General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[ac3r]

In one way yes.. in another way the houses were all derelict and rundown as accommodations for students. There were few actual home owner residents left even 20 years ago.

Exactly this, the neighbourhoods were destroyed by a refusal to accommodate change. Not by the development of high density student housing.

Eh...I beg to differ on that. Indeed, the refusal to initially build student housing resulted in old neighbourhoods with primarily single family homes being taken over by students. It has been a student ghetto for decades. But that aside, the new high density student housing has created a wasteland of bad that has greatly upset the fabric of the university area. There are entire lectures that are given at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture on how bad the new high density student housing has messed up the neighbourhoods. The professors, students and residents all hate it. It is truly, truly awful stuff in terms of architectural design, streetscape, the city skyline and now uninviting and depressing all that stuff is for everyone who lives there or simply has to look at it as they travel through the area. And as Joedelay Highhoe mentioned, it's a mecca for slum lords preying on students.

All of that stuff is going to be stuck there for the next 50 or 60 (assuming those poorly constructed buildings even last that long). And sadly, there isn't going to be much opportunity to improve the area in other ways. The City of Waterloo likely won't put much effort into improving the streetscape for people there, so it'll likely just remain this horrible student ghetto devoid of anything but ugly buildings and bubble tea shops.

It's possible to create student housing and have it still be nice, while also improving the neighbourhoods they are in (parks, new streets, infrastructure, lights, greenery etc) but for some reason Waterloo doesn't seem to care about any of that, they just rubber stamp the proposals and let the developers go crazy.