Editorial: Concordia, Help Your International Students With Housing
Concordia needs to get organized when it comes to student housing.
Last semester, an international student from China who goes by the pseudonym Xiao-Ming was subjected, without help, to the harsh rent market in Montreal— which resulted in inadequate living circumstances.
He had to pay $850 per month for rent, and share a duplex with at least one other student at a time, along with the landlord and his wife. The heat was only turned on in December, despite the cold weather starting in October.
To use “extra services,” he was asked to pay up to $200 per month in additional expenses. The fee would provide basic living expenses and items like access to a clothes dryer, micro- wave, hairdryer, television, shampoo, soap, lunch bag, photocopy, scanner, iron, bicycle, dessert, garbage bags, towels, tissues/napkins, toothpaste and shower gel.
International students should not be exploited simply for wanting to come to Canada. In fact, we should be encouraging students to come here to study, building a more global university community. There is a simple solution to this problem, and it starts with an initiative taken by the Concordia Student Union and UTILE, a local not-for-profit group.
The CSU took $1.85 million of student money, collected for student space initiatives, to be put towards the Popular University Student Housing fund. With this money, the organization plans to build an affordable student-housing unit with about 100 to 150 rooms. It will be located about 30 minutes away from either of Concordia’s campuses. Rent will not exceed $450 per month, and the unit will operate as a cooperative.
“Montreal is the second largest student city in North America,” Terry Wilkings, general coordinator of the CSU, told CBC. “If you look at the universities and the residence halls they provide, they only provide about 5,000 beds.”
There is an obvious lack of space for students coming from outside of the city to go to Concordia, as international students make up 15 per cent of the university’s 43,752 students.
This housing project is exactly the kind of change that will help prevent serious problems for students coming to study at Concordia from different countries, or even different provinces and cities.
UTILE and the CSU plan to make this project a model for other similar housing units across the city. The unit is set to be finished in July 2018, though—and the problem exists now.
The Link sees a possible solution in HOJO, the CSU’s Off-Campus Housing and Job Bank. HOJO works to educate and help university students by providing resources and references about housing and employment.
The International Students Office refers their patrons to HOJO for all manner of issues, from lease transfer papers, to legal disputes with their landlord. Even the pamphlets available at the ISO office regarding housing are made by HOJO.
If the school is already referring international students to a student- run housing organization for residence issues, then Concordia should be funding this organization. With more money for resources, employment, outreach to students and information, HOJO will be able to go beyond what they are doing now to help create a less exploitative city for international students.
