The non-profit organization Student Housing Nova Scotia wants to work directly with post-secondary students in the province to create a first-of-its-kind provincial student housing fund.
The Developing Affordable Student Housing (DASH) Fund initiative, launched by the group on Thursday, is a plan to address the housing crisis students face while living and studying in Nova Scotia. Student Housing NS will ask students to directly contribute to creating new and affordable housing options that meet their unique needs, and to sit at the table when designing and developing projects with their funds.
The initiative “is an opportunity for students to build a more affordable future for less than the cost of lunch,” says Student Housing NS executive director Mitchell Archibald, “where $5 a semester would contribute to this fund.” That’s what students will be asked to vote on in a referendum: whether their campus wants to add a student fee, or levy, of $5 per semester to the non-academic fees they already pay, which would directly contribute to the DASH Fund. As an example, domestic full-time students at Dalhousie University’s main Studley Campus pay $1,118.59 per semester in non-academic fees. International students pay hundreds of dollars more than that. These fees cover such things as the students’ health plan, a bus pass, student services, student union dues and facilities renewal fees.
“We’ve worked on this for more than a year, and now we’re ready to put this to students—a province-wide fund to create housing that meets the needs of students at prices they can afford.”
Student Housing Nova Scotia is a non-profit organization that develops, operates and advocates for housing that meets the needs of post-secondary students in Nova Scotia. Over the past decade, their units in Halifax and Wolfville have been rented by students at an average of $400 below market rates.
This fall, the group conducted a housing survey of more than 1,200 post-secondary students from across the province. One takeaway from this survey, says Archibald, is that more than 72% of students said they trusted the non-profit sector to fix student housing, versus 43% saying they trusted the public sector to do so and 27% saying they trusted their college or university to do so.
“The message there is not that we don’t want to work with these partners,” says Archibald, “but it’s a message to the province, especially, that this is where the investments should go and, frankly, this is where students trust it to go.”
There are 10 universities and 16 Nova Scotia Community College campuses across the province, and as of the start of October 61,978 full-time and part-time post-secondary students were enrolled from Yarmouth to Sydney and Springhill to Halifax.
Archibald says this initiative is “uniquely positioned because there’s no other population with a mechanism in place to make this kind of change and to have this kind of impact through an automatic fee or levy.”
The DASH Fund’s goal is for every student union and association across Nova Scotia to add a question about the $5 housing levy to the ballot alongside their regularly held student council elections in 2025, letting students decide whether they want to start paying into the fund.
“It’s their choice where this ends up on the ballot,” says Archibald of each campus’ student council, “but based on the conversations we have, there’s a lot of broad support both among students generally but also among the students’ leaders. We’ve presented this to a lot of them already, so that in January we can hit the ground running and have conversations about what needs to happen to hold a referendum.”
Student Housing NS is a non-profit organization that has managed affordable student housing in the province for nearly 60 years. It regularly tours different post-secondary school campuses during orientation week to provide students with housing resources and to have conversations on what their housing needs are. Based on these conversations and the recent survey of 1,200 students in the province, whose results will be published in early 2025, Student Housing NS determined that 70% of students were willing to pay something, and that $5 was the average price students would pay for such a fund.
Student Housing NS has calculated that a province-wide $5 per student per semester fee would generate more than $600,000 annually to be used, essentially, as the start-up cash needed to secure much greater funding through provincial programs and loans. Student Housing NS estimates that it will be able to use its position in the non-profit housing sector to convert this DASH Fund capital into $12 million annually to build and develop affordable student housing options that would directly support the campus communities that had contributed to the fund over the long term.
“One of the benefits of non-profit housing from an investment perspective,” says Archibald, “is that the equity contribution required is 5% versus the 20-25% required in the private sector. This is where the $12 million figure comes from—because 5% is $600,000. Students aren’t paying for the entire property; we’re mortgaging the 95% and covering those additional costs.”
Student Housing NS estimates that $12 million annually could support the creation of hundreds of affordable rental units for students across the province over the next five years. In the short term, 10% of the DASH Fund will support students through bursaries and financial aid for the first few years as housing gets built “to ensure that there’s a tangible benefit being offered to students on day one,” says Archibald.
“A core part of the DASH Fund is that, from a governance perspective, the stakeholders—the student unions and their representatives—are going to be very involved in how this funding gets distributed,” says Archibald. How the fund is used will determine which campuses sign on, both initially and long-term. “If every campus across the province signs on this year and everyone joins, that’s great,” says Archibald, “but if it’s just Acadia and Cape Breton University on different ends of the province, it’s going to be a different conversation about what that looks like. But the general principle is that funds that a campus contributes stay within that community.”
Archibald says that once campuses sign on, the student groups that represent them will meet to discuss how to use the fund. They will create an agreement to determine their campuses’ housing situation, what they want, and how they want the initial 10% to be distributed for scholarships and bursaries on a campus-to-campus basis. “Any projects funded are going to be collaborative, meaning the proposed agreements put forward to folks that join us will be the conditions of the release of funds,” says Archibald. “There will be accountability mechanisms so that students can be confident that their money is being used appropriately and that they’re getting value from it.”
