Student housing projects in BC

A roundup by Frances Bula

Vancouver Community College eyes Broadway site for student housing (March 2023). Frances Bula in the Globe and Mail.

In B.C., no postsecondary institutions were allowed to take on debt to create housing until 2018. The University of British Columbia was the only one that added housing from 2006 to 2016 because it was able to leverage its endowment fund.

Colleges and technical institutions, and even other universities, didn’t have those kinds of resources.

The 2018 NDP housing initiative allowed all of them to take on that kind of debt, with approval and backing from the province.

Specific projects in Metro Vancouver. The article also talks about projects in northern BC and on Vancouver Island.

One of the biggest projects proposed for Vancouver’s Broadway Plan – the city’s ambitious effort to add 50,000 new homes along the subway extension now under construction – is a 3,300-apartment development by Vancouver Community College, as it joins other B.C. colleges and technical institutions in a push to build housing.

Several other institutions have already built new projects or are in the process of doing so. Douglas College, for example, will build a 20-storey, 368-bed tower near the current New Westminster campus with $200-million in provincial money for the $292-million project, which will start construction this summer.

In Burnaby, at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, a 12-storey mass-timber building is under way that will have 470 beds, some of them reserved for students who come into the city for only a few weeks at a time to complete intensive trades-training programs.

More:

• In Ontario, Mike Moffatt has been talking about student housing as a quick way to add more housing, as post-secondary students account for a big chunk of rental demand. From an August 2021 interview: “We’re not building residences that quickly. One thing that we could do really quickly is build more college and university residences, particularly college residences, because that’s where a lot of the growth is happening.”

• Solving the student housing crisis. Frances Bula in University Affairs, March 2022.