Waterloo benefits quite a bit from playing host to two major universities. It has a lot to do with our relative prosperity, now more than ever. If there’s a downside, though, it’s that you have to put up with undergraduate students.
And so last spring, the Waterloo Chronicle published a special, investigative series entitled Waterloo’s First Ghetto?. The premise is that students are running amok in the Northlake neighbourhood. There’s vandalism and public urination everywhere. It’s implied that we’ve turned some sort of corner and it’s now worse than ever. As if on cue, a “near riot broke out” on Ezra street at the end of April and the Chronicle got to pat itself on the back for being so timely.
The articles bothered me at the time (and, it would seem, still bothers me enough to write about). I came to Waterloo as one of those undergrads, but was never much into public urination myself. I stuck around because I genuinely like this town. Come September, I will have lived here 15 years. I used to live in WCRI, nearby the so-called “ghetto”. It always seemed rather… nice. My girlfriend currently lives on Hickory street, so I’m well familiar with the “ghetto” as it is now. It still seems rather nice. The picture painted by the Chronicle seems to me to be wildly out of proportion. Certainly, the devastation wrought by students doesn’t seem that much worse than that of any other time since I’ve lived here. The fact that a lot of students live there certainly isn’t new.
I’m also familiar with the actual student ghetto in Kingston, the one referenced in the articles. Hickory and Albert have a long way to go if they aspire to that level of ghettohood.
The Chronicle seemed to insist that nothing was being done about the neighbourhood, except that’s obviously misleading. You only have to drive down Columbia to see the change that’s happening. The city has a 25 year plan, that involves increasing the density along University, Columbia, Lester and Spruce Streets, largely to meet the demand for rental housing from students, while trying to preserve the interior neighbourhoods along Albert and Hickory. Oddly, the Chronicle doesn’t spend much time discussing the plan, even to criticize it.
Preserving the interior neighbourhood means that housing prices there have settled down to something reasonable from the rampant speculation of five to ten years ago, even if the prices are still high enough to encourage young families to look elsewhere.
The solution the Chronicle article proposes is to somehow encourage high-end condominium development for high-tech workers. It’s not clear, however, that those creative class high-tech folks would want a condo on Albert Street, even if you could convince a developer to build one, and one wonders if painting the neighbourhood as an unrepentant slum where your BMW is almost certain to get peed on is going to encourage anyone to take up the idea.
It’s hard for me to see what the Northlake Area Residents’ Coalition referenced in the articles believes it can accomplish from its campaign to tarnish the reputation of their own neighbourhood, unless they are trying to convince the city to bail them out. I’m not sure why the investigative reporters at the Chronicle weren’t willing to ask those questions.
