Student housing going up in Dartmouth

Students sleeping in cars, having to leave school because of housing crisis

After working so hard to get here, Chukwuemeka Ugwu came so very close to giving up and going home to Nigeria because he couldn’t find a place to live.

“It’s not something I would like anyone to go through,” Ugwu said. “I thought I was strong, but I met what was stronger than me.”

He didn’t expect the struggle when he landed in Halifax for his first year of power engineering this fall as an international student at NSCC’S Akerley campus in Dartmouth.

Ugwu had to stay in an Airbnb for months, which exhausted his budget. He often stayed in the school’s library every night until it closed because “it was my place of comfort at that time.”

A friend and fellow student from Nigeria gave up and went home, and Ugwu was considering that too when he eventually, with some help, found somewhere to live.

“I found out that the problem is not just that people don’t have enough money to pay, the problem is the few who have accommodation, housing, are taking advantage of the situation that more people are looking for housing than the houses that are available,” Ugwu said.

NOW BUILDING: 350 BEDS

Sounds of construction are echoing across three NSCC campuses in the province right now. For students scrambling for housing, these projects can’t be finished fast enough.

■ Akerley campus in Dartmouth: 100 beds, target opening date: September 2024

■ Pictou campus in Stellarton: 50 beds, target opening date: September 2024

■ Ivany campus in Dartmouth: 200 beds, target opening date: September 2025

Announced in November, the province kicked in $112 million for the three projects.

Beyond the new builds, NSCC has housing options at three of the 14 campuses in the province with 200 total beds: Truro, Port Hawkesbury and Lawrencetown in the Annapolis Valley.

Demand is high and students are planning ahead.

“For our current three buildings, we already have over 250 applications for the fall of 2023,” said Chauncey Kennedy, manager of housing and student life at NSCC.

He said they’re already getting emails from students about when they can apply to live in the new buildings. The three new buildings are not dormitory style but rather one or four-bedroom suites with washrooms and private bedrooms.

Rates for the new units haven’t been set but typically now students pay about $8,000 for eight months for a one-bedroom unit, which includes rent and meals.

“It is a basic human right and need to have safe housing, and I think it’s key that if we want our students to be successful, this is a really a need that needs to be addressed,” Kennedy said. “It’s hard to expect a student to be successful in the classroom if they’re going home to something unsafe.”

STUDENTS SLEEPING IN CARS

Post-secondary life is tough enough, let alone having to live in your car while keeping your grades up. Lisa Mader, researcher and student services counsellor at NSCC, is collaborating on the first and only national research project examining student homelessness in Canada.

"We’ve had students living in their cars, we’ve had students sleeping on a park

bench a few years ago, just not where you think our students would end up, but they’re not excluded from the general population that are struggling more and more to find safe and secure housing in the city,” she said.

It impacts their studies because they’ll miss classes because they’re apartment hunting, and it also affects their ability to focus when they are in school, Mader said.

“You’re trying to work on assignments and things like that when you don’t have a roof over your head, which means you don’t have a place to work on your schoolwork, which means you’re showering potentially here at the college … and you’re struggling to eat meals,” she said.

As a counsellor, she said she sees how housing insecurity leads to anxiety, depression and “turning to other ways to cope that might not be healthy.”

The college has an emergency housing program in Halifax that has helped 16 students since it started in 2019, but that’s for emergencies only, not for the waves of students who struggle with finding a place.

The national research project is still a year or so away from producing findings and making recommendations, but Mader said a 2021 survey showed about five per cent of the post-secondary population was experiencing some form of homelessness. That’s about 110,000 students nationwide.