Student housing survey

Press, 21 May 1982, Page 13

Student housing survey

Student housing problems have always been with us, but in the last few years they seem to have got worse. OLIVER RIDDELL looks at a National Housing Commission survey to see what is wrong with student housing and what needs to be done to improve it. The survey was undertaken by Alison Gray and Judith Davey, of Urban Research Associates.

Any new’ accommodation for students should be in the form of ~ independent units rather than hostels, and consideration should be given to converting existing hostels into independent units wherever this is economically feasible.

these are the two main recommendations from the survey. The authors say any further research should focus on the needs of university students, who have the greatest accommodation difficulties.

Educational institutions away from centres where rental accommodation is generally available should take greater responsibility for acquiring or creating housing for students, says the study. This may require cooperation with local authorities and central government.

Educational institutions in central city areas where rental accommodation is scarce should promote student housing schemes. This may involve buying up old houses for renovation, utilising local authority or central government urban renewal funds, or building new units.

In some cases it may be possible to use houses acquired by the Government for motorway and other purposes, at least on a temporary basis, and local councils may be prepared to set aside some of their housing stock for the use of students who are required to study away from their home towns.

The report identifies several problem areas, but probably underestimates the de-

gree of difficulty faced by some students, specially at the universities. The sample on which the study was based was biased in favour of non-university, female and younger, first-year students. But it still showed up some clear trends.

It has suggested that some groups of students may be worse off than others in the search for accommodation, but generally this does not seem to be the case. Conditions for women students were no different than those experienced by men, and problems were equally shared. Cultural background had no noticeable bearing on housing difficulty.

The same could be said of the larger, non-university centres, where some institutional accommodation is already available in the form of hostels. These seem to provide enough places but were not the first choice of their occupants, who would rather be flatting. While there is no way of checking; it is possible that the few students in these

regions who took longer than six weeks to find their accommodation had been in hostels or private board before they moved, those two being the least popular forms of accommodation. This idea has been supported by recent research. The need to consider the possibility of turning hostels into flatlets should be pursued if the requirements of such students are to be met.

In the university centres, problems intensified. This causes special difficulty for students at Massey, Otago and Victoria Universities. There seem to be two issues involved — the nature of the institution, and the age and residential composition of its immediate suroundings.

Availability of accommodation seems to be a greater problem than cost, and in areas where there are specialist institutions set apart from traditional sources of rental accommodation problems are at their most acute.