Housing Trust Questions the Limiting of Student Homes

Report on the Meeting of the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, February 13, 2025

This meeting was held over Zoom and was recorded.

Present
Gaston de los Reyes (Chair), Allegra Clark, Rob Crowner, Alex Cox, Carol Lewis, Erica Piedade, Grover Wehman-Brown.

Staff: Greg Richane (Housing Coordinator).

Jesse Mager, Chair of the Housing subcommittee of the Planning Board, presented some of the subcommittee’s ideas about preserving neighborhoods for year-round residents. Mager emphasized that he is not opposed to students but that student housing drives the market in Amherst, so that even UMass professors can’t afford to live near the center of town. He characterized the housing subcommittee, not as anti-student, but pro long-term resident.

Because the full Planning Board did not have time to discuss housing issues at most of its regular meetings, four members formed the housing subcommittee about seven months ago. At the outset, the subcommittee looked at how other university towns have regulated student housing, but first they needed to develop a definition of a “student home.”  The subcommittee proposed a definition used by State College, Pennsylvania, for the past 10 or 12 years of “two or more persons unrelated by blood or marriage who live in the same dwelling while attending a university or college.” He noted that this definition has held up in the courts. He hoped to add the definition to the town’s zoning bylaw, especially with the new accessory dwelling unit (ADU) guidelines from the state that prohibit requiring owner-occupancy for an ADU or associated principal dwelling.

He noted that preventing neighborhoods from flipping to majority student rentals has been a discussion in Amherst for at least the past 30 years. Examining data from the past 20 years, Mager said that he could not find a single case where a home owned by an LLC (limited liability corporation) was sold to a family. Over the past year, the Planning Board has suggested ways of easing the pressure of student housing on neighborhoods by proposing an overlay district for denser housing on University Drive, increasing density in areas already zoned for apartments north of UMass, and a possible overlay district in East Amherst.

Trust Members Question the Concept of a “Student Home”
Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust member Alex Cox, who identified himself as a UMass graduate student who has only lived in town for a couple of years, challenged the claim of students infiltrating single-family neighborhoods. He said that data he examined from 2023 showed that less than three percent of single-family homes in town were owned by LLCs. Mager pointed out that the percentage of rentals varies greatly by neighborhood, and that his neighborhood near downtown has 30 to 40% rentals, and other areas have very few. He said that these neighborhoods need to be treated differently. “We see [identifying student homes] as a way for the town to collect data and then intelligently make decisions based on the percentages and neighborhoods of student homes,” he said. “If as a town we decide we’re okay with Sunset/Lincoln becoming 80% student homes, fine, but it should be an intentional movement, not letting investors decide.”

AMAHT member Grover Wenham-Brown asked how the city would track blood relationships, and wondered how the definition of a student home would apply to a queer couple, especially if gay marriage might be ended at the federal level. “I’ll just say that that language concerns me.” She also stated that many of her children’s fellow students at Fort River have graduate student parents and many are immigrants. She was concerned that the definition was a proxy for other kinds of exclusion and asked if the student housing designation is solving what needs to be solved—whether the issue is more conduct than the age or student-status of the renters.

Mager replied that the subcommittee considered these issues, but said the issue is not so much curtailing student behavior as retaining neighborhoods that encourage families to live here long term. The subcommittee has not yet come up with a different way to try to define what it wants to limit, which is the percentage of student homes in neighborhoods. Mager added  that housing the “large population of temporary residents changes the neighborhood in terms of commitment to upkeeping a property, in terms of making long-term relationships.”

Allegra Clark agreed with Wenham-Brown that the town needs to be careful not to exclude or discriminate against neighbors based on what category they fit into, but she said she also agreed with Mager’s point about creating a tool to regulate the number of student homes. She noted that it was important to differentiate student homes from rentals in general, because, she said, “We want to encourage rentals from long-term residents. We want to bring the rent rates down, and it’s simply not possible in our town, because it’s so lucrative to rent to students.” 

Mager received further pushback from Cox, who said that the definition of student homes could include adults taking a night class or graduate students with families who “are a vibrant part of town.” He asked if Mager was trying to say that there are parts of town where certain people can’t live, simply because they’re students. AMAHT Chair Gaston de los Reyes asked if the end of preventing the erosion of neighborhoods justifies the means for this policy, and Carol Lewis said that she doesn’t agree with the ends. “If students are good neighbors, what’s the problem?” she asked, adding, ”Not all people who’ve lived here for a long time are good neighbors either, so I just feel like something is screwed up and students are taking the fall.”

Mager admitted that there are students who are good neighbors, but that it is the year-round residents who keep the town vibrant—the people who are here during the summer to go to restaurants and who have kids in the school. ”We just invested in the library and in the school, and we’re not going to have people use these things. How many vacancies do we have in in-town storefronts? I think that’s because there aren’t enough people who live in town, walk to town , and go shopping.” Clark noted the change in neighborhoods in Amherst since she was growing up here. “I drive past friends’ houses from high school which clearly have no families living in them, and it does change the landscape of the town.”

Erica Piedade felt that UMass should “do better for its students and staff in terms of housing.” Wenham-Brown stated, “It seems like this solution is trying to solve a problem of greed—like the people who are buying single-family homes can charge as much as they possibly can for a room are charging students who can’t really afford it, likely going to their student loan debt and raising prices so that everyday working families can’t afford either, forcing them out of the market.” However, she disagreed that the student home designation would solve the problem, and thought it would just make student housing more insecure.

All admitted that Amherst needs about 5,000 more housing units in town to make rents come down, but that is a long-term process. Mager hoped the rental registration program/inspection program recently enacted would send a signal to investors that they can’t run rampant, and the town will try to push back as best it can toward the goal of bringing rents down.