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MONTREAL — If policymakers want to help solve Canada’s housing affordability crisis, they should start by building rental housing near colleges and universities. That’s the implication of a new study from CIBC, which estimates that Canada has a shortage of about 300,000 housing units because of the way it counts — or doesn’t count — students. In Canada’s census, a student who lives away from home during the school year but returns to their parents’ home in summers is counted as living with their parents. Watch: Empty Vancouver mansions make for sweet student crash pads. Story continues below.

That census data is used by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) to generate estimates of the demand for housing across the country, which are closely watched by the real estate industry. As things stand, CMHC’s data shows a perfect balance between the number of new homes built and the number of new households formed in the country. Thus, developers aren’t building the housing needed to fill this demand because they simply don’t know it’s there. “If we are undercounting young people, and most of them are renting, then we have to increase rental supply,” said Benjamin Tal, CIBC’s deputy chief economist and author of the report. Tal told HuffPost Canada it’s “reasonable to assume” that urban centres with large universities would be most impacted by this.