AMHERST — Around 8,000 undergraduate students, or more than one in three who attend the University of Massachusetts, will not be living in dormitories this fall.
For some Amherst residents who have seen an influx of college students into their neighborhoods, the town and UMass have to do more to prevent negative impacts from these rental properties.
“UMass is outsourcing housing to developers,” says Lynn Morgan, a Cherry Lane resident who recently brought her concerns directly to Tony Maroulis, the university’s executive director of community and strategic initiatives. Maroulis was participating in an in-person community conversation with Town Manager Paul Bockelman at the Black Sheep Deli in downtown Amherst.
Morgan, who has observed encroachment of student housing after 30 years in town, recently sent a letter to the Town Council asking that it do something to stem the student housing properties, which have emerged as major investment opportunities, but can create problems such as loud parties, parking and sometimes poor upkeep.
“Furthermore, young families of modest means are being priced out of Amherst as investors scoop up single-family homes at the lower end of the price range and turn them into short-term rentals, transforming family neighborhoods,” Morgan wrote.
These concerns come as the Town Council’s Community Resources Committee studies how to deal with the matter of undergraduates living in rentals in single-family neighborhoods, and whether so-called absentee landlords need to be held more accountable.
The committee will be proposing updates to current regulations, adopted by Town Meeting in 2013, that are exclusively complaint-driven, with a possibility that town inspectors will be able to do more regular looks at properties for violations. Under the existing system, any property owner who rents has to fill out a self-certification checklist that ensures the home or apartment is up to code.
Similar to Morgan’s concerns, Ira Bryck of Strong Street said he is seeing obvious violations, such as a nearby home with six unrelated housemates, exceeding the town’s cap of four unrelated housemates.
“It ruins the town,” Bryck said of these homes, adding that such situations illustrate that UMass should be pressured by the town to build more housing.
Others asked about what it would take for UMass to house nearly all undergraduates on campus, similar to what Amherst and Hampshire colleges do.
Maroulis, though, said that is not an apt comparison and that, as a public institution, UMass is already at or above many of its peers in providing housing, even though 120 transfer students are scheduled to spend the fall semester at the EconoLodge hotel in Hadley.
In recent years, Maroulis said 13,500 beds have been offered on the UMass campus, which is increasing to 14,300 beds this fall because on-campus demand is so high.
Maroulis attributes this demand to more students seeking the experience of dormitory life after their college careers were disrupted by the pandemic.
He also disputed that there is any intention to bring too many students to town. “We don’t over-enroll, but we don’t promise housing for all students,” Maroulis said.
The 22,700 undergraduates, in fact, could be a small decline from last fall.
Maroulis stressed that a positive change in recent years is having in-depth details about where students are living off campus, tracking if they are in Amherst, Hadley, Sunderland or other nearby communities. This was the result of COVID-19 and the need to isolate infections among students.
He also praised the work of Bill Laramee, the police department’s community liaison, and the town’s ambassadors, as doing outreach to off-campus students that help reduce complaints about problems in neighborhoods. Maroulis, though, acknowledged that the past year was one of the more challenging from a public safety perspective in a long time. Last spring’s pre-St. Patrick’s Day festivities, once known as Blarney Blowout, took a turn for the worse, especially at Townehouse Apartments, where fences installed to reduce large gatherings saw people scaling them, with at least one person suffering a serious injury from being impaled.
Meantime, Maroulis said a joint discussion and planning with Amherst around housing needs and other topics is something UMass is interested in. “Where we go, we have to go together,” he said.
Access to housing for faculty and staff is a component of the university’s goal to get to a net-zero campus, he explained, and that if those it employs have to live far from campus and drive, that is not a good thing for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Bockelman said the university remains the lifeblood of the town, and adjustments to the rental program will allow them to be managed more productively. Yet he said the town is struggling with the zoning issue and whether there are ways to discourage the continued investment in rental properties.
There are not a lot of tools available to prevent people from buying homes and then turning them into student rentals, he said.
One tool that is being discussed is whether Amherst should adjust the limit of four unrelated housemates. Having a higher cap might lessen the demand on off-campus rental homes.
Ken Rosenthal of Sunset Avenue, though, said he and others affected by students in neighborhoods prefer to see the cap reduced and the limit move to three unrelated housemates. That would serve as a means of cutting into the profits that landlords are making off the rentals.
Another concept Rosenthal said has been deployed in some college towns is to require a set distance between rental properties, which would make it impossible for student rentals to be strung together along one street.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
