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"The purpose of this thesis is to conduct a case study of the University of British\nColumbia Okanagan\u2019s student youth (ages 18\u201329) rental housing experiences in the City\nof Kelowna, British Columbia. Kelowna features high rental costs and low rental vacancy\nrates. The rental housing problems that Kelowna currently faces have been\nacknowledged by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the local government,\nand the local media. However, there is a dearth of peer-reviewed literature on student\nyouth rental housing experiences Kelowna.\nData were obtained using semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 key\ninformants and 30 student youth currently attending UBCO and living in the City of\nKelowna\u2019s rental housing market. The study population for this research includes\nCanadian-born and internationally-born students, some living on campus and some off.\nThe primary conclusions of this case study are that the student youth respondents\nface barriers of rental housing unaffordability, unsuitability, and unavailability. The\nissues of unsuitable rental housing include its quality, locale, roommate problems, and\ndiscrimination from landlords. Empirical evidence indicates that the coping strategies\nused among UBCO student youth in Kelowna include social networking, taking on part-time\njobs, and using student loans to pay for housing. There are also a variety of coping\nstrategies recognized as important for this population, but not being currently utilized,\nincluding crowding or sharing housing, and living in a state of \u201Chidden homelessness\u201D.\nFinally, this thesis discusses a variety of potential policy recommendations made by the\nkey informants, including re-assessing funding and cooperation between the private and\npublic sectors, constructing additional purpose-built rental units, creating rental housing\nservices for UBCO student youth, and examining the utilization of secondary suites.\nThis exploratory case study expands on the existing literature by focusing on\nUBCO\u2019s student youth rental housing experiences in the City of Kelowna. Moreover,\nthis research deals with an understudied topic. The findings from this study suggest that\nfurther research must be done on university student youth rental housing experiences in\nmid-size cities such as Kelowna."@en
<https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0071299>