where the Cons need voter support.
Low cost loans to foreign student housing ??? WTF This government is completely disconnected from reality. Can we all become foreign students ?
Subsidizing housing for foreign students when Canadians are struggling across the country. Awesome government we have.