PETERS – TRU, City of Kamloops, students all look bad in housing flap
NO ONE REALLY LOOKS GOOD in the mess with Thompson Rivers University student housing right now — not TRU and not the City of Kamloops.
TRU was surprised by the number of unhoused students who showed up this fall and thus, the school is trying to find a solution for them.
It has proposed temporary modular housing be put up in one of its parking lots – not dissimilar to housing used in work camps in northern Alberta and, in fact, in many places in B.C., too.
And it’s really not that dissimilar from the housing that was erected along Mission Flats Road.
One might argue it is up to the students themselves to find housing before school starts – and it is, but it’s also easy to see why so many students had problems this year.
The Kamloops housing market has tightened considerably since the last time students came for in-person learning in the fall of 2019.
James Peters is the radio anchor at CFJC, coming to Kamloops in 2006. He anchors the afternoon news on B-100 and 98.3 CIFM, and contributes weekly editorials to the CFJC Evening News. He tweets regularly @Jamloops.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
TRU passed on the opportunity to build more residences on campus. Instead, they leased the land to developers who have built some of the most expensive dwellings in Kamloops. At the same time, the plan is to close the McGill student residences and I suppose, let developers build condos there as well. The TRU master plan includes zero units of low-cost, affordable student housing, something which is pretty remarkable given the the housing problem has been a reality for many years.