Waterloo's first ghetto ?

Posted with permission of the Waterloo Chronicle


Waterloo's first ghetto?

Longtime residents feel like they're being pushed out of their homes
By Greg MacDonald
News
Apr 16, 2008

This is the first in a three-part series looking at the issues with student housing in neighbourhoods surrounding the universities. Next week will look at the student demand for housing.
Deborah Easson is part of a dying breed.
She and her husband Ken live in a storey-and-a-half house near the intersection of Albert and Columbia streets, the same house she grew up in and where her mother lived until 2003.
But the Eassons are a rarity in the neighbourhood -- permanent residents living among a sea of students.
They bought the house from Easson's elderly mother, hoping to settle down in a diverse and vibrant neighbourhood.
But over the past five years, Easson, the chair of the Northdale Area Residents' Coalition, has seen the neighbourhood degenerate quickly, with absentee landlords buying up property and renting it to students.
The students become transient tenants who have little concern for the appearance of their residences or upkeep of their properties.
And now this neighbourhood and others like it in the city's core have reached critical mass -- according to Easson. There are now more student-occupied houses than permanent residences in the neighbourhood bounded by University Avenue, Columbia, Lester and King streets.
"The balance has shifted. Students are now telling us (permanent residents) that we shouldn't live here because it's a student neighbourhood," she said.
And they're partially right -- the area is predominantly made up of students.
Easson took a poll of more than 200 homes in neighbourhoods in close proximity to the universities, and found that more than 75 per cent are occupied by students.
"The neighbourhood has reached a tipping point. The perception of a neighbourhood changes when you get that kind of saturation. This is now seen as a student party zone," said Easson, who charted the results of her survey on a map.
She marked lots with permanent residents green and ones with rental tenants red.
What she found was a few sporadic areas of green in a sea of red -- and the number of red lots is steadily increasing.
Most of the permanent occupants in the area are seniors, who by their own admission will have to leave the neighbourhood for health or age-related reasons, Easson said.
The only way they're able to sell their houses for a reasonable price is to sell to landlords because families and young professionals have no interest in moving to the area due to its reputation as a party haven, she added.
It hasn't always been this way, said Terry Dorscht, who has lived on Lester Street for 42 years. There has always been a strong student contingent in this part of the city, but in the past five years Dorscht has seen students take over.
This has led to a general decline in residents' quality of life, he said.
"The general maintenance of properties is going down . . . there are parties and noise at night," Dorscht said. "There's also some theft, so we can't set much outside.
"It just feels like I'm being hemmed in by students."
Both Easson and Dorscht have horror stories about the behaviour of their student neighbours. They've seen their properties urinated on, been woken in the middle of the night by loud parties and have heard about neighbours being threatened when challenging these occurrences.
But they don't blame the students for the condition of the neighbourhood. They say the problem stems from lack of bylaw enforcement and poor zoning.
Easson was critical of bylaw's response to her and her neighbours' complaints. In her experience, students take a visit from the bylaw officer very lightly when they actually do get caught.
For many of the infractions, like public drinking, vandalism or urination, the offenders are long gone by the time the proper authorities arrive, leaving the residents helpless.
"It's not like I can go out and ask the guy peeing on my lawn for his name," Easson said.
But the real problem is the demographics, she said. The fact that the area is so heavily populated by students means that their lifestyle dominates.
Students take up so much of her street that once school is out, the neighbourhood is deserted. This imbalance is killing the community, Easson said.
"It's not much of a neighbourhood if you don't have neighbours," she said.
Easson, Dorscht and a slew of their neighbours went to city council on April 7 to ask the city to fix their neighbourhood.
They wanted the city to encourage diverse development in the area, which would allow families, young professionals, seniors and students to live together in a clean and vibrant neighbourhood.
"I don't think the city wants to make an area full of students," Dorscht said. "But that vision to allow other developments isn't there."
The city decided to stay the course with its current development plan, which came out of the student accommodation study during the last council.
But the residents believe without an innovative zoning strategy, the neighbourhood will fall into further disrepair, and soon become a dilapidated mess filled only with students.
Easson and her neighbours want the city to encourage different kinds of development in the area, such as high-end condominiums.
With the area's proximity to both uptown Waterloo and the technology park, the city could easily attract young professionals and high-tech workers, Dorscht said.
The city contends that they can only zone areas, not dictate what type of development is built there.
Easson believes there are ways to attract developers to the potentially lucrative area.
"Why not offer incentives? (The city) could waive development fees if the buildings were the type they want," Easson said.
And while council's decision to carry on with a 25-year development plan caused much consternation in the neighbourhood, one councillor's comments are causing outright panic, Easson said.
Coun. Jan d'Ailly said in his remarks at the council meeting that property values in the area could be driven down in order to attract non-landlord buyers.
This comment has made neighbours who were never thinking of selling before start to consider it, which will only make the problem worse, Easson said.
She wants to see the area saved from itself and made into something more than a Kingston, Ont.-style student ghetto.
Residents believe that the area can be more than temporary residences for undergrads, she said.
They believe that they can achieve a vibrant neighbourhood without lowering their property values.
But first the city will have to change the way it deals with the neighbourhood, Easson said.
"The dynamic of the neighbourhood is broken," she said.