TasWeekend: Students challenged even before the school year starts
Hobart’s housing crisis has hit the wall — and students are among those bearing the brunt of the impact.
Lifestyle
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ELLA Edwards wakes up every day thankful she isn’t homeless. The University of Tasmania honours student says she spent the first month of this year frantically trying to find somewhere to live, and the ordeal was gut-wrenching.
“It was so stressful,” she says. “I’ve been privileged enough in my life to have never faced homelessness, but that was going to be a real possibility for me — and it was very frightening.”
The 21-year-old English honours student considers herself to be one of the lucky ones. After weeks of having rental applications rejected, her housing situation has been resolved — for now — but not without taking an emotional toll.
Edwards was one of more than 1100 University of Tasmania students to receive a letter from the university’s Student Living team advising that they wouldn’t be guaranteed a room for the coming year.
The letter, sent out in the week leading up to Christmas, outlined that the university would prioritise first-year students and those moving to Hobart from other areas over its previous commitment to continuing students.
Edwards was floored. “I just felt like I did something wrong,” she says. “When I was at the apartments I was volunteering and I was tutoring. “I had never gotten complaints about my behaviour and I worked hard. [When I wasn’t offered a room] I felt like I wasn’t a good student or worthy enough for housing,” she says.
The letter, which the university has since acknowledged was poorly worded, pointed students to realestate.com.au and Gumtree among other websites to help students in their search for housing. Shortly after, an email was circulated offering international students an opportunity to “jump to the head of the accommodation queue” if they paid their accommodation fees upfront — a gaffe that was later retracted.
Edwards still feels bitter about her treatment by the university. She thinks someone should apologise for the unexpected stress that was caused and believes that the institution failed to help her as a student.
“I felt so unsupported,” she says. “I felt my entire degree and my life was interrupted for something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. I don’t know how the uni thought it would be a good idea to eject hundreds of students into a city in the grip of a housing crisis. Where would they go?”
UTAS Vice-Chancellor Professor Rufus Black acknowledges the challenges faced by students seeking accommodation, and reiterates his belief that access to housing is a crucial component of access to education.
“Insecurity about where you might live is incredibly unsettling,” Black says. “Housing is an issue that affects our wellbeing at a fundamental level, which is why we have been working so hard to help our students through a challenging situation. From the outset, we have prioritised Tasmanian students from outside the Hobart region for university accommodation.” Black says the university also provides a range of scholarships that support Tasmanian students who have to move away from home to study. “To deliver on equity of access, which is a key strategic goal of the university, we must also find solutions to the current challenges that exist in Hobart’s housing market,” he says. “It will take the community working together to do so.”
Edwards’ own solution to the housing shortage is an unconventional one. She now rents a room in Lindisfarne, in the family home of her best friend Dana Anderson, which she shares with Anderson’s mum, stepdad and 17-year-old brother.
She seems pleased with where she landed. She says she pays much less than if she stayed in the city, no longer pays for parking and gets home-cooked meals when she wants them. “I feel very blessed,” she tells TasWeekend. “It’s like I have a second family down here, which I’m really grateful for.”
We are sitting in a cafe not far from the university’s Hobart Apartments on Melville Street that Edwards had been living in until she was given notice to move out. She has brought along four of her friends who want to share their thoughts on the way the university is dealing with the crisis. After receiving their notice from the apartments last year — and then enduring the uncertainty of whether their accommodation would be confirmed — all of them believe the education provider is prioritising profits over student wellbeing.
“As a society we need to decide whether we think universities operate a service to people or whether we think they should function like a business,” third-year medical student Vivian Imbriotis says. “If you think it’s a service then we need to make sure universities are behaving in a way that protects their students. We need to view universities as having some kind of duty of care over people enrolled in them.”
Imbriotis sits jammed in one of the cafe’s vinyl-clad booths, wedged in between Edwards and Sam Campbell, an education honours student. Opposite them sits Edwards’ housemate Dana Anderson, an honours student in media, and third-year information technology student Michelle Ruoyaom, an international student from northern China. Imbriotis and Campbell made successful bids to continue living at the Melville Street apartments, while Ruoyaom has relocated to the university’s Midcity Apartments. Anderson, of course, lives at home.
“After a backlash they chose to take affirmative measures to accommodate returning students, but they took those measures as a consequence of the potential to lose some of their reputation in being able to house students,” Imbriotis says.
Ruoyaom says she applied for at least 10 rental houses while waiting for notification from the university about whether she would get a room. “I was really upset because we had just one month to find something,” she says quietly. “It has been very stressful for me because I couldn’t find a place very easily. Quite honestly, if they didn’t offer me a place, probably I would have been homeless by now.”
At last count more than 140 students were still on the waiting list for university-supplied housing.And with semester one beginning on Monday, the window to find housing for the students before classes resume is rapidly closing. Despite efforts by the university to create additional student beds, the supply hasn’t been enough to meet the increasing demand.
