Derry housing shortage leaves Magee expansion ‘at risk’, say landlords and students

More than 400 students at Ulster University’s Magee campus in Derry began the term living in hotels, hostels and a converted office block, as the university’s expansion towards 10,000 students outruns a city that has built almost no purpose-built student housing.

Magee has grown from 4,400 students in 2022 to 7,100 this autumn, the fastest growth of any UK campus, after the Northern Ireland executive committed £140m to a medical school and new engineering and computing departments. The target of 10,000 by 2032 was a central demand of the city’s campaign for parity with Belfast. But private rents in the streets around the campus rose by 19% in the year to August, according to the Housing Executive, and the city has 840 purpose-built student beds against a need the university puts at 3,000.

The university has block-booked 180 rooms at two hotels in the city centre and 90 beds in a hostel across the border in Donegal, from which it runs a morning coach. A further 130 students are in a former tax office on Strand Road that was converted in nine weeks over the summer. Students pay £95 a week for the hotel rooms, subsidised by the university.

“I am sharing a hotel room with a girl I had never met, with a kettle and no cooker, 25 minutes from the campus by bus,” said Aoife Gallagher, 19, a first-year nursing student from Omagh. “It is clean and it is warm and it is not a home. My mum wants me to transfer to Jordanstown.”

Landlords say the pace of expansion has outstripped the private market’s ability to respond, and that the city council’s planning committee has approved just one purpose-built student block, of 300 beds on the Strand Road, in three years. Two other applications were refused on height and design grounds. “Everyone in this city wanted Magee to grow and nobody wanted a six-storey building near them,” said Seamus Doherty, who chairs the Derry Landlords’ Association. “The students are here now. They are living in the Bogside in houses that were family homes two years ago, and the families have gone to Strabane.”

The Housing Executive’s figures show 210 family lettings in the Bogside, Brandywell and the Waterside converted to student lets since 2023. The city’s social housing waiting list stands at 5,900.

Ulster University said it was in talks with a developer for a 650-bed campus residence on the former Foyle College site, with planning to be submitted in the new year and completion in 2029. “We are growing exactly as the city asked us to, and the housing has to keep up,” said the campus provost, Siobhán Bradley. “We cannot build it alone.”

Derry City and Strabane district council said it had set up a student housing taskforce with the university, the Housing Executive and landlords, and would publish a plan in December. In the meantime the Donegal coach leaves Letterkenny at 7.15am.