Studentification Unveiled: Navigating Socioeconomic Shifts, Housing Pressures, and Community Cohesion in Aging Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the interconnection between studentification, demographic change, and the financialization of housing in Kingston, Ontario. As university enrollment grows and housing becomes increasingly commodified, tensions can arise between students, older adult residents, and municipal policymakers. The study investigates how these dynamics impact housing affordability, social cohesion, and the urban landscape. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research combines spatial analysis of housing trends with qualitative insights from nine semi-structured interviews with students, older adults, and professionals. The findings reveal that homes marketed to student investors are spatially concentrated near the university and sell at a premium compared to homes for owner-occupiers. Statistical analysis shows that unoccupied dwellings, indicative of student rental investments, are strongly linked to specific neighbourhood characteristics. Housing in student-dominant areas fails to meet Canadian affordability standards, with students and older adults facing significant challenges in securing affordable housing. These results highlight the need for policy interventions to address affordability disparities and ensure housing stability for vulnerable populations. Downtown Kingston also plays a significant role in shaping student-resident relations. While students frequent the downtown core for nightlife and services, older adults engage more deeply with local businesses, highlighting differences in place attachment. Interviews with the Kingston Business Improvement Area (BIA) and a longitudinal analysis of storefront operations reveal concerns over the growing presence of chain stores catering to students, potentially displacing local businesses and altering the downtown character. To address these issues, the thesis offers four recommendations: (1) strengthen communication channels between students, the city, and local organizations through outreach positions and orientation programs; (2) enhance housing regulations to ensure landlord accountability and improve housing conditions; (3) promote intergenerational living to foster social connections and provide financial benefits to homeowners; and (4) activate public spaces that encourage interaction between students and long-term residents. Ultimately, this study highlights the need for inclusive urban planning that recognizes students as temporary but vital members of the community. By fostering connections between students and older adults, Kingston can work towards a more cohesive and resilient urban fabric, mitigating the negative effects of studentification while embracing its potential for positive change.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".