Steph Taylor, executive director of Student Experience at UTAS, explains how the university found itself in this predicament. “Towards the end of 2018, impacted by a traditionally tight housing market and a drop in turnover at our properties, an unmet demand became apparent, and teams of staff and contractors have worked around the clock to address that,” she says. “This is a very complex challenge and the university is committed to doing all that we can to support our students and help manage Hobart’s housing market as we continue to deliver a pipeline of major long-term student accommodation projects.”
As of last week, the university claims it had more than 116 beds still available across a variety of options, of which 100 were available through homestay, and with new applications for accommodation being received daily.
Since December last year a further 300 student beds have been made available in rooms at the university-operated Fountainside Hotel, which it purchased in December, the MidCity Apartments, the Theatre Royal Hotel and the Old Commerce building at the Sandy Bay campus. These new offerings are in addition to the university’s existing 1400 beds across its Hobart Apartments on Melville St, John Fisher and Christ colleges, MidCity Apartments, Mt Nelson Villas and independently run Jane Franklin Hall. There are also proposals for 430 beds at the new Melville St apartments (in the former Forestry Tasmania headquarters), expected to be ready in 2021; a student village comprising “quality prefabricated accommodation” along with 11 dwellings to be developed at Grosvenor St, Sandy Bay; and a renewed push for more homestay providers.
It’s unknown whether these additional beds will be enough to cater for the university’s projected growth. As the education provider grapples to deal with an escalating situation, its accommodation landscape is changing rapidly. The university so far has been producing a crisis response. Plans for a floating hotel were released and then, almost as quickly, retracted.
Tasmania University Union president Sharifah Syed-Rohan says while the union acknowledges the difficulty in finding an immediate solution to such a widespread issue, the fact that some students remain unhoused is troubling. She says the union would like to see better clarity and improved consultation with students on their housing allocation.
According to Syed-Rohan, the TUU housing forum on Facebook, which was set up to provide a platform for people to network to find housing, received an “unprecedented amount” of daily requests to join the group in the week leading up to the university’s O-Week. “The market is very tough, and I think it’s really scary that if it doesn’t improve then students will consider moving out of Hobart to seek educational opportunities elsewhere,” Syed-Rohan says.
Last year, a study by the Higher Education Standards Panel found that UTAS had the nation’s lowest retention rate, with a third of all students failing to finish their course — a figure that is twice the national average. The concern is that the unabating housing crisis will impact on the university’s already damning attrition rates.
Back at the cafe Imbriotis is convinced the university’s behaviour towards its residential students is a symptom of a bigger problem. “I think UTAS has continuously responded to financial incentives,” Imbriotis says.
“UTAS could either preference new students, including international students, or existing students ... and they got more money by preferencing new ones, so they did. I don’t think we can say UTAS was being moral or immoral. I think we can say that UTAS responded to the incentives, which in some ways were really poorly set up, and it caused a lot of harm to a lot of people.”
An obvious financial gain is the lucrative international student market. For many years now higher education and its related expenses has been one of Tasmania’a biggest export industries. Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show the state pocketed $423 million in 2017-18 from education-travel revenue. UTAS continues to be the sole provider of tertiary education in the state. The latest figures (from 2015) show UTAS’s international student body accounted for 72 per cent of all visiting students to Tasmania. In 2018, the number of international student enrolments totalled 5036, nearly double its 2014 figure of 2674. Last year it had a 90 per cent increase in the number of international students from China.
The university’s revenue focus would also be a product of its arrangement with the asset management firm Spark Living. The consortium, at the end of 2017, was awarded a 30-year licence agreement for 10 of the university’s 14 accommodation properties. In what is an emerging model in the tertiary sector, the consortium, which includes DIF and Tetris Capital, paid an undisclosed sum in return for future rental revenue.
Campbell says what he pays in rent at the Hobart Apartments is expensive when you consider that the building falls under the Government’s National Rent Affordability Scheme (NRAS) for low-income earners. “It’s meant to be 25 per cent below market rate,” he says.
“They recently increased the rent by $18 a week and the parking permit by $65 a week. So my rent was already $255 with parking, then they upped it to $320 a week,” Campbell says.
Edwards was in the same situation before moving and found it exceptionally hard. She was on the highest rate of youth allowance, which covered her rent but left just $10 a fortnight to cover everything else, including payments for her car and phone.
A boom in tourism and the increasing popularity of short-stay accommodation platforms such as Airbnb, combined with population growth and low housing supply, have all combined to driving up rents in Hobart.
Late last year Hobart’s vacancy rate was just 0.7 per cent. Anything under 1 per cent is considered a market failure, and is likely to increase homelessness and negatively impact migration and economic growth.
