VIPIRG Student Housing Report featured in the Martlet

A new study highlights the impact of the ongoing housing crisis for Victoria-area students. The study found that 70 per cent of post-secondary students reported that their yearly earnings place them under the national low-income cut off, or “poverty line.”

The report, “Victoria’s Student Housing Crisis” by the Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group (VIPIRG), used over two-and-a-half months worth of research and uncovered the effects of increased housing costs on students’ well-being through surveys and interviews.

“Everybody knows that student housing is rough, but not a lot of people know what that actually does to students,” says Dakota McGovern, VIPIRG’s outreach coordinator and one of the co-authors of the study.

“The vacancy rate is .05 per cent in Victoria. It’s the lowest in Canada, but everyone uses that number and very few people know what it means. So, the goal of this project was to show, in examples, what that [looks] like.”

A total of 386 students from either UVic, Royal Roads University, or Camosun College were surveyed. Fourty-seven per cent of participants said they paid between $501 and $750 in monthly rent, and around 12 percent said they pay $1 000 or more.

Read the rest of the report here