This paper demonstrates the infiltration of finance into increasingly niche real estate sectors, taking the example of the emergent Canadian purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) sector since 2011. Drawing on a novel database of PBSA, qualitative document analysis, and key informant interviews, we uncover the business strategies and geographic patterns of investment in the sector. We then consider the local impacts of this phenomenon in Waterloo, Ontario, the country’s largest PBSA market, where finance-driven new-build studentification has contributed to higher housing costs and age segregation. This process of financialization has differed from other housing sectors as it depends on the creation of new student housing to provide an avenue for investment therein. At the same time, finance-driven new-build studentification functions as a spatial fix by directing investment to secondary cities. However, this process has been fragile, marked as much by failure as success, pointing to the limits of financialization.
We investigate the spatial relationships among three prominent facets of contemporary urbanism – gentrification, studentification, and youthification – in the context of Canadian post-secondary educational institutions (universities and colleges). We conduct the analysis in three major Canadian cities with substantial knowledge economy sectors using confidential Statistics Canada census files, which include information on individuals and their geographies, and the location of universities and colleges, by enrolment size. We document ‘spillover’ effects of expansions in student enrolment and the building of campuses by analysing the geographic correlations among universities and gentrification and youthification. Studentification and youthification are to some extent coincident but not entirely, whereas the connection to gentrification is more complex. Our work provides novel insight into the ways the three different facets of contemporary urbanism overlap and contribute to our understanding of how universities and colleges, as hallmarks of the knowledge economy, influence the social geography of cities.
Despite attention to social equity in the way public transit services are distributed, little work has considered how transportation systems may impact social equity through land use changes, particularly gentrification. Existing research on transportation and land use has been grounded primarily in a neoclassical urban economic perspective. However, the neoclassical framework is limited in its ability to handle issues of social justice such as the gentrification process. Meanwhile, critical gentrification literature has seldom considered the potential inf luence of transport systems to alter the distribution of accessibility benefits within a city. It is argued that a Marxist approach that considers the roles of capital and class in the gentrification process offers a better understanding of how transit infrastructure matters and contributes to a reinvigoration of transport geography. Finally, some directions for future research are suggested.
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