At UBC, the Provost’s Office and Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies held consultations in November and December last year about the challenges that postdoctoral fellows are facing.
A dominant theme in those discussions was the lack of housing. Post-docs are ineligible for housing programs for students, staff, or faculty, and postdocs living in Wesbrook report spending over 50 percent of their income on rent and utilities alone.
Participants in the consultations pointed to the cost of housing as a major stressor and distraction from their research which also drives top talent away from UBC.
When accessing housing resources or support at UBC, postdocs occupy an uncomfortable limbo, as they are treated as neither students nor faculty. While on paper post-docs are classified as “faculty,” virtually all housing support programs at UBC are earmarked for tenure-track faculty. For instance, UBC’s rentgeared- to-income (RGI) program caps the rent of participating staff and faculty at 30 percent of their income. Yet, post-docs are excluded from this and all other UBC housing programs.
The mean post-doc stipend at UBC is about $50,000. Meanwhile, tenure-track faculty will usually have salaries that are at least twice as much. The rent-geared-toincome program was introduced out of a recognition that the cost of housing was prohibitively expensive for faculty making over $100,000 a year, but somehow it is thought reasonable that employees making half as much should spend three quarters of their income on housing. Tenure-track faculty also have access to relocation funding that is unavailable to postdocs, which means that the latter often arrive burdened by the expense of moving to UBC.
Since postdoctoral fellows are not students, they cannot live in graduate student housing or access housing programs intended for students either. Instead, the only housing at UBC available to post-docs are in buildings reserved for staff and faculty, such as those managed by Village Gate Homes (VGH) in Wesbrook. However, the units available in buildings operated by VGH are often smaller and more expensive than similar apartments that are available off-campus or elsewhere in Vancouver.
The cheapest, smallest units in VGH’s new Symphony building in Wesbrook Place cost over $1,900 per month, while larger one-bedroom apartments can be found elsewhere in Vancouver for $1,700. Most of the one-bedroom units in Symphony actually cost $2,000-2,200 per month, as much as $500 more than off -campus one-bedrooms. To add insult to injury, VGH’s buildings in Wesbrook charge higher utility rates than most off-campus apartments, and those rates are set to rise for the next three years.
Staff and faculty housing available through VGH is advertised with “reduced market rents”, however that perk is a taxable benefit.
The taxable benefit is supposed to represent the difference between VGH’s estimated market rate for a given unit and the rent that they actually charge staff or faculty to live there. However, VGH’s estimates of what they “could” rent the units for must be inflated, since their apartments are more expensive than off-campus equivalents.
Consequently, it is financially disadvantageous for post-docs to live in the only on-campus housing available to them. As a result, most UBC post-docs live in off-campus housing and must commute to participate in the life of the university.
At the consultations held by the Provost’s Office, the participants were split into groups and seated at tables where questions were posed to them about the postdoctoral experience. One such question asked what could be done to improve the housing programs available to post-docs at UBC. Reading this, several participants wryly observed that there are zero housing programs for post-docs. If the Provost’s Office wanted to improve the situation, they can start by introducing even one program.
Some participants expressed that to meet the cost of living they had taken on second or third jobs, which naturally took them away from their research responsibilities. Yet, since many post-docs are immigrants to Canada on work visas, they are forbidden from taking on work outside of UBC to supplement their income. If their departments have no additional teaching work for them, these post-docs have no choice but to subsist on their meagre postdoctoral stipend.
Relatedly, participants noted that UBC insisted on giving many postdoctoral fellows contracts that were only one-year long, even when they held a multi-year fellowship. This resulted in immigrant post-docs having to reapply for a work visa every year of their appointment, causing unnecessary stress given the slow processing times at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). Similarly, the one-year contracts made it difficult for immigrant post-docs to secure healthcare and childcare when the providers of these services required documentation of long-term employment.
The stress of financial precarity and the need for many to find additional work to supplement their income distracts post-docs from their research and limits their productivity. These issues also make it difficult for UBC to attract externally-funded researchers whose funding will go further at other institutions. During the consultations, post-docs from countries like Germany and Australia noted that they were better paid as graduate students than they are as post-docs at UBC.
The housing problems faced by post-docs at UBC is entirely within the university’s power to solve. UBC owns buildings in Wesbrook and throughout the endowment lands that could offer affordable options for post-docs and other employees, and new buildings are continually being constructed. Yet, the university seems more interested in constructing profitable rentals than housing its employees. Right now, VGH is struggling to find tenants to fill its apartments because of uncompetitively high prices. These expensive units are no help to struggling post-docs.
When the Provost’s Office asked post-docs what the ideal postdoctoral experience would look like, the consensus was clear: it would be one where postdoctoral fellows could afford to live at UBC.
ERIC WILKINSON IS A POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT UBC. HIS REPORTING HAS APPEARED IN BRIARPATCH, CANADIAN DIMENSION, AND PEACE MAGAZINE, AMONG OTHER OUTLETS.