Archibald hopes to help all Nova Scotia campuses hold a DASH Fund referendum over the next two years. The group’s campaign starts now to get it added to the ballot. The pitch: “This is a solution that, in the long term, can have a significant impact on student housing in this province and we want students to have the opportunity to decide whether that’s something they want to support or not.”
Students in Nova Scotia make up more than 5.5% of the provincial population, and they face significant challenges in finding and keeping safe and affordable housing that meets their needs.
As reported in Nova Scotia’s Provincial Housing Needs Assessment Report from 2023:
- 17% of students were living in housing without enough bedrooms for their household
- 24% of students didn’t have access to public transit
- 9% of students identified as being “unhoused”
- 71% of students were spending more than 30% of their income on housing
- 48% of students said they’d gone without groceries to pay for housing
- 36% of students said they’d experienced discrimination while finding housing
- 57% of students were living in housing that required repairs, or where they felt unsafe
University and college campuses are spread out across Nova Scotia from tip to tip, and face different challenges. For example, students at Cape Breton University in Sydney frequently use ride-shares to travel from Halifax and back each school day because there aren’t as many housing options near the CBU campus. For students who do secure housing near campus, Sydney’s overwhelmed transit system means students spend hours a day commuting by bus the distance it takes a car to travel in 10 minutes. Both these issues affect CBU attendance numbers and overall student well-being.
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Archibald says Student Housing NS is concerned about this as well as smaller campuses in places outside the HRM where “there’s much less housing and many fewer options.”
Archibald says creating more student housing “will benefit Nova Scotians more than they understand, because when we think about students as actors in the marketplace, non-market student housing is the perfect solution for the housing crisis.”
He says students are paying, on average, $700-$1000 for a room in a multi-bedroom house. “It doesn’t get much lower than 700.” According to Zumper’s data, the average rent in Halifax as of November was $1,942 for a one-bedroom, $2,657 for a two-bedroom and $2,873 for a three-bedroom. “What family can pay that much?” says Archibald. “So, non-market student housing will, in the long-term and especially in the communities with high amounts of students, begin to push down those market pressures because all of a sudden, the private sector won’t be able to as easily charge this much for two- and three-bedroom units.”
It’s also a solution for other issues students face in securing housing, says Archibald, “like living in housing that needs repairs or where they feel unsafe—it’s addressing those things, too.”
When it comes to what affordable or even deeply affordable student housing means, Archibald says “there’s no adequate definition of affordable housing in the student context, because a lot of times we say that affordable housing means you’re paying 30% of your income on housing costs. Most students don’t often have an income. Some do, but it’s not proportional.”
He says this is why “a broader conversation needs to happen about complex student housing needs and we determine affordability, and we’ve been having that conversation for as long as I’ve been in this role. But the short answer, for us, is: how can we make it as affordable as possible and reduce costs as much as possible for students?”
He says the reality is that “a lot of students are actively going into debt for housing and tuition, which is kind of unique. So, really, what they can afford to pay is zero but what they’re able to pay, in a lot of cases, is more than that. But students in Nova Scotia have the second highest amount of student debt when they graduate, at about $40,000.”
The DASH Fund is based on a successful model used by a Montreal-based non-profit organization called UTILE. It has built over 500 affordable units for students in Quebec, with more than a thousand additional units in development based on previous student referendums at large Montreal schools like Concordia University and McGill University. Archibald says one referendum at either of those schools is the equivalent of almost all campuses in Nova Scotia, “so there’s an ability to scale there—but we’ve adapted this to be permanent and recurring.” UTILE held referendums for specific campuses and specific projects, which were successful but weren’t set up to be recurring. DASH is different because its student levy will remain and be continually used to fund deferred maintenance and sustainability costs of the housing projects created for those campuses. It will also be used to keep student rents as low as possible through future subsidies.
“We want to make Nova Scotia a leader in student housing while supporting students for generations to come,” said Archibald during the group’s release on Thursday. “The DASH Fund will allow us to provide more housing that students need, which is critical if Nova Scotia is going to attract, train and retain the skilled workers needed to grow and move our province forward.”
The province’s Department of Advanced Education signed one-year bilateral agreements with each university last May, which stipulates that government funding for schools will be tied to various requirements, such as a 15% bed provision for students by each school. However, there is no additional funding attached to this requirement from the provincial government, so it’s up to the schools to find ways to pay for this, if they don’t meet that threshold. The three schools that don’t are Dal, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and CBU.
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Archibald says, “I think it’s incumbent on all of us to do something to fix the student housing crisis—not just universities and the province. That’s why our organization exists, because we see a solution in the non-market and non-profit sector, and we’re not going to sit around and wait.
“I think students have long waited for their government and universities to address housing needs, but nothing has happened. This initiative as a whole is trying to give some control back to students to say, ‘we’re going to build something better that we have more control over, that we can trust is going to be affordable and will meet our needs in the long term.’”
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.