Instead of a new residence, MacEwan builds partnerships with developers

MacEwan will not be getting a new residence anytime soon, even if the current residence building has no vacancies. Instead, the university is looking to partner with private developers to meet the rising housing need as the school looks to grow by over 10,000 students in the next five years. 

This new partnership between MacEwan and unspecified developers will test a pilot in fall 2025 and will first pair a portion of around 50 students with rental units close to campus. 

With 36 per cent of MacEwan students being renters, the current shortage in quality, affordable housing presents a challenge.

For MacEwan student Angel Dahiya, this meant having to live in four different places during her first year of university, before she found a place that worked. 

But before she found her ideal housing, she spent time sleeping on a living room floor, didn’t know where to look while accidentally searching posher parts of town, and was crunching numbers to see if she could afford a luxury Ice District apartment. She hopped from downtown to Mill Woods to St. Albert, to Kingsway, before she finally found a place on Jasper Ave for her second year. 

“There were no places at all, and the places that were there were super expensive, and I didn’t even have a job at the time,” Dahiya says.

As an international student, she didn’t know who to talk to or where to look, and was worried about scams and safety. MacEwan’s residence also wasn’t a good option for Dahiya. For a similar price, she preferred a spacious suite in Mill Woods over sharing an apartment with up to four other students.

But even if she wanted it, she’d have a harder time netting one of the 875 beds in residence, and even then she’d be paying more than what most students at MacEwan can afford. 

In a spring survey from SAMU where over 1,500 students responded, 80 per cent said they couldn’t spend more than $750 per month for rent and 40 per cent said they couldn’t afford more than $500 per month. At MacEwan residence, monthly rents cost between $800 and $900 per month.

SAMU president Gabriel Ambutong has been pushing the case for affordability to MacEwan, but is also worried about predatory landlords and safety issues in downtown adding he’s especially worried for international students.

But he doesn’t care if the solution comes from MacEwan or the private sector.

“The execution doesn’t matter as much as the outcomes,” Ambutong said when asked about MacEwan’s plan for housing. “So as long as the outcome bears affordable, accessible housing for students. That’s what we’d like to see.”

He hopes MacEwan can get a concrete timeline in place soon, and that SAMU can get more clarity on what’s being done. 

“I think either we address it now or it’s going to be a bigger problem in the future.”

In simple economic terms, the key to getting more affordable housing downtown is getting more supply. However, negative views surrounding Edmonton’s downtown make it difficult for builders to buy-in. 

Bill Blais has built student housing before, and very recently. “Right on the doorstep” of the University of Alberta, Laurent (named after Laurent Garneau whom the university neighbourhood is also named after) stretches high over most of the campus’s short and stocky buildings. 

Laurent is an icon of what’s new in the rental supply. These are sleek, tall buildings that are stacked with amenities like a yoga studio, co-study spaces and ping pong tables, all embedded in a neighbourhood rich with restaurants, bars, pubs and coffee shops. 

While they’re not exactly the most affordable, the new supply takes the pressure off of the rest of the market, which helps keep costs at more affordable places down.

Blais says he understands there is still a greater need for student housing and says his company, MacLab Development, has a few properties downtown, like the soon-to-open The Parks project, that might soon be filling those gaps. Its 363 units should be ready to rip in a month or so.

Still, looking at downtown Blais admits things aren’t what they used to be. 

One major barrier is financing. Even if a builder is wholly committed to getting a project up and going, they usually need a money lender to get the project started. Naturally, these lenders are the risk-adverse type and may see challenges with Edmonton’s downtown. 

“Real estate development is not an easy thing to do even at the best of times,” Blais says.

The lack of vibrancy, the perceptions of safety, crumbling concrete, and obstructive works-in-progress like the LRT expansion make it hard to convince a bank that you can turn a profit. Ever since COVID-19 siphoned much of the workforce away from the offices, it’s been slow to recover the number of people who frequent its shops and restaurants.

Blais points to the city for solutions and says high taxes on multi-family homes are making it difficult for developers to prove to financers that they can actually make some money. 

“If they were actually business-friendly and attracted developments, it would work out better for everyone to be able to build more units.”

But without investment and development, vibrancy is unlikely to improve. In fact, it’s more likely the opposite, and could lead to a vicious cycle where a lack of people, and lack of interest, and a lack of investment continue to hollow out downtown. Then lenders become even more hesitant to finance projects, nobody builds more housing, vacancies go down, and prices go up. 

If this trend continues, downtown Edmonton could fall into BILD Edmonton Metro CEO Kalen Anderson’s worst case scenario, where new housing builds can’t keep up with population growth, and Edmonton goes the way of Vancouver and Toronto where the cost of living is the worst in the country. 

But for Anderson, Edmonton’s two downtown post-secondaries could be the key to breaking the cycle.

The Downtown Investment Plan, a 42-page set of research and recommendations for government which BILD Edmonton Metro helped co-author, calls for immediate investment into the areas surrounding MacEwan and Norquest to unlock the potential of what the report calls an “education district.”

Speaking in an interview, Anderson calls it “urban acupuncture” where you, “pick a spot, you hit it hard, and it makes a big impact.” She says this education district downtown has been tremendously underleveraged, and calls MacEwan’s plans for rapid growth a gift. 

“So many other cities would die for this.”

When asked about if a single student housing project would be good for downtown, Anderson says it’s not nearly ambitious enough. 

“Building a university neighborhood, I think that would be the ideal.”

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Photos by Amanda Erickson

Feb. 26, 2025 Clarification: Kalen Anderson is the CEO of BILD Edmonton Metro. This story has been edited to clarify this.