What the reaction to “Amherst’s Newest Landlord” reveals about us — and what we can do about it

Opinion By Shalini Bahl-Milne

A few weeks ago, Evan Naismith wrote in these pages that Amherst’s newest landlord is a private-equity firm. The posts about it on social media have been viewed more than forty thousand times, and the comment threads that followed were something to behold. 

“Amherst is already gone,” one person wrote. 

“Greedy boomers sold its soul.” 

Of student rentals, another offered: “I would be delighted if it was made illegal.” 

A seventy-two-year-old resident described giving up on finding a place to rent in the town where she has spent her life. 

One reader wasn’t even sure, from the headline, whether “Amherst” meant the town or the college.

What struck me was not any single complaint but the shape of the whole. Everyone was pointing outward, and everyone at a different culprit—Blackstone’s money, the “progressive woke,” the town government, the taxes, the boomers, the students, UMass. They cannot all be the villain. 

What the commenters share is not a diagnosis. It is a feeling. And the feeling, not any particular bylaw, is what’s keeping us stuck.

Naismith made the policy argument well. I want to make a different one. Underneath the debate about exaction fees and tax rolls is an older question: who gets to feel at home in Amherst?

Everyone feels like the loser.

The public conversation sorts us into sides: townies against students, families against landlords, residents against private equity. When I served as a Town Councilor, I co-led a survey of Amherst homeowners, landlords, and tenants. We asked people not which side they were on but how they actually live here—as a tenant, as a homeowner in a neighborhood with rental units, as someone who rents property to others, or as more than one at once. A tenant is also somebody’s neighbor. The homeowner two doors down may also be a landlord.

Among the 257 respondents, we did not find a winner and a loser. We found that everyone feels like the loser.

Tenants feel policed: “I have felt targeted for being a college student. I am always fearful of doing something that aggravates my neighbors even if it is not wrong.” 

Homeowners beside rentals feel trapped, because “saying something can lead to retaliation and property damage.” 

Landlords feel villainized: “Please don’t hurt the only strong business left in town.”

Our report named the through-line plainly: “a lack of empathy among tenants, neighbors, and landlords for each other’s perspectives and experiences.” Almost no one described the situation from any vantage point but their own.

We are wired to see a question like this through the lens of our own interest. That is not a character flaw; it is how attention works under threat. Which is why asking one another to rise above it has never worked, and why the flaw worth fixing is in what we have built around it. 

These conflicts arise not because one group is uniquely unreasonable, but because each is reacting to what the system makes safe. The tenant who keeps quiet rather than risking her lease. The homeowner who calls the town rather than knocking on the door, because the call is anonymous and the knock is not. The landlord who puts four names on a lease and stops asking who else sleeps there, because the landlord who does ask loses the tenants to the one who doesn’t.

Decent people, reasoning honestly from where they stand, arrive together at an outcome not one of them would have chosen. That is a system—and a system is something we can redesign.

The town where only the H is silent.

Amherst is not a quiet town. We like to say it is the place where only the H is silent. So when I say that fear makes us stop talking, I do not mean we fall silent. I mean we stop having the conversation—the kind where you listen to a view that isn’t yours and try to work something out.

I watched that happen up close on the Community Resources Committee. When our discussion of the survey reached a genuinely contested question—the four-person occupancy limit—we stopped engaging. No one would open the question, because to raise it at all was taken as conceding that the number might change. 

So we left it closed, and lost the distinctions a real conversation would have drawn: some houses can comfortably hold more than four people and ought to be allowed to; others should not hold more than two. Those are the kinds of deliberations we could have had with new possibilities that would have addressed the concerns of all groups. But we never had that conversation.

The cost of that avoidance is that we reach for fixes aimed at one group alone and those do not hold. 

Many homeowners want the occupancy limit lowered: fewer cars, less noise. But tenants told us the limit already drives up their rents and is used “by landlords to prevent tenants from complaining,” and landlords acknowledged that they simply put four names on a lease and pack in more anyway. 

Tighten the rule and you raise per-person rents, deepen the shortage, and accelerate the very thing homeowners named as their nightmare—more family homes converted into student rentals. The fix aimed at homeowners curves back and bites homeowners.

Our division is somebody’s business model.

Scale that instinct up and you arrive at Naismith’s warning. The reflex to say no is exactly what a firm like Blackstone shops for; its own marketing chief has said the company looks for “markets with barriers to entry.” 

Barriers do not stop development. They decide who gets to do it. Three years of appeals, a lawsuit, a forced redesign—a local builder with a triplex cannot absorb that. Blackstone budgets for it.

So the building moves onto campus, beyond our reach, and everyone loses. Fieldstone, the $200 million dorm private developers built on UMass land in 2024, pays the town nothing. By Naismith’s reckoning, the same project off campus would have paid roughly $20 million in up-front exaction fees and $3.9 million a year in property taxes—money that now has to come from the houses already standing here. Students pay market rents many cannot afford. Those priced out spill back into the neighborhoods that feared them, competing for the same houses a young family or a retired teacher is trying to rent.

Polarization is not merely unpleasant. It is expensive. The longer a town spends fighting itself, the more advantage shifts to whoever is patient enough to profit from the stalemate. When a whole town acts from fear, there is no winning side. There is only Blackstone.

Hear how the same street looks from another window.

So here is my ask, and it is a small one. Read the survey—especially if you live in a neighborhood with students. 

