Ottawa is in the midst of a student housing crisis that, despite its severity, is rendered nearly invisible in public discourse. While media coverage often hovers over Toronto’s market volatility or Vancouver’s housing collapse, the crisis in the capital quietly festers behind the walls of government offices and university boardrooms. Home to two major universities and a large college system, Ottawa has one of the country’s largest student populations, with 106,641 students (table 1), yet virtually no infrastructure in place to support their right to housing.

Manufactured scarcity

The crisis is not a sudden or isolated emergency. It is a manufactured outcome of legislative neglect, institutional abdication, and planning exclusion. As enrolment grows in the City’s educational institutions, affordable housing supply has flatlined. Students now face record-high rents, exploitative lease conditions, and chronic displacement.

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Ottawa’s vacancy rate (the number of vacant, available units) for an apartment is 0.9 per cent in the $750 – $999 range and 0.5 per cent in the $1,000 – $1,249 range, while the average rent surpasses $1,650—far out of reach for students living on OSAP or minimum wage incomes. Meanwhile, waiting lists for subsidized housing in Ottawa exceed 10,000 applicants and have a wait time of five years or more, and the city has failed to implement any comprehensive student-focused housing strategy.

And all of this is happening in real time, in a city that bills itself as safe, stable, and livable. But for whom?

The mechanics of displacement

A core structural driver of this crisis is Ontario’s vacancy decontrol regime. Although the rent of sitting tenants may only increase according to provincial rent increase guidelines, landlords may raise the rent of vacant apartments without limit, which incentivizes frequent turnover. For student renters, whose leases often last between 8 months and a year, this turns impermanence into a profit model.

The 2018 amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act gave buildings first occupied after 2018 an exemption from the CPI-determined rent increases. In practice, this creates two tiers of tenants: long-term renters protected by rent increase guidelines, and short-term renters (which are disproportionately students and newcomers) subjected to market volatility and landlord greed. 

Rent control can serve as a powerful check on the profit strategies of large, financialized landlords who rely on frequent tenant turnover to hike rents beyond inflation. Ontario’s elimination of vacancy control has enabled this form of speculative extraction, especially in neighbourhoods with high tenant turnover, such as those surrounding universities. Universal rent control tied to the unit, rather than the tenant—as is the case in PEI and Quebec—would not only reduce financial precarity, but also remove disincentives to geographic mobility, which would eliminate the common economic argument against rent stabilization.

Ottawa’s student population is particularly vulnerable to this dynamic. Turnover is structurally built into academic cycles, creating a population that developers can exploit annually. In fact, according to the CMHC, Ottawa’s turnover rate, which sat at 16.5 per cent in 2023, is almost double that of Toronto (8.3 per cent) and Montreal (9.6 per cent). 

Short-term renters, and especially students, are less likely to file claims with the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB), less familiar with tenancy rights, and more easily displaced. Aidan Kallioinen, the Vice President Student Issues of the Carleton University Students’ Association, said that the most common questions he hears from students include “where do I find housing? How do I start a tenant’s union? How do I get legal support? How do I bring things before the LTB.” He notes that this is because for nearly all students, this process is new, and there is not much information available for them.

Vacancy decontrol turns every empty unit into a revenue opportunity, while every returning student becomes a new source of extraction.

As Carleton University Professor Jessica Parish points out, a major barrier to effective housing policy, especially for students, is the lack of clarity around what “affordability” actually means. Most affordability frameworks use vague or market-relative definitions, like a percentage of average rent in an area. But for students in Ottawa, many of whom rely on part time work, student loans, or parental support, this metric is entirely useless. “Any good measure or discussion of affordability,” Parish explains, “has to consider things like income, wealth and debt—people’s capacity to pay the rent they’re being asked.” When governments and institutions define affordability in ways that ignore those most impacted (students, racialized renters, those on fixed incomes), they are practically writing entire populations out of the policy conversation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Ottawa’s student housing landscape. Lacking sufficient on-campus options, students are pushed into the private rental sector (PRS), where they face inflated rents, precarious leases, and little recourse. As Parish notes, Ontario’s deregulated rental market, especially post-2018, has turned housing into a “low-risk” investment for landlords, but a high-risk necessity for tenants.

Privatized housing and institutional abdication

Ottawa institutions increasingly outsource housing to private developers, funded via public-private partnerships, rather than build non-market residences under university control. The result is an explosion of market-rate micro-units with minimal community or affordability goals.

Carleton University’s new Rideau Hall, set to open in September 2025 with 450 beds, will almost certainly be immediately full, showing that demand greatly overpowers supply. Without institutional investment in non-profit or co-op housing, students are pushed into the exploitative private rental market.

Many universities appear to treat student housing as a secondary concern, as something disconnected from their core educational mission. Instead of investing in affordable, institutionally managed residences, they rely on enrollment revenue while outsourcing housing to corporate developers.

