“Our data did not directly explain why international students didn’t cause the rental crisis, however … when we looked at the broader literature we actually knew international students had different housing needs compared with locals,” Professor Mu said.
“Some of them were in student accommodation, some of them would choose shared bedrooms, so obviously their housing needs were somewhat different from the local people.”
Meanwhile, the original article says,
From 2021 to 2024, the study reported, Canada’s population increased by an average of 859,473 people per year while only 254,670 new housing units were started annually.
But this makes the false assumption that those who came had identical housing needs as local citizens, when we know international students (for example) did not.
Also, aside from this token callout,
driven almost entirely by immigration
there’s no breakdown in the article on how much of that increase is actually from immigration as opposed to citizens moving back home because of covid - let alone a breakdown of new PRs vs international students vs temporary workers vs refugees vs etc…
Perhaps the study actually does contain this information. I wanted to double check there but couldn’t find the study linked in the article, so I wasn’t able to do this. Basically it’s a very poor article that conflates different things, I’d go as far as to speculate that they came up with the conclusion that they wanted first and then tried to find support in the data while disregarding or outright ignoring contrary indicators…
I find serious flaws with this.
It’s for a different country, but consider from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/australia-rent-crisis-not-international-students-fault-study/105076290
Meanwhile, the original article says,
But this makes the false assumption that those who came had identical housing needs as local citizens, when we know international students (for example) did not.
Also, aside from this token callout,
there’s no breakdown in the article on how much of that increase is actually from immigration as opposed to citizens moving back home because of covid - let alone a breakdown of new PRs vs international students vs temporary workers vs refugees vs etc…
Perhaps the study actually does contain this information. I wanted to double check there but couldn’t find the study linked in the article, so I wasn’t able to do this. Basically it’s a very poor article that conflates different things, I’d go as far as to speculate that they came up with the conclusion that they wanted first and then tried to find support in the data while disregarding or outright ignoring contrary indicators…