“Once it drops below 1 per cent, it becomes irrelevant as to whether it’s 0.8, 0.7 or 0.6. It’s bad,” says Dr Kathleen Flanagan, deputy director of UTAS’s Housing and Community Research Unit. Flanagan says Tasmania is experiencing a cultural shift in relation to housing, where housing is increasingly seen as a product in a market rather than as an essential good. The answer, she believes, is an expanded supply of social housing that would help to address some of the market challenges by providing an alternative option that is de-commodified.
Launceston-based law student Isaac Clifford says he has not ruled out transferring to a Melbourne university to finish his combined law and business degree after his experience trying to find accommodation in Hobart last year. He believes as many as eight in 10 law students based in the North have considered leaving the state’s sole tertiary provider rather than attend the compulsory Hobart-based subjects needed to complete their degree in Tasmania — a consideration wholly attributed to the “impenetrable” Hobart housing market.
Clifford recounts how his grades slipped from distinctions and high distinctions to credits and passes during the semester he studied away from Launceston. He puts it down to the stress he endured as he tried to secure housing while also trying to maintain his studies. “I had an emotional and mental breakdown because I couldn’t study and be practically homeless at the same time,” he says. “I do not consider myself a mentally ill person, but while I was down there I had constant anxiety and I was really depressed. My grades suffered and it put considerable stress on my relationship.”
Clifford tells TasWeekend he moved five times in five months for reasons tied directly to the city’s housing shortage. He feels the university could do more in providing accommodation assistance for northern students relocating to Hobart for study.
“I had a situation when I went to an open house in Sandy Bay where there were upwards of 30 other people applying, and they said they would give priority to people who need it most,” he says. “I thought I was in a pretty dire situation and I didn’t get accepted. I can scarcely imagine what other people are going through.”
Clifford is not alone in his belief that the university needs to better protect its students. A 29-year-old law student from Malaysia said he was paying $200 a week to sub-let a windowless room in Dynnyrne. The house he is sharing with 10 other students has been retrofitted to accommodate eight bedrooms, two of which are in the basement. Although gas, electricity and wi-fi is included in the price, the home is without a lounge room — which was converted into a bedroom — or a common area aside from the small kitchen to sit and socialise in.
He considers himself lucky, though. Despite living in a basement, he has a large enough space to house a bed, two study desks and a chair. He also has the option to rent an approved heater from his landlord.
Back at the university-run Hobart Apartments on Melville St, climate control is also challenging for the residents. Although they, too, have access to small heaters, the rooms aren’t equipped with air-conditioning, and over summer residents reported the north-facing rooms reached internal temperatures above 40C.
Residents have also commented on the building’s layout, which has been criticised as being designed more like a hotel than for a community to live and interact in. Communal spaces that would invite conversation, camaraderie and networking are limited, and some residents have complained of social isolation.
Professor Black says he is keen to work with students collaboratively to enhance the student experience and the student voice within the communities.
“Creating successful student accommodation is about much more than just beds. We must also create welcoming, healthy, safe and vibrant places to live,” he says. “Our student living community has expanded significantly in recent years as we have grown the number of beds we offer to meet increasing demand. At the Hobart Apartments and our other new accommodation facilities, we have residential support officers on site and available from 8am until midnight, and a range of academic, financial and social support programs students can access.
Student Living also runs a number of events each semester that are designed to bring students together and create a sense of community.”
The antidote to this lack of community is possibly best summed up by Joanna Rosewell, Principal of Jane Franklin Hall at South Hobart, who is a strong supporter of her college’s accommodation model. Rosewell explains that the open-plan spaces of the Jane Franklin buildings facilitate opportunities for chance meetings to promote soft skills development, while the college’s catered dining schedule encourages shared conversations over shared meals. “I firmly believe if you get people’s home life right, everything else flows,” she says.
As the housing crisis deepens, the university has been actively marketing its homestay program to attract more hosts.
Erika Thomson offers UTAS international students a classical homestay program in her Rosetta home. Along with basic board across two private rooms, she provides three meals a day and the opportunity for students to participate in family life.
The mum of Austin, 8, has hosted more than 15 students over three years, with stays lasting anywhere from five weeks to a year. “For us it’s been a really positive experience,” Thomson says. “Often the student is coming from overseas to a place that is unfamiliar. Hosts can help navigate their way through a foreign place and help them in setting up a network of friends.” And she enjoys the cultural exchange the program provides.
“At the end of the day we are a multicultural society, and the better understanding we have and the opportunity we give other people to understand us as a community is very important,” she says.
Despite the successes of the internally-run program, the university last week confirmed it will outsource the homestay service to a national provider. TasWeekend was told the new service is to be delivered by the Australian Homestay Network.
At this stage not much is known about how the new service will operate, but it is believed students will have the option of shared rooms and a choice of meal packages. The new program is rumoured to have a larger catchment, which would result in longer commute times for students, and a fee increase.
Thomson says she doesn’t see anything wrong with the current program, as it fits in well with her family life.
“Homestay is about people becoming part of your family, really, and welcoming them in as though they are family,” she says. “If you’re making it a commercial transaction you lose some of the family intimacy of it.”
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