uOttawa student seeks to help peers find safe, affordable housing

Attending post-secondary is a huge challenge. Adjusting to academic demands while learning how to live on their own, students shouldn’t have to worry about how they are going to keep a roof over their head — but many of them do.

According to the United Way of East Ontario, between 1,200 and 1,400 young people in Ottawa experience homelessness each year. But Aidan Fitzmaurice, a student at the University of Ottawa, said the number of youth, especially students, experiencing housing insecurity, is much higher.

“Most students aren’t homeless in the sense that they don’t have a roof over their head, but there are a lot of students who are struggling and are on the brink of being homeless and are what are typically like couch surfers, just because, like our main job is to be students,” he told CityNews.

Even when students can manage to juggle jobs on top of their studies, sometimes it’s still not enough. While rent in Ottawa appears to be stabilizing, the Ontario Living Wage Network says those living in Ottawa need to make $23.40 per hour to cover basic expenses and participate in the community — $5.80 above minimum wage.

Mayor Mark Sutcliffe has pledged to end youth homelessness by 2030. While Fitzmaurice said this goal is laudable, he has yet to see many ideas implemented as action.

“I think it really is going to involve a lot more nonprofits and cooperative housing, like what the student unions are emphasizing, because their goals are to provide a service over just charging as much rent as possible,” he said.

Fitzmaurice himself has built a platform he hopes will help students help to find more stable housing options. He is the founder of Next Room, a student-led platform where students can find housing listings as well as roommates.

What makes Next Room different from Facebook Marketplace and other similar platforms is that only students can be on it. Fitzmaurice said they factor in housing preferences, like price and location, and also roommate preferences, to match students.

“uOttawa for instance, they have an off-campus housing billboard, but it hasn’t been updated since 2012,” he said. “So you go on it, and you click on the off-campus housing link, and the website just crashes. It doesn’t work. And because it doesn’t work, students don’t use it, and landlords don’t use it. So it forces students into these highly unregulated off-campus housing platforms.”

Using unregulated platforms can lead to other issues, like scams.

“It’s kind of like everyone has to fend for themselves and unfortunately, a lot of the people on my team especially, have faced scams, some of them well over $5,000,” Fitzmaurice said.

Part of the reason students are so susceptible to housing scams is that they don’t understand the system. For the majority of students, they are out on their own for the first time and learning along the way.

In collaboration with the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) at uOttawa, Fitzmaurice is getting set to host the first a Sprint Against Student Homelessness.

It is an “Amazing Race”-style competition that will have students completing activities that raise awareness of student homelessness and specific challenges in the campus communities at uOttawa and Carleton University.

One task, Fitzmaurice shared with CityNews, will have students building a budget and shopping accordingly at a local grocery store.

“It’s going to be a timed sprint, meaning the teams with the best times are going to win prizes,” he said. “There’s going to be like a lot of adrenaline.”

Fitzmaurice said they are expecting between 100 and 150 students at the event, and have already received $5,500 in financial support from partners including FSS, Forum Asset Management (Alma ByWard Market) and Quickie stores.

The event is set to take place Wednesday April 1, at 1:30 p.m.