Since 2021, Vladimir Fenenko, a third-year PhD student, has been living in the Assiniboine apartment complex at York. By sheer luck, he was fortunate enough to secure a room — but at what cost?
Boasting an impressive $1300 a month rent, Assiniboine has become home to many graduate students at York. Fenenko, who works as a teaching assistant (TA), earns a less than accommodating salary to support his monthly rent of $1300. “We have a buyer contract when we get hired for a PhD. You get a TA-ship agreement and the salary from that pays for your rent more or less, maybe 95 per cent. And the other 5 percent has to come from somewhere else,” Fenenko says.
“There’s also a grant-in-aid that gets paid monthly for every PhD working student to help pay for rent, groceries and so on. Right now, on average, you’re expected to get about $1900 to $2000, not depending on your year of study,” he adds.
When compared to the Ontario minimum wage of approximately $2500 for a 40-hour work week, $1900 seems insignificant. But this, coupled with a rent of $1300, leaves Fenenko and others like him with very little for groceries and other necessities.
You might wonder if a rent of $1300 comes with a decent living space. Unfortunately, that is far from reality for some, as university maintenance requests haven’t always been responsive. “Maintenance request responses are terrible. It took a while for them to fix a light in my bathroom, so I didn’t have a light in my bathroom for a week, a week and a half. It took them a while to fix my fridge, it wasn’t working for around four or five days, so some of the food went bad,” says Fenenko.
He also mentions that the elevator breaks down frequently, noting that it was inoperable approximately three times this past week. On top of these several issues, rent for graduate student housing has also increased without a proportionate increase in salaries.
Yunus Bozkurt, a second-year PhD student, provided his opinion on the state of housing.“I didn’t struggle a lot with finding my place, but I know a lot of international students coming from another country do not have a financial history, they do not have the credit score or someone to give a reference. They are struggling to find even a place. I am not even talking about pricing or conditions, they are struggling to find just a place,” he says.
Bozkurt explains that existing language barriers exacerbate these challenges for international students. As a result, they may struggle to fully express their needs.
For York students, affordable housing can be challenging to find. Those who end up securing a place might be stuck living in inadequate conditions.
