Waterford student accommodation in crisis
The student accommodation situation in Waterford has been described as a crisis. File pic of SETU campus.
“We have a housing crisis, but we also have a hidden housing crisis, which is student accommodation.”
That was the message last week from Patrick Curtin, former President of the Students' Union at SETU's Waterford campus and upcoming local election candidate.
During a recent housing meeting in Waterford City, Mr Curtin addressed the persistent challenges confronting students in securing affordable accommodation within the area. He said students are “paying a sickening amount of rent”, and that the average cost of a single room in Waterford is between €600 and €700 per month.
“In Waterford at the moment we have less than 1,200 bed spaces for student accommodation and only 426 of them are owned by the university,” he said.
“A lot of purpose built student accommodation is from private developers," he added.
"After ten years this, purpose built student accommodation is allowed to be repurposed and put into public use. So that means goodbye to students.”
Mr Curtin went to comment: “We need to build purpose built student accommodation that is owned by the state, and manage and controlled by the university. By doing this, we’re taking students out of homes in housing estates and freeing these up for families."
"That tackles two parts of the housing crisis: housing students and housing families," said Mr Curtin. "The government needs to up the ante on this."
“SETU was awarded a €1 million for the Waterford, Carlow and Wicklow campuses, but that wasn’t to buy land, wasn’t to start developing properties, that €1 million was just to design and get a plan put in place," he said.
“At the former WIT just before Covid, we were ready to build, but the Government wouldn’t fund it, because there was no framework for IT’s at the time to borrow from the European Central Bank or from the Government. We’re still facing that problem as a technological university”
