Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas
Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas
Granting an ever-growing number of these visas to people who we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best
Granting an ever-growing number of student visas to people we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best and fraudulent at worst.
We need to dramatically cut the number of student visas, especially for private colleges, some of which are offering a quality of education that is less than desirable. We then need to tie student visas to housing availability – that is, a university shouldn’t be allowed to take on more international students than it can house in that community, for the duration of that person’s time studying in Canada.
Why is Canada trying to attract so many international students? Because it's easier than properly funding post secondary institutions:
international students are cash cows. Tuition fees for domestic students are regulated by provincial governments. Not so for their international counterparts, which makes bringing in foreign learners incredibly lucrative for perpetually cash-strapped schools and universities. (The real growth is increasingly not just from universities, but also from private colleges.)
The housing crisis has a bunch of causes, from Airbnb, to shitty taxation policies, to NIMBYs, to regressive zoning. Tying student visas to available, reasonably priced housing would be a simple first step to reducing prices.
What a bizarre take. Isn't Canada's housing crisis linked to corporates and foreign investors hoarding up residential space? How many foreign students even are there in Canada?
The manufactured right wing talking point that’s growing inorganically online is that Canada’s housing crisis is solely to blame on immigrants.
This talking point requires the holder to pretend that the worldwide housing issue only exists in Canada and not every single developed country in the world.
The idea that the cons have been spitting xenophobic shit has been true for decades. It's their chosen target to demonize.
I haven't seen those talking points. The commentary I've seen says the housing crisis is caused by a bunch of factors:
- shitty zoning
- NIMBYs
- low interest rates
- the federal and provincial governments stopped building non-market housing
- tax incentives
- a lack of skilled trades
- growth of short term housing like Airbnb
- a lack of supply
They also include Canada's rapidly growing population. All of those factors need to be addressed.
Some of them are hard to address: it will take years to train more trades people, and years to build more housing. But we can require post-secondary institutions to start providing housing for international students at the start of the next academic cycle.
Being from Kitchener/waterloo I see there's definetly a student housing issue and it affects the area badly. But also see the proposed solution as blunt and likley ineffective.
With 2 universities and a college that area has it pretty rough with housing. I had to move into my dad's basement for a few years despite having a good job. I could afford a place but there was no where else to actually live.
Many homes close to the college apprently had 10 people living per room, you see places with like cars filling the parking lot and the lawns. The fire department whould demand evictions but that usually never takes.
The universities have a lot of huge condos and student housing near them but it seems every year we'd get news of one of the buildings not being done on time and hubdreds of student's ending up having to live out of hotels. This also stresses the transit system and a lot of services. Then waterloo becomes a ghost town in the off seasons.
Of course for non students the cities become a mess of temporary rentals, and explotive landlords. There's also the massive street parties that whould drain the police force budget.
Now in cases like this I'm not suggesting less student visas but schools need to coordinate with the cities to ensure there is enough housing in the area for the number of students they intend to intake. Though I'm not really sure how to make that fair as KW seemed to favour one school over the others. Keeping this coordination free if blatant corruption is going to take effort and require the setting of some standards potentially on a national level.
Fortunately, there's been solutions other to this. Remote learning, when available, reduces the stains a lot and is becoming a popular option. It's cheaper for rhe schools and the learners.
I also know schools have been decentalizing with campus spreading out across the city instead if just having one massive campus. Though this can make things more difficult for staff and learner, often needing a private transit setup. The benefit is that it spreads the housing needs a little and reduces strain on the public transit systems.
However, I still think the best option may be to limit the number of housing dependant students eatch school can take regardless of a visa.
The op-ed states they're are around 800,000 foreign students in Canada. In a lot of cases, students are coming into towns that don't have enough homes for rent, and the universities/colleges aren't stepping up to build housing. Cape Breton University sounds like a particularly severe example.
I don't think anyone would say the housing crisis has a single cause. Shitty zoning restrictions, NIMBYs, Airbnb, low interest rates, all play a part as well.
CBU absolutely abuses the student visa program. The housing situation in Sydney has been awful now for a few years, but unless there is some disincentive for CBU I don't see it changing, unfortunately.
Simply because you're not aware on an angle on an issue doesn't make it a bizarre take.
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Governments need to get back to investing in our publicly funded universities and colleges. Colleges and universities are broke from government underfunding and are turning to foreign students to fill the gap.
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Provinces (especially the Ford government in Ontario) changed the laws, letting private colleges (and private satellite colleges tied to public colleges) run amok, scamming foreign students and benefiting the companies that want to turn our education system into a cash cow.
We should have a robust public education system that is attracting foreign students and providing them with the same quality of education available to domestic students. The players that look at our education system and see $$$ signs need to go.
This episode of Wag the Doug provides decent background about how the Ford government’s legislative changes and underfunding of public colleges led them to partner with private institutes to juice the number of foreign students for more cash.
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/56-students-in-strip-malls/
Hard agree. Our post secondary institutions should be properly funded from by taxes (and enrollment, I guess).
and enrollment
Nope. See: Norway.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Desperate calls by schools to urge local homeowners to rent out their rooms; students paying $650 a month to live three-to-a room in college towns boasting monthly rents upward of $2,000; a viral TikTok video purports to show an international student living under a bridge in Scarborough, Ont.
But in the short term, there is at least one glaringly obvious – if surely controversial – way to help ease the challenge of finding affordable rental accommodation: We need to stop issuing so many international student visas.
But anybody who thinks that our desire to bring in as many fruitful international students as possible isn’t contributing to the housing crunch hasn’t looked at the figures lately.
International students, who actually dwarf the population of temporary foreign workers at the moment, comprise about 17 percent of university enrolment in this country.
Further, the majority of those students are opting for schools where housing is exceptionally expensive and difficult to find – namely, in big cities in Ontario and British Columbia.
If that edict seems extreme, I would remind everybody that reducing international student visas to a more manageable baseline would actually be among the easier levers to pull to relieve pressure in our housing market.
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We need to stop issuing so many international student visas.
Yes. The others. Get rid of the others. Then it's all better.
Wait. My university is now poor because it's a user-pay mess and it relied on international students paying 4x as much as domestic students from across the country that it's now broke. Somehow this is the others' fault but I'm not sure how.
The suggestion is to tie visas to housing available in the institutions' community. It would ensure that there's enough housing for international students. It would give schools a reason to build and manage student housing.
Many post-secondary institutions are accepting students who will have nowhere to live. That's shitty for the students, it's shitty for the communities that don't have enough housing.
International students are still welcome.
And as stated in other comments, we should fund our schools directly, rather than relying on international students.