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Priced Out Vancouver Students Are Sleeping on Campus Couches

VICE caught up with one of them to find out what showering, partying, and dealing with security is like when you are crashing at school.

Library couches, not just for naps anymore. Photo via Flickr user nshepard

At a certain point, Simon Fraser University theatre student Cindy Kao says she just didn't want to bother searching for a place to live anymore. Everything in Vancouver was out of her $600-a-month price range, and the competition was getting out of control.

"I just realized I didn't want to think about it anymore," she told VICE. "Despite the market being as expensive as it is, it's still a huge fight. Anything cheap gets taken within a day or seconds… It shocked me that I don't even expect to have a place."

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Kao was one of the subjects of a recent Globe and Mail story that found several students at Simon Fraser University have given up on the city's overpriced rental market and are choosing to crash on campus couches instead. It adds to a growing list of strange ways young people are trying to get by in a city where housing values have shot up in the last year faster than any other city in North America. VICE caught up with Kao to learn more about the challenges of partying, showering, and not getting caught while sleeping at school.

Kao says she started regularly sleeping on campus in February of this year and stayed nearly every night until school let out in April. Before that she crashed every so often, but when her lease on a basement suite was up, she decided the couch in the student lounge was better than a couch at a friend's place.

"I have a lot of friends who would offer, but that's only a once in awhile thing, you can only take so much from people," she said.

Read More: Vancouverites Tell Us the Strange and Awful Ways They've Saved on Rent

Kao knew she wasn't alone, because she had friends doing the same thing, and they would see each other wandering the halls of the student building late at night. The lights in the downtown campus student lounge don't turn off, so she began asking friends for access codes, and eventually found off-the-beaten-path studios with a working light switch.

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"You start wanting to use it for school purposes, but once in awhile you just need a darker place to sleep," she said. When that doesn't work out, Kao puts a scarf over her head, and hopes security won't bother her.

Kao says much of her campus sleeping arrangement depends on the whims of security. Showers are available on campus, but only during certain hours. Before the school opens, Kao says she sometimes asks a guard to open the door for her. "If they're willing to open it for you."

And then there's the challenge of getting past security to crash after a night of partying. Unless Kao's out with friends who can put her up for the night, it's up to campus security to let her in. "There are definitely times where I had to come back to school at strange hours and sign in with security guards," she told VICE.

Kao says she hasn't run into too many issues, but she says she's seen other sleepers who have been asked to leave at 3 AM, "simply because he didn't have his ID on his person."

Kao is sleeping better now that she lives with her mom in Langley, but says she's likely to return to campus couches in September. Her studies often keep her on campus past midnight, so commuting back to the Fraser Valley—a two-hour journey when transit is actually running—isn't an option. She's been looking at places, but isn't holding her breath. Her former roommate, meanwhile, found a spot in someone's living room for $600—a deal considering two bedroom apartments in the city averaged nearly $1,600 last year, and have been creeping up closer to $2,000.

Being public about her campus couch surfing has so far prompted mixed reactions. "I know when the article came out I worried a lot of people," she said. But Kao has also heard from other students trying to get by floating around campus. "I knew that there were a lot of people in my position, but I didn't realize that there were more. Some of them actually reached out to me and thanked me for doing it."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.