In November, I took the opportunity to attend a regular meeting of the Ainslie Wood Community Association. There’s been some anti-student rhetoric in the neighbourhood, and I wanted to determine if the AWCA represented a single-issue focused splinter group from the nearly 20 year old Ainslie Wood / Westdale Community Association, or if this represents a natural evolution of local engagement to the creation of a separate neighbourhood association for distinctive area. The summary? There are residents on the AWCA working to transition it from single issue advocacy to an established neighbourhood association that is focused on community planning instead of reactionary responses to a school closure. The biggest challenge facing the AWCA will be creating a positive relationship with McMaster students, and allowing purpose built student housing in spite of a strong undercurrent of NIBMYism lead by some of their most predominant citizens. Politics is not without context, and the long-term residents of Ainslie Wood are dealing with the closure of their public elementary school. This scars them, it angers them, and it is the catalyst for the creation of the AWCA. Prince Philip closed in the face of declining enrollment in the past decade as many of Ainslie Wood’s single family homes have become multi-resident (student) rentals during the past twenty years. The City’s poor (arguably non-existent) planning for student housing is often confused by long-term residents as students being the problem. Students fuel the economic vibrancy of West Hamilton and provide the customer base that enables so many commercial services to be located along Main Street and across the neighbourhood boundary at University Gardens in Dundas. The watershed moment that started the transition of Ainslie Wood from a predominantly single-family community began in 1995 with the implementation of the bulk discounted HSR universal pass for McMaster undergraduate students. The U-Pass opened west Ainslie Wood to student living. Prior to this, living in the quadrant of Ainslie Wood south of Main Street and west of Ewen Road was not convenient for McMaster students. Now they could ride the bus for “free” as the cost of transit was part of their tuition. Around the same time, the provincial government cut block funding to universities, and provincial funding was more greatly tied to student enrollment. McMaster, and other Ontario public post-secondary institutions, responded by rapidly increasing enrollment. In 1996, McMaster’s undergraduate enrollment was just over 12,000. There were just over 1,500 graduate students. In 2015-2016, McMaster reported an full-time undergraduate enrollment of 24,797 and full-time graduate enrollment of 3,616. To put this in perspective, it took McMaster 65 years to reach 12,000 undergraduates, and only 20 years to double that. While increasing full-time enrollment by over 14,000 students, McMaster has only built two new residence buildings in the past 20 years. Presently, McMaster lists a capacity of 3578 beds in its residence buildings, 669 of those are in the new buildings. The university did add beds in older buildings by converting double rooms to triple, and a few larges rooms to quads. Even being generous, despite more than doubling enrollment, the university barely added a quarter to their residence capacity. Each year, McMaster’s enrollment increases. For the university, increased enrollment brings increased revenue. A class of 500 students costs a teaching assistant or two more than a class of 450 students, and is significantly more profitable. There’s no disincentive to adding students in most of the liberal arts programs. (Students are not happy about this either, but they have no customer power to improve learning conditions) The result for Ainslie Wood has been a shift, the single-family homes are profitable investments as rental properties, and they’ve become just that. The AWWCA (Ainslie Wood Westdale Community Association) began in 1998 as a reactionary response to students moving further east into the Longwood area. Known originally as the Ainslie Wood / Westdale Community Association of Resident Homeowners, students were strictly forbidden from joining the association. I tried to join in 2005, when I lived in Ainslie Wood, and was told renters were not welcome. I covered one of their events in fall 2006 for The Silhouette, and they made clear the McMaster student newspaper was not welcome. Needless to say, I was not impressed to be unwelcome in my own city. Tensions were high during the late ’00s to early ’10s as a splinter group calling itself “Parents Against Drunk Students” left the AWWCA and fought against the graduate students pub.