Four international Conestoga College students from India share an apartment in Kitchener, Ont.Alicia Wynter/The Globe and Mail
Anna Triandafyllidou is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University.
In recent months there has been a heated debate about Canada’s housing affordability crisis and the role of international students in the mess.
Some argue that, particularly in Canada’s big three (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver), international students drive up rents because they are prepared to rent rooms in larger apartments or houses, and even share rooms with flatmates, bringing the overall possible rent of a unit to levels that are totally unaffordable for a local family.
In many smaller cities and towns, the sheer numbers of international students are also said to put pressure on housing, as there are simply not enough units for rent, regardless of the cost.
The question thus arises whether the average Canadian family is worse off because international students are creating an impossible rental market.
It is my contention that this is not the case, and I would actually argue the opposite: International students are saving both the average Canadian homeowner (and mortgage holder) and the Canadian banking system. How is that?
International students are high-paying and often exploited tenants in basement apartments and spare bedrooms across Canada’s large and smaller cities. Some are indeed contributing to competition in the market. But the housing crisis began long before the current surge in international students, and many of them, rather than competing with domestic renters, are living in arrangements that Canadians would not be seeking anyway.
Moreover, the rents that international students pay are allowing Canadian families to survive the Bank of Canada’s string of interest-rate hikes and their galloping mortgage payments. This, in turn, helps the banking system, as it grapples with the rising risk of defaults.
Recent reports show that, as the central bank tries to tame inflation with higher borrowing costs, several Canadian banks have allowed borrowers to extend their mortgage amortizations to more than 55 years in an effort to keep the loans afloat and allow households to keep up their payments.
Anecdotal evidence suggests many families are renting not only their basements but their bedrooms to international students. In many cases, parents and children have squeezed into one or two rooms to leave the spare rooms for renters. Networking often works through friends and extended family, as many homeowners prefer to have a student from their own ethnic and/or linguistic background, to make sharing the home easier for everyone.
These rentals play a crucial and still unaccounted role in keeping households afloat now that their mortgage payments have grown sharply in less than a year.
While this is not a long-term solution for the housing affordability crisis, nor a strategy for international student migration, these insights point to a few ideas that could help in the short and medium terms.
Colleges and universities should be asked to arrange affordable accommodations for their incoming international students as part of the study permit application process. Such accommodation arrangements can include tailored schemes where, for instance, seniors are paired with students, offering full board for a reasonable price while the student helps by doing chores and grocery shopping or befriending the older person.
University students struggling to find housing in Calgary and other cities
Young families could also be paired with international students and receive tax breaks on the rental income they make.
Provincial governments should provide strong incentives for colleges and universities to build more student residences.
International student migration needs to be reconsidered in Canada in some ways. We need to identify both bad practices (such as overexploiting international student streams as a revenue and sustainability strategy with little educational value) and bad actors (brokers and postsecondary institutions that prey on international students and their families, selling false promises for a path to migration). We also need to offer adequate services and protections to international students, including access to health care and clear pathways to job prospects.
But we must remember that international students are not the cause of Canada’s housing crisis – and that many households would be a lot worse off without them.