Something happens when you go straight from a tenant’s answer to a homeowner’s answer to a landlord’s answer on the same question: people you had filed under a category start sounding like people in a situation.

You will also find what the comment threads on social media never show you—how much quiet decency is already at work. A tenant who keeps a garden and trades growing tips with a landlord glad to have them there. A homeowner who bakes brownies for the students who move in each fall and calls it “a coexistence conversation.” A landlord who, when a complaint comes in, “follow[s] it up to hear the other person’s version, and then tries to find a resolution.” None of them waited for the town to fix anything.

Empathy is not agreement. It is the willingness to hear how the same street looks from another window.

What we can do.

Our report ended with a question rather than an answer: how do we cultivate a culture of empathy and care among tenants, homeowners, and landlords? Fear shapes how we think; incentives shape what our institutions do. We have to work on both.

Create a welcoming neighborhood: Start this fall. Institutionalize the brownie week our survey’s homeowner invented. UMass’s Off-Campus Housing office already offers mini-grants for students to do something good for their neighborhood; the town could match them, turning lease-turnover week into an annual welcome—block potlucks that include the renters, phone numbers traded so a late-night problem starts with a text instead of a police call.

Make mediation a simple first-step: Forty-five percent of the homeowners we surveyed did not know whom to call about a problem next door. Free mediation already exists: the state funds it through the Office of Public Collaboration, and the designated center for this county, Collaborative Resolutions Group, works out of Greenfield. A service twenty miles away that residents cannot name is not a real option. In practice the choice collapses to two: say nothing, or file a complaint. That is why so much of what lands on the inspector’s desk is really a relationship problem no one had a way to raise. A neighborhood mediation program—trained volunteer mediators drawn from Amherst itself, and block ambassadors on the streets where town and gown meet—would run the sequence properly: neighbor to neighbor first, then a facilitated conversation, and only then enforcement.

Build broader participation into tough deliberations: For the bigger decisions, deliberation can be designed. Oregon seats a panel of randomly selected voters on contested ballot questions; they study the evidence, question advocates from both sides, and publish a short plain-language statement of the strongest case each way. Researchers found voters used it and came away better informed, largely because it came from people like them rather than from a campaign. Massachusetts piloted the model in 2016. 

Amherst does not need a ballot measure to borrow the principle: before the next hard housing vote, seat a panel of residents drawn by lot—tenants, homeowners near rentals, landlords— hand them the survey and the town’s own numbers on what a project of that kind actually costs and yields, let them put questions to the developers, the university, and the loudest voices on both sides, and ask them to report back on what they found.

The honest caveat is that we have convened panels before and they can feel like wasted effort. If councilors receive the report but are unwilling to let go of their strongly held beliefs and truly listen to the findings, all that work by the panel is not seriously considered and volunteers not valued for their time and expertise. The real finding from Oregon is that process itself confers legitimacy—people will accept an outcome they voted against when they can see how it was reached. That only holds if the people who decide are willing to be moved by what they hear.

Finally, treat listening as what it is: a skill. We train our building inspectors and certify our firefighters, yet we ask councilors to hold the town’s hardest conversations with no training in staying present when a discussion turns tense. That training exists and is not hard to find. It matters far less who teaches it than that we stop treating the capacity to stay in a hard conversation as a personality trait some councilors happen to have.

And it should make us faster, not slower. The purpose of hearing each other out before a decision is to stop relitigating the same fight for five years—and a town that deliberates seriously and then decides on a predictable timeline is one a small local builder can afford to work in, while the developer that budgets for delay loses its edge.

The university can build belonging from its side of the line. When students work with the community they live in, responsibility follows. I saw it in my own mindful marketing classes, where students partner with local businesses: the businesses get real help, and the students come away invested in a town they now know by name—no longer visitors, but stakeholders. UMass could multiply those bridges, and in doing so revive the good-faith town-gown collaboration Naismith described from the Gateway years.

The real test.

A different Amherst begins the moment we are less afraid to listen.

None of this is finally about Blackstone. It is a test of whether a town that thinks of itself as progressive can solve a hard problem without first turning its neighbors into opponents. If we cannot learn to deliberate across differences here—in a small town, among people who by and large want the same things— then we will go on choosing, together, an Amherst that not one of us wants.

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Curiosity is a practice, not a personality trait

Most of us think we’re curious. But when we disagree with someone, the question that comes first is usually Why would they do that? or Why can’t they see it? Those questions invite us to defend what we already believe. Having questions is not the same as being curious. The real skill is asking a question without an agenda, one that could change your mind.

Before reacting to the next housing debate, try three questions that expand your understanding:

• What do I actually know here, and what am I assuming?
• What don’t I know about the other person’s experience?
• What do we need—not just what do I want?

They don’t require agreement. They widen the field of view, which is where better decisions begin.

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The Amherst rental survey — the Community Resources Committee’s Community Engagement Report — is public and worth your time.

Shalini Bahl-Milne is a former Amherst Town Councilor who served on the Community Resources Committee and co-led the 2022–23 rental survey. Through A Sama Life, she teaches mindfulness not as a way to relax but as a set of skills for steadying attention, working with difficult emotions, and making wiser decisions, the very capacities a community needs to listen and deliberate well. Learn about her approach and upcoming classes at asamalife.com, and read more of her writing at samalife.substack.com.