Reporter Scott Merzbach reported on “A new apartment building featuring 68 units and 230 beds at the site of a former sorority house on Olympia Drive [Amherst], to be rented exclusively to college students, is making its way through the town’s permitting process.”
I noticed this while searching for apartments in Amherst. I am not a college student, though I am a life-long learner.
It stunned me is that it is legal to discriminate against people who are not part of the priveleged class of young people who can afford college.
Amherst places a huge emphasis on social justice issues. Discrimination in housing is common and there’s all kinds of ways to “get away with it,” but these builders don’t even have to pretend. Right there in the municipal permitting process, they say quite clearly: if you are not a college student, we will not rent to you.
Let’s not even talk about “affordable housing” for the rest of us anyway. If I met the income qualifications for “affordable housing,” I wouldn’t be able to afford that housing.
All the social justice action and talk seem superfluous when a municipal government doesn’t consider the lack of “housing that real people can afford” (not “affordable housing”) to not be part of the top priority. But America and Canada don’t see the ability of their citizens to afford safe housing as any of the government’s concern. I don’t get that either.
Discrimination by high price is of course legal and happens all the time. This Olympia Drive project doesn’t even resort to double-talk: it’s right there — “to be rented exclusively to college students.”
Rivke Lela Reid
Belchertown