Oshawa’s Student Housing Battle
Oshawa has hosted students renting in this city ever since Durham College was established in the late 1960’s. With this smaller campus quite north of the main city, students were hardly noticed. Quite the difference a few decades later to the overwhelming presence of a college aged population, Oshawa is becoming something of a University town. Trent University has expanded their Oshawa branch once placed in the middle of Durham College, now to their own official campus further south near the Civic centre. The biggest influence on the student boom has been UOIT which was founded in 2002 on the northern campus of Durham College, on donated land from Windfield Farms. The last ten years have dramatically changed the landscape, attitude and housing market of Oshawa.
Most Oshawa residents felt the campus expansion was nothing but a positive addition to Oshawa, bringing in further revenue, students with disposable income to the area, and rental investment opportunities at a time of GM floundering. However, perhaps Oshawa was unprepared for the sudden increase in student population. UOIT is now the “fastest growing university in Ontario”, steadily increasing their enrolment by over a thousand students each year. Investors quickly bought up properties in the existing subdivisions backing onto the main campus, an area commonly known as “Dalhousie”. Prices for these average houses skyrocketed in the late 2000’s and was estimated that up to 75% of the subdivision had been purchased and converted into suspected student lodging houses, some with up to 8 to 10 bedrooms in a single house.
The student housing controversy caused the City of Oshawa to introduce a new bylaw on February 18, 2008 limiting the number of bedrooms in a rental home to four and forcing landlords to pay a $1,000 fee, driving up the cost of affordable housing for students. This bylaw known as Section two affected all housing north of Ormond drive. It went so far as to change the marketing procedures for Tribute Communities, a builder with an existing site at Simcoe and Conlin road. Tribute announced that in accordance with the new bylaws they would no longer be selling homes to purchasers with investment motives. A letter in the Toronto Star, the chief of the Ontario Human Rights Commission Barbara Hall, stated “I urge Oshawa City Council members to look closely at what has been proposed, to apply a sound city-wide planning rationale, and to consider the human rights impact of its decision.”
Although residents of the community are afraid of Oshawa going the ways of a student ghetto, the reality of the situation is that UOIT has made no plans of slowing down their ever growing campus locations and that students will be a future constant in Oshawa. There was quite a lot of criticism in how the city dealt with this housing crisis and is still in consideration for bylaw changes. People argue that student rental investments of existing properties in the area are necessary to keep up with the demand and that Oshawa should embrace the changes.
In the last two years UOIT has built new on-campus residences that house an additional 350 students. A student based apartment building with room rentals available was completed on Simcoe Street just south of the main campus that can accommodate over 500 students. Compared to the increasing number of students the schools are bringing in this appears to only be a dent in a much needed broader housing plan. The question of whether Oshawa will be able to support the numbers of future students without sacrificing portions to investors for student housing is still yet to be known.