What used to be "Elliot House" (the rather out-of-place 1967 concrete office block on Hillside Crescent) has been stripped back to the frame and re-clad for conversion to "luxury" student apartements. If you dig really deep into the planning application you can find it is intended for 138 persons (subsequently altered upwards by amending the planning permission to include 3 roof-top studios). The student accommodation replaced an existing granted (probably expired) proposal from 2006 to convert the office in the same manner into 34 private dwellings, 7 of which were to be affordable.
There's a proposal pending consideration to demolish the old Stanley Place church (the one at Abbeyhill that rather spectacularly and mysteriously burnt itself down a few years back while being used as a scaffolding store), which was fairly notable architecturally for being a brick-built Victorian church in Edinburgh. That's for 93 student flats.
There's 450 student flats being built at Abbeyhill / Abbeymount on the old Chatham garage (or in old money on the site of the Regent Cinema, or in even older money the Palace Brewery).
There's 170 students at the "Gateway Apartments" (Gateway Studios in old money variously the, Gateway, Atmospheric, Pringle's, Millicent Ward's, Festival and Broadway cinemas).
A little down Leith Walk at Haddington Place (where the Shrubhill House stood) they are building a mixed-use development including 226 student bedrooms.
The planners recently threw-out plans for a 240-bed student residence at the end of Bothwell Street (I'd hazard a guess they'll be back shortly with amended proposals).
So in a very short period of time, 12-18 months at the most, that's potentially over 1,200 students put in an area not 700m across from end to end, where previously there's been no single concentration of students, rather they've been sprinkled amongst the existing flats and houses. It seems that only the larges (the Abbeyhill one) of these qualifies to need a "student management plan"; developers don't need to provide this under a certain size. So you can still fit 1,200 students in an area but you don't need to make specific provisions for their impact if they are spread amongst a number of smaller developments.
I'm not sure what I make of it all, clearly you can fit a lot more students in the same space than non-studenty peoples. And clearly a number of developers and management companies are going to be making themselves very rich given the sorts of above-rental market fees they are charging.
I've also discovered it takes quite a long time to trawl through all the planning permissions for each development to get a headcount for each. I very much doubt most people take their lunch hour to do this and I'd imagine most people are in the dark about such things until it begins to bother them in some way or another.
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