So I heard it was bad…

26Sep2010 Filed under: Residence Life Author: musaku

…But I didn’t know it was THIS bad.

University students are always on the move, this is a known fact. This includes moving the location of the place you call “home” every year.

I’m not living in official UBC housing this year, but I’m still living off campus near unknown barely marked buildings that look super nice. (In fact, I can see into some of their living rooms/kitchens.) They look so nice that despite it being September, I’m looking into them. I made a post earlier about housing on campus, but none of these buildings were on it.

So what are these mystery buildings?

They’re the reason why people complain so much about UBC housing.

I’ve walked by a few, wrote down their names, Googled them, and then I stumbled across this link – a nice list of all mystery buildings on campus. I dare you not to cry when you look at how many properties are on that list and how much they’re going for. (38 properties from about $400,000 to $1,400,000, with a select few at almost $3,000,000).

I’m from California. It’s difficult to live there and it’s quite expensive. Some of these go for more than my house back there that houses 3 people and 3 pets spaciously. I understand that Vancouver is also quite expensive, but really? This is a university. There’s hundreds/thousands of students who just plain can’t afford that. How is it that UBC has room for all of these developments, but lacks the ability to create more affordable housing for students? A university is a place for students to live and learn, not for them to go broke over housing or to have other, more well off people living on the land that students deserve.

I could be entirely wrong about this. Maybe the university is making money off of these developments and uses that to fund student programs. Maybe they have an agreement with the city that in exchange for something, the development corporations are able to build on the land. Either way, I really hope that the housing situation improves to benefit all of the students, rich or poor, at UBC.

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2 Responses to “So I heard it was bad…”

sara
September 27th, 2010 at 5:41 pm

I feel your pain. My father is a realtor, and he recently sold an apartment on campus (similar to your mystery buildings). I believe that it sold for $1,500,000 – $2,000,000… and while it was quite a nice place, it couldn’t have been more than 800 square feet. Can you imagine what two million dollars would get you elsewhere in the world?

I agree that the housing situation at UBC *needs* to be rectified… they are spending money to build an entirely new SUB (our current one is outdated, sure, but hardly unusable) and yet thousands of international AND domestic students end up not being able to come to UBC not because of their academic merit, but because they can’t find a place to live? Ugh so rage inducing.
Nancy Knight
October 12th, 2010 at 10:22 am

I’m Nancy Knight the Associate Vice President of Campus and Community Planning for UBC. Your hunch at the end of your post was right – family housing provides a substantial financial benefit to the university. A tiny snippet of history: UBC is a “land-grant” university. When it was first created more than 100 years ago, the provincial government recognized that BC wouldn’t have the population, and therefore tax base, necessary to support the growth and development of the university. So what did they do? Instead of money, they gave UBC a land endowment to be used to fund teaching and research in perpetuity. Family housing has added almost $300 million to UBC’s financial endowment, representing about one-quarter of the total funds. Endowment funds support research and student scholarships, which keeps UBC at the forefront of globally significant research and academic activity.

But housing on campus achieves more than a financial return for UBC – it delivers academically, socially and environmentally too. And that is why we are working very hard to increase the supply of student housing on campus. Despite having more student housing at our Vancouver campus than on any other Canadian university campus, we know that there is still high demand at UBC. Our recently approved Vancouver Campus Plan creates the capacity to house 50% of students on campus by 2030. Student Housing and Hospitality Services also has a plan to create 2,500 new units of student housing in the next five years, with 500 new beds coming online at Totem Park Residence by Fall, 2011.

Making the campus a complete community means encouraging a diversity of people – students as well as faculty, staff, and others – to live here. This diversity of people creates the year-round population that will bring more shops and services on campus. (When a large part of the population disappears for four months in the summer means many shop owners don’t see UBC as a good place to locate a business.) And we know this is important for students; in a recent survey we conducted, 74% of students living on campus said this was the most important thing UBC could do to improve their quality of life. Having a more substantial year-round community at UBC, where people can meet all their needs in one place and not have to commute to and from campus so frequently, will also have a huge impact in terms of reducing UBC’s GHG emissions and achieving our sustainability goals. Right now, more than 50% of households at UBC have someone who works or studies on campus, which is one of the most significant contributions UBC can make to sustainability. More housing, of all kinds, will make UBC a more vibrant, livable community for everyone.