A student who signs a lease in Amherst is an Amherst resident. She pays rent here. She is counted in the census that determines our federal and state aid. She votes here. When something goes wrong at two in the morning, our fire department comes. She has the same claim as the rest of us to live in whatever part of this town will have her.
That should not be controversial. But Amherst’s zoning has fought this idea for 60 years, and the argument resurfaced this month. At its Sept. 2 meeting, the Planning Board discussed asking Beacon Hill for an exemption from the state’s accessory dwelling unit law. The complaint was not that the new units are unsafe or badly built. It was who would live in them. One member put it plainly: the point of the law, he said, is not student housing.
Hear what that asks for. It asks the commonwealth’s permission to look at a young person with a signed lease and a rent check and decide she is a lesser sort of neighbor — she’s welcome to spend money here, welcome to be counted when the aid formulas are run, but not welcome to live in a residential neighborhood.
The state has already refused to carve Amherst out of its bylaw — or students, for that matter. The implementing regulations specifically bar towns from limiting who may occupy a protected accessory unit based on enrollment in an educational institution. Unlike our Planning Board, the state Legislature wants to house all residents, not merely those with certain characteristics.
And Amherst’s “ADU boom” is not an invasion. It is a symptom of our historic refusal to build off-campus housing. UMass houses more than 60% of its students on campus — among the top five of 209 ranked public universities for the share it takes in. Read it the other way. Amherst is uniquely reluctant to build student housing, despite the enormous tax benefits. We build at one-quarter the rate of similar municipalities like State College, Pennsylvania. We capped occupancy at four unrelated people in 1966 and never revisited it. We even tried (via Articles 18 & 19) to ban students from residential neighborhoods. This is cruel and counterproductive.
We are paying for our anti-student housing policy in three currencies. Revenue, because every bed pushed onto campus sits on land that pays no property tax; the same bed downtown would pay for teacher and DPW salaries. Affordability, because 12,000 off-campus students compete for the same aging rental stock as the young family and the retiree on a fixed income, so rents rise for all of them. And legal fees: the Zoning Board of Appeals is in Land Court now defending a restrictive reading of the bylaw that the town itself did not apply to the first nine units permitted under it.
The Town Council has an obligation to provide political representation to students. Any of us, as private residents, may find our neighbors loud and say so — at a meeting, in this paper, across the fence. That is ordinary civic life. But a councilor casting a zoning vote or a board member drafting a bylaw is not acting as a neighbor. They hold office for every resident of Amherst, the ones on a 30-year mortgage and the ones on a nine-month lease. In the words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote.”
When public servants say out loud that the purpose of a zoning rule is to elevate the rights of one kind of resident, they are doing something their office does not authorize. They are also building a record. Land use challenges turn on stated purpose, and every declaration that a bylaw exists to limit student occupancy is a sentence someone’s lawyer will read into evidence — at our expense.
Amherst’s character is inseparable from the young people who arrive each fall. We owe them better than a code built to make them somebody else’s problem.
Let them live where they can find a room. Then build more rooms.
Evan Naismith lives in Amherst.