While Amherst has made some progress, the town is still in the throes of a housing crisis. The University of Massachusetts Amherst deserves its share of the blame for today’s mess, but the Town of Amherst and its residents are equally responsible — if not more. Though regulations and zoning restrictions have been the key cause of today’s housing crisis, some locals’ unique hostility to students and their needs is another factor that needs to be considered.

UMass exacerbated the situation when it continued to admit more students than they could actually accommodate on and off campus. However, relative to its size, UMass has a huge on-campus population much larger than universities its size. The University has over 60 percent of students living on campus as opposed to the 35 percent at the University of Georgia and the 39 percent at the University of Virginia. A key factor in this has been some Amherst residents’ historic opposition to student presence in town.

Now, we are living with the consequences of some residents’ decades-long refusal to consider the needs of students despite choosing to live in a college town.  If Amherst wants to enjoy the benefits of being a college town, they must learn to respect the students who breathe life into the community.

After assisting in raising housing prices, the Town of Amherst also decided to limit the allowed number of non-family residents of a house to four. Their reasoning is they must limit the number of people in a given home for resident safety, but this overlooks why people — particularly college students — resort to living with over four people in the first place.

No one really wants to live in a home with five or six other people, but housing in Amherst has become so unaffordable that many middle and working class students have no other choice. As if engineering a housing crisis wasn’t enough, now residents who were trying to adapt to those very same circumstances face even more difficulties.

The residents of Amherst have made it clear through these decisions that they would rather watch students and local renters suffer than build more apartments in their town. Even worse, they have decided they’d rather see their fellow locals be priced out of their neighborhoods by not giving new students more places to live.

With a near negligible amount of new homes built in recent decades paired with a steady increase in UMass Amherst’s student population, students have been forced to compete with locals for homes in traditional family neighborhoods.

Even for residents not at risk of being priced out, the steady encroachment of students into their neighborhoods leads many to move out, as the rowdy lifestyles of students are not quite compatible with their own.

All of this could have been avoided if Amherst simply rezoned areas around the campus to allow dense apartments designed for students. Most students already want to live as close to campus as possible, and designating the surrounding neighborhoods for student apartments would ensure that the rest of the town could remain for families.

To add to the irony, Amherst residents like other NIMBY communities across the nation have named traffic as one of the biggest reasons to not approve new housing. But if the Town of Amherst simply allowed housing to be built right by campus (essentially more of the apartments that have only gone up in the last few years), barely any traffic would result since people would take buses, bike or walk.

In another ironic twist, out of their very fear of causing more traffic, residents’ rejection of new housing projects near campus only added to traffic as students resorted to commuting from further-away homes and overcrowding into unwalkable neighborhoods not designed for them at all.

Students and locals have very different lifestyles and interests. The town’s refusal to accommodate students has not made them go away but has instead just made life worse for everyone.

Fortunately, the town has started coming to its senses and allowed more housing to be built in recent years. However, judging by the number of students and locals still struggling to afford rent, we still have a lot of work to do. It starts with having more respect for students.

Liam Rue can be reached at [email protected].