EDITOR VIOLETTA KRYAK | TUESDAY, NOV. 28,2017 | THE VOICE 7 Specialinvestigation Pouring money down the drain Students buy water from the cafeteria instead of bringing their own bottles = By AMANDA POOLE AND NIKITHA MARTINS angara students are spending tens of thou- sands of dollars buying bottled water while the manufacturer is getting it from the province for free. Students shelled out around $78,120 in bottled water at the college cafeteria in the past year — enough to pay for over 800 course credits — instead of bringing their own bottles, according to college numbers. The Province’s Water Sustainability Act came | into force on Febru- , ary 29, 2016, and the , B.C. government al- lowed the commer- cial groundwater users such as Nestlé a three- year transition period to pre- pare and sub- mit their ap- plications and annual rentals. Even once the Act is in effect, water companies will pay only $2.25 for every million li- ters they pump. A report by the Coun- cil of Canadians claims Nestlé, for example, draws 265 million liters from the Kawkawa aquifer in Hope every year — and would pay about $596.25 under the new rules. Selling that much water at two dollars a half-litre bottle would get the company over a billion dollars in revenue. Nestlé’s Director of Corporate Affairs, Jennifer Kerr, wouldnt comment on the company’s profits. “(Nestlé — extracts] less than 1% of the available water in the aquifer,” she said. “We do an extensive amount of monitoring to ensure that anything we take out of the aquifer system is taken in a sustainable manner.” But B.C. shouldn't focus on the profits to be had, said the B.C. Green Party’s Sonia Furstenau. On the one hand, there is a real cost to distributing the water, and on the other, if the province charges too much, there’s a profit incentive to harvest even more water than is being bottled already, she said. “Commercializing wa- ter is problematic and dangerous,” she said. Reusable water bottle. JASON GILDER PHOTO NN Students shelled out around $78,120 in bottled water at the college cafeteria in the past year. avanoa poole PHOTO Housing going up, none is for students m Developments around Langara do not include student housing ™ By CAMERON THOMSON, ETHAN YAN AND MANNY OBIAJUNWA T he neighbourhood around Langara College will get more housing under a new city housing strategy, but there are no plans to reserve any of that for students. Instead, multi-million-dollar homes are slated to remain in most of the land that’s a walking distance from campus. While some four- storey buildings will be built along 49th Avenue, there is no mention of their availability to students any- where in the plan. “T feel a bit cheated,” said Steven Nguyen, a 20-year-old Langara student who commutes from Sur- rey and was hoping the city would consider student's needs more. “Building apartments right next to Langara and not making it really usable for students...they should have put that into account and marketed more for students. They could have joined forces with Lan- gara, make a profit off it,” he said. Vancouver's mayor has said the city's plan hopes to create around 11,500 new homes in the Cambie Corridor. That includes taller build- A new development under construction on 49th Avenue and Main Street. /4son ciLDER PHOTO ings on arterial routes and town- houses in what were single family neighbourhoods. Experts say those units are still going to fetch high rents. A single room in a house off Quebec Street is listed on Craigslist for $850 a month, while a two-bedroom lane- way house on 49th Avenue is listed at $1800 a month. Meanwhile, the houses themselves along 49th av- enue are worth an average of $2.8 million each. “It seems that a condo building right next to a college would be useful as student housing, seems like a home-run,” said Thomas Da- vidoff, a professor of Real Estate Finance at UBC. “Only in a city with such a tight rental market, where supply is so inadequate to the need, would you think that it’s not very likely that it would go to students.” Langara College says it hasn't been lobbying the city for more student housing. “While we certainly take an in- terest in our neighbourhood, the city and the College have not had any specific discussions on housing in the area.” Said Ajay Patel, Vice President of External Development for Langara. Commuting to cheaper cities seems like how students are get- ting by — data provided to the Voice through a freedom of information request suggests more than 2,000 students commute an hour or more. “Student housing is a very impor- tant advocacy project for the LSU, students are having difficulty find- ing affordable housing especially in Metro Vancouver,” the Langara Student Union Media Committee wrote in an email.