The Yellow House, a colourful experience!

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This article was published 29/03/2018 (2730 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

W­­ith an historically low vacancy rate, landing a room or an apartment that’s not only available, but affordable, can be a challenge for many.

But in certain circles, students have banded together to create their very own housing communities a trend picked up by students at Brandon University’s School of Music.

When Winnipeger Abby Ziprick first came across the Yellow House on 18th Street three years ago, it wasn’t really known by its common moniker at that point. Named after the iconic yellow paint-job that ­­decorates the living room, Ziprick helped popularize the nickname throughout her time there.

Today, the Yellow House stands as one of the longest-running music homes in the city.

“It’s a colourful experience to be in our house and I think it represents the colourful characters that have come through here too,” said Ziprick, a student in music education. “It does accurately reflect us and I think we’re proud of that.”

Those colourful characters that Ziprick is referring to are music students, who for nearly 10 years have almost exclusively occupied the home.

The home is conveniently placed right across from campus, the university’s education building and health studies complex seen in full view from the living room. But even before she moved in with her two roommates, Ziprick spent a year living next door at the corner of Princess Avenue and 18th Street, at a home that for decades was a music student homestead.

Housing at least five people at any given time, the aptly-named Corner House — along with another downtown location off Rosser Avenue called The Loft, named for its massive amount of space — both received widespread notoriety for their huge parties and reputations as music student hangouts.

“My first-year party for music happened in that house,” said Nick Brown, president of the Brandon University Students’ Union.

Brown is a music student himself and a transplant from Ontario who first moved to Brandon in 2011. Throughout his time in school, Brown has seen music student homes pop up across the city, along with one home for students in psychiatric nursing. The trend appears to be two-fold: students want to live with the people they know and it lessens the burden of having to find a place elsewhere.

Ziprick’s predecessors, Megan Pokrant and Aren Teerhuis, say it was rare that there would be full turnover at the Yellow House. Both have masters degrees in jazz performance and the couple currently live together in an apartment in Brandon.

“We took our apartment over music students too,” said Pokrant, who works as a teacher in Boissevain.

Such is the nature of student housing, but it also happens to be, “The best way to find housing too, though,” Pokrant said.

Teerhuis, who is a musician in the city, said it is usually easier for tenants to find someone they know, while landlords don’t have to worry about posting an ad.

The experience seemed to define university in a sense and, “For musicians,” Teerhuis said, “if you’re not socially active with the people you’re playing with then the music is not going to be great.”

But generally speaking, student’s don’t have a lot of money either, Brown said.

“We’re working part-time, minimum-wage jobs to get ourselves through, we’re relying on loans and grants from government, we’re relying on scholarships to pay our way. That means we’re looking for the cheapest options possible at all times, and a big part of that is housing.”

Brown lived in McMaster Hall residence for most of his university career and currently lives in an apartment off campus.

Prior to landing his current home, Brown looked at a few places, including a basement unit where he nearly put his foot through a vinyl floor that was suspended on top of wooden beams and dirt.

A couple of weeks later, Brown found a room at an affordable price in a four-bedroom house, but was later dissuaded by the peeling floorboards and the appearance of mold behind the toilet and shower head.

“Those are the places that students are living in,” he said.

Students will still sacrifice cleanliness for affordability and even today, Brown said he has friends who are living in a five-bedroom home and paying as little as $150 a month in rent.

“We’re able to find the deals, they’re out there,” he said, “but the house they’re living in is not a quality establishment.”

Recent developments in Brandon have given students a few more options to work with, including a newly-built set of modern apartments in the south-end of the city called The Groves, located by Sycamore Drive and Tracey Street. BU is also working on a downtown project with the University of Winnipeg Community Renewal Corporation to develop housing and commercial space.

But even the aforementioned Corner House and The Loft have since been disbanded as student homes.

The Corner House has since been bought by the university, along with the Yellow House and another home right next door to it.

As Ziprick gets ready to graduate this year, she hopes to keep the legacy of music student living alive, given how important it was to her education for the past three years.

From birthdays, to potlucks and the odd Christmas, the place has truly become a second home for her.

“As long as there’s some music students living in here I would be happy with that,” she said.

 

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Caught Unwaware

The growing population of both Brandon University and the city-at-large has traditionally put pressure on affordable housing, which remains low in stock but high demand.

Combined with a historically low vacancy rate, the impact has left some students without a home to live in by the start of each school year.

Stephanie Lockerby, program manager for the Canadian Mental Health Association in Brandon, says anywhere from five to 10 students are left living in shelters for the first few weeks of school because they haven’t found a place to live.

Cases usually appear sometime between the end of August and the beginning of September, and most involve out-of-town students.

“Everybody is chasing after the same housing stock,” Lockerby said. “There will be 20 different people going after the same apartments.”

Students will come to Brandon, unaware of what the market looks like, and wind up in a shelter or couch surfing.

“When they get to this point, I find that the students are very overwhelmed and deflated,” Lockerby said, given their high hopes of moving to Brandon for something meaningful such as an education.

“I just find that by the time they come to us, at that point, they’re quite devastated because they just didn’t know that this was what was going to happen.”

Chris Reid, a housing resource worker at 7th Street Health Access Centre, has lived in Brandon since 2000 and said the vacancy rate has always been low.

“I don’t know when there was a good vacancy rate,” she said.

Whether you’re a young person or an adult with kids, finding affordable housing is hard, Reid said.

Reid sees the search for housing like finding a job, and through her work, she does what she can to help people navigate that market.

“When you’re going to rent an apartment, you’re going into a legal agreement with someone. You’re asking them to let you use a valuable piece of their property. So you as someone looking for a place to live has to establish that sense of trust and demonstrate that you’re going to be responsible.”

Although there isn’t any clear-cut solution to the housing problem, Reid said students should work on building a good tenancy history and start looking for housing as early as July, because their list of choices gets smaller and smaller the closer they get to the start of school.

But renting remains the only option for most students, Lockerby said, which keeps the cycle going.

“There’s such a misconception that homelessness only affects those that are struggling with addiction or a severe mental illness,” she said.

“There is that misconception because homelessness can affect anybody who is losing a job, where rent is very challenging and the vacancy rate is low.”