Recent 'studentification' processes raise issues regarding the positive and negative impacts of student influx on the urban environment. The positive impacts discussed in the literature include urban core revitalization, employment generation and economic growth. The negative externalities comprise the formation of temporary sub-communities, competition with low-income groups in the rental housing market, and an increase in traffic volume. The current study adds to the literature by focusing on the influence of student influx on rent prices. The importance of this issue derives from the need to understand the net effect of the contradicting impacts of 'studentification' on contemporary urban development for policy implications. While student influx is considered a promising force of urban regeneration, in the literature concerns were raised regarding the detrimental effect of students' temporary sub-communities. The impact of 'studentification' on rent prices is evaluated by hedonic property price analysis incorporating spatial correlations. Data were collected from on-line real-estate portals advertising apartments for rent in the city of Haifa, Israel. The data include apartments characterized by more than a dozen relevant attributes to rental apartment choice including rent price, location, structural features, furniture and electrical appliances. Locations with high proportions of students in the private rented sector were identified on the basis of municipal tax files, as students in Haifa are eligible for substantial municipal tax discounts. The results of this study show the rent price differential between apartments of comparable characteristics located in 'studentified' and 'non-studentified' zones. The paper concludes with a discussion regarding the policy implications of the findings.

During their time of study, most students in higher education live in private rented accommodation, either in the open market private rented sector or in tied accommodation that is provided by their educational establishment.

The purpose of this thesis is to explain how undergraduate students at Iowa State University (ISU) think of their current housing, their mobility, their housing preferences, and criteria they use to select where to live. Based on this knowledge of student preferences, rental housing providers can adjust the rental units to reflect the needs of student tenants. Two surveys for students and property managers were set up for this research. Results from the student survey indicated that most of the students were not satisfied with their current dwelling units. The majority of respondents were planning to move in the near future, and most said they preferred to live off-campus. When looking for housing, the most important criterion they considered was the rental price.

Student housing has emerged as a mainstream global asset class, while the concentration of students in particular neighbourhoods through a process of "studentification" has increasingly been recognized as an important phenomenon in a variety of international contexts. Yet student housing is often associated with vexing planning problems associated with noise disturbances, behavioural issues, and poor property upkeep. Therefore, attention to how the student housing submarket is formed and operates is essential. This dissertation draws primarily on a case study of the City of Waterloo to investigate the role of a variety of actors including developers, investors, landlords and property managers, planners, institutions, students, and others in creating and shaping the student housing submarket. In doing so, it interrogates how and why student housing has become a favourable investment, the role of the life course therein, and the implications for planning practice. Waterloo is an especially salient case, as it is home to nearly half of Canada's private purpose-built student accommodations and is an exemplar of the so-called "knowledge economy city." The analysis combines political-economic and intergenerational approaches. Data are drawn from document analyses of planning reports and real estate industry filings, reports, grey literature, and related materials as well as semi-structured interviews with 44 key informants from the planning and real estate sectors, universities, and student and neighbourhood organizations, and 27 students. The findings are described in four empirical article-based chapters. The first article demonstrates how planning in Waterloo has not merely responded to changes in the student housing submarket, but since the 1980s has actively anticipated change and as a result has shaped subsequent trajectories of studentification. The second article examines where and why the student housing sector in Canada has garnered the attention of large-scale finance-backed investors, and the strategies these players use in their attempts to extract value from the sector. It also considers the implications of this process for students and cities as it has played out in Waterloo. It concludes that the development of student housing in Canada has been largely driven by the search for new avenues for profitable investment, and therefore studentification can be interpreted as a spatial and sectoral fix within capitalist urbanization. The third article investigates the role of planning, real estate strategies, and neighbourhood politics in shaping studentification at the local scale by producing "generationed" spaces based on a distinct student life course stage. It finds that creating a student neighbourhood in this way facilitates the extraction of rents, and argues for a radical reconfiguration of the politics of studentification based on intergenerationality. The final empirical chapter evaluates Waterloo's attempts to bring more non-student residents into a near-campus neighbourhood, a process and policy I call "post-studentification." Despite promise to address some issues, in practice, the strategy may not achieve its intended outcomes or be applicable as a model elsewhere, and may reinforce inequalities along the dimensions of class, age, and gender. As a whole, the research contributes to understanding student housing as a matter of "town, gown, and capital" by theorizing studentification and its relationship to other urban processes, including capitalist urbanization. It also illustrates the centrality of the life course to these processes. Finally, given the role of planning therein, the dissertation provides practical recommendations for formal planning practice, post-secondary education institutions, and housing advocates for building a more equitable post-studentification city.