For newcomers to St. John's, a tight housing market gets even tighter

Ana Maria Alcantara had already done it all before, so when she arrived in St. John's on Aug. 18, she thought she had given herself tons of time to get settled away before the new school year began.

But two months later she's only been able to move from one temporary accommodation to another — an Airbnb unit that's returned to the long-term rental market, with just enough space for her, her husband and her five-year-old son to sleep.

"I do not have, for example, laundry. It's a place just to stay for one weekend, not to live with a kid," she told CBC News in a recent interview.

Alcantara is one of many newcomers to Newfoundland and Labrador who are struggling to find appropriate housing and finding themselves short-handed in a rental market that's become increasingly competitive.

It's not for lack of trying — the Brazilian-born student said she's attended plenty of open-house rental viewings. But she only ever gets her hopes up, she said; she never gets the lease.

"We need to fill a form and people will contact us in case that we fit with that position. But we do not fit. We are a newcomer," she said. "I think that there is a lot of reasons.… I am just a student and I do not have a professional background from here."'

While waiting for a call to finally come her way, she heads to Memorial University Queen Elizabeth II Library just about every day for a quiet place to study while pursuing a master's degree in gender studies. She has no car, because she has no permanent address, so she takes the bus each time. 

Her son can't play much in the house, either, because it's not big enough. So as winter approaches, her worries are only getting heavier.

"I came with my family, so I need to solve a lot of things.… All these kinds of things are more complicated at the moment."

Alcantara has a leg up on some other newcomers: she has one Canadian rental reference, from a previous stint in Canada in 2019. That's a trip she made with her husband when he was studying for a postdoctoral degree.

But Ayomide Elijah Oranayie has none. He arrived in the province for the first time this summer, coming from Nigeria.

And he faced the same issues: he figures he inquired about roughly 20 units, but without references, he found himself on the outside of many rental units, looking in.

"I did not get any audience to even talk. The minute I say, 'I'm new in the province, I can't give reference,' they're like, 'OK, I'm sorry I can't give it out to you.'"

Oranayie did try to get ahead of the issue; he started looking early, when he was back home in Nigeria, but found that many landlords weren't comfortable holding a place for him until he arrived in the country. 

His friends have faced that problem too. So, since he arrived in Newfoundland and Labrador, he's looked at places on behalf of friends of his back home, in order to give them a head start.

"We kind of have this WhatsApp group chats where graduate students coming from Nigera — where we connect and all of that. So she reached out to me, 'Please, I'm coming in soon, I need you to help me secure a place.'"

Oranayie himself decided to rent a room in a shared house. It's not something he wanted to do, but Oranayie figures it will give him a landlord reference that he can use in a year to find an apartment of his own.

That's if he can afford one — Oranayie has noticed prices are way up in Newfoundland and Labrador even from last year, when he initially planned to start his studies at Memorial University and started to look for apartments and rooms.

"I think there's been a major increase," he said. "As of fall 2021, the average rent for a decent room in a shared house is between $400 and $500 a month, now the start price is like, $550 to $600, $650."

Reliable data on the topic is tough to find, according to Hope Jamieson, a housing advocate in St. John's, but anecdotal reports of ballooning prices are widespread.

"Things have shifted radically … in terms of interest rates, which of course landlords will be passing on to their tenants," she said. "In-person classes have returned at MUN and there's a variety of other factors that are driving changes to the rental market."

According to Jamieson, it means many more people in the city are paying an unsustainable amount of money on housing — more than 50 per cent of their monthly budget.

"It's safe for us to assume that that was made worse by the pandemic, and is even worse now."

Alcantara has noticed a difference too, when compared with her 2019 visit to St. John's. 

Between pricing and availability, it's adding up to a much different market than the one she faced with ease three years ago.

"The other time when we came, we found in one week, beautiful and really nice house to rent. It was an easy process to us," she said.

"We never have that as a trouble or a problem, it was something really easy to solve. But now it's quite different."

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