Toronto’s rental market is unforgiving for everyone. But for students, it exacts a cost that has gone largely unmeasured in housing-affordability debates: academic performance.

Where a student lives can shape how much time they have to study, how easily they can participate in campus life and whether they have access to academic and social support. A lack of affordable housing can affect student mental health and reinforce social hierarchies on campus.

Housing is therefore one of the most powerful, and unequally distributed, factors affecting whether students thrive at university.

We are a team of four researchers — a real estate economist, an architect and planner, a business school dean and a housing researcher — brought together through StudentDwellTO, a multi-university initiative. It was launched by four Toronto university presidents after they kept hearing that students’ housing situations were undermining their university experience.

Read more: Universities and colleges want to enrol more students. But where are they supposed to live?

Our new research, recently published in Housing Studies, draws on more than 750,000 student records from four Toronto universities. It combines more than a decade of administrative academic data with National Survey of Student Engagement responses on educational satisfaction, commuting and living arrangements.

We found that where a student lives is linked to measurable differences in academic performance and satisfaction.

A city where residence is the exception

Only between seven and nine per cent of Toronto’s university students live in on-campus housing in a given year. That figure has fallen since provincial funding for this purpose was cut to Canadian universities in the 1990s, and more recently as universities have faced provincial constraints on their debt loads.

Read more: Student housing crisis: Municipal bylaws have created roadblocks for decades

Decades ago, student residence........

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