On February 24, 2025, UBC Student Housing and Community Services (SHCS) gave Acadia Park residents just seven days to accept new rental fees for 2025/2026 with rent increases of 5%, or lose their housing at the end of April. With nowhere else to go and little time to decide, most students had to accept. Residents across UBC housing are slated to experience 5-8% rent increases annually from 2025-2027, amounting to real dollar increases of between 16-26% over a three year period without anywhere near compensatory wage increases for student workers or changes to student visas to allow increases in permitted work hours. These steep rent increases place undue hardship on students and their families who are already financially vulnerable. Planned additional increases are absolutely unsustainable and will compound this hardship.

We, as residents of UBC Family Housing in Acadia Park, call on the University of British Columbia to revoke these outsized rent increases and freeze rental fees until 2027. We also support the future creation of a regulatory body for UBC tenancy that caps annual rental increases thereafter in keeping with the provincial maximum allowable increase (currently set at 3%).

Letter:

Dear Andrew Parr, Associate VP, Student Housing and Community Services,

Affordable family housing at UBC is a precious resource that makes it possible for students to serve UBC as teaching assistants, research assistants, and productive members of the academic community while supporting families. Residents of Acadia Park depend on fixed incomes from UBC that do not increase with inflation, and many are constrained by international student visas that limit work hours to a maximum of 20 hours per week. Meanwhile, tuition and living expenses rise steeply every year. Parents also confront financial strain due to a chronic daycare shortage in Vancouver. UBC is aware of the precarity and insecurity that families in residence face: many regularly stand in long lines to receive food staples from UBC’s own Acadia Food Bank. UBC has recognized the importance of addressing the housing affordability crisis in its Housing Action Plan, and UBC Housing’s own stated mission is to “[embed] a culture of wellbeing, inclusivity, transparency, Indigeneity and sustainability in processes and practices.” Last year, you committed to ensuring that family housing would see the smallest increases at 3.5%. We appreciate this acknowledgment of the financial precarity faced by families in residence.

Yet, with only one week's notice, residents of UBC housing, including Family Housing, were notified that they would have to start paying 5-8% rent increases annually from 2025-2027, amounting to real dollar increases of between 16-26% over a three year period. Such increases are not inclusive, transparent, or sustainable. They jeopardize well-being; they disproportionately impact disadvantaged students; they make it increasingly difficult for vulnerable families to make ends meet; and they exacerbate the housing affordability crisis.

Over time, these steep rent increases will compound to become absolutely unsustainable for UBC students in family housing and beyond. A resident of Acadia Park with the current minimum PhD student funding package of $24,000 per year can now expect to spend over 93% of that funding on rent for the cheapest two-bedroom apartment in Acadia Park as per the new 2025/2026 fees ($22,476 per year). By 2027, if two slated additional 5% increases for Acadia Park are imposed, the annual cost of that 2 bedroom apartment ($24,797 per year) will well exceed 100% of that funding.

We are disappointed that UBC has used its exemption from provincial housing law to transgress the basic protections to which other tenants across the province are entitled. Provincial law requires that landlords notify tenants of rent increases three months in advance; UBC gave just one week’s notice. Provincial law currently caps annual rent increases at 3%; UBC has been increasing rents by 5%-8% across student housing. Provincial law outlines a process by which tenants can dispute illegal rent increases; UBC students have no formal recourse as UBC raises rents steeply to profit from the housing affordability crisis.

We now call on your humanity and your duty to the students in your care in this difficult time. These outsized rate increases are timed to do maximum damage to vulnerable families just as a trade war threatens families living in Canada with job losses, rising food costs, and increased expenses across the board, all in the midst of a pre-existing national housing crisis. This is the wrong time to put yet more hardship on the backs of working student families.

We ask UBC administration to:

1. Cancel planned rent increases

2. Freeze rent prices on student housing until 2027

3. Create a regulatory body to bring UBC housing in line with recommendations set out by the AMS limiting annual rental increases to the provincial maximum allowable increase (currently set at 3%)

4. Recommit to keeping UBC family housing affordable.

We believe these reasonable accommodations will support both the university's mission and the well-being of student families.