While many universities have offloaded housing responsibilities, some institutions are demonstrating that more equitable models are both possible and scalable. The University of Winnipeg Community Renewal Corporation (UWCRC), a nonprofit entity affiliated with the university, has emerged as a leading example of what community-engaged institutional housing can look like. Its mixed-income, mixed-use residential tower model reserves 40 to 51 per cent of units for low-income renters (which includes immigrants, Indigenous tenants, persons with disabilities, and others facing housing insecurity) while operating off-campus in partnership with local organizations.

Designed with sustainability and equity at its core, UWCRC’s model has been replicated multiple times and is set to make the university the largest non-governmental residential developer in Winnipeg’s downtown by 2026. This stands in contrast to the trend of universities withdrawing from affordability mandates, and shows that, with political and administrative will, postsecondary institutions can play a proactive role in housing justice.

Quebec offers another example through UTILE, a nonprofit developer of student housing which is rooted in the social economy. Founded in 2012 by a group of recent graduates, UTILE emerged out of the momentum of the student movement—much of its early funding came from student unions—and a recognition that there were no dedicated actors who were addressing the growing student housing needs.

Rather than relying on for-profit developers, UTILE works directly with student unions, universities, and other partners to build permanently affordable student residences. Those “member” organizations have the ability to vote in UTILE’s internal democratic structure. The projects are environmentally sustainable and tailored to students’ lived realities. The organization opened their first building in 2020—and now has 13 projects across Quebec, including five completed buildings and over 2,000 apartments. Their growing portfolio across Quebec shows that when student voices are a part of shaping policy, community-rooted housing solutions become possible.

Demolition-evictions and regulatory collapse

A recent case in downtown Ottawa reveals the human cost of these layered failures. A developer purchased a block of low-cost rental buildings (including long-time student and low-income residents), issued N13 “demoviction” notices, and began evicting tenants under the pretext of redevelopment. According to a tenant in the block, the existing 30 rent-controlled, spacious residential units will be transformed to over 260 luxury microunits. 

At first, the developer offered token buyouts of approximately $1,500, not enough to cover even an average month’s rent in Ottawa, and imposed impossibly short deadlines that left tenants with little time to seek legal counsel. In an effort to signal compromise, a local councillor approved a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the developer, but tenants were excluded from its negotiation. One tenant recalls receiving the MOU on the evening of February 27, with the negotiated $30,000 buyout offer contingent on vacating by February 28.

While a couple of tenants were informally granted extensions, they never received compensation. When they later followed up with the councillor’s office, they were told that the MOU only applied before the original deadline, and that there is no help that can be offered. 

The outcome: low-income tenants, including students, seniors, and renters with disabilities, displaced with little support, no enforceable right of return, and deeply destabilized communities. 

A just housing strategy

Addressing Ottawa’s student housing crisis requires more than symbolic gestures. The intersecting failures of federal funding design, provincial deregulation, municipal zoning, and institutional inaction have created a system in which student displacement is normalized and profit extraction is incentivized. Yet this crisis is not inevitable; it is the result of specific policy choices, and it can be reversed with equally deliberate interventions. Drawing from successful models like UWCRC and grounded in the lived realities of Ottawa’s student renters, the following policy recommendations outline a pathway toward a more just, affordable, and inclusive housing landscape:

Federal level

  • Designate a student-specific stream within the Housing Accelerator Fund.
  • Establish a national, transparent definition of “affordable housing” based on income, not market rates.
  • Create federal funding incentives for university–nonprofit housing partnerships.

Provincial level

  • Reinstate vacancy control provincewide
  • Eliminate rent control exemptions post-2018
  • End Above Guideline Increases (AGI) to rent
  • Establish required tenant right-of-return in N13 demoviction cases

Municipal level

  • Reform zoning near campuses to allow for high-density, nonprofit student housing.
  • Pass a strong anti-renoviction by-law, including licensing requirements and fines for landlords who use renovations to illegally evict tenants.
  • Create enforceable anti-demoviction policies and a tenant right-of-return clause.
  • Limit Airbnb and short-term rental conversions in student-dense neighborhoods.

Institutional level

  • Prioritize development of non-market student housing through cooperative or community-run models.
  • Involve student unions and tenant organizations in all strategic housing decisions.
  • Implement emergency housing programs for displaced or precariously housed students, with institutional funding and municipal support.

Housing as a right, not a revenue stream

Ottawa’s student housing crisis is not the result of natural market fluctuations or unpredictable growth. It is the outcome of a policy ecosystem that has prioritized financial return over social responsibility. Every single layer of governance, from the federal to the institutional level, has contributed to a landscape where displacement is normalized and affordability is increasingly out of reach.

If Ottawa and other university cities are serious about being livable, equitable, and future-facing, they must treat students not as temporary consumers, but as full civic participants. Addressing the student housing crisis is about dignity, community, and the kind of society we’re building.

The author would like to thank Dr. Jessica Parish of Carleton University for her insights and research guidance, Aidan Kallioinen of the Carleton University Students’ Association for sharing his perspectives on student housing policy, and the Bank Block Tenants for their time, experiences, and commitment to fighting for housing justice in Ottawa.