The student Ghetto has been renamed the Village in all institutional references, AMS Municipal Affairs Commissioner Paul Tye said Sept. 9. The change means AMS initiatives such as the Key to the Ghetto awards will remove references to the term.
Tye said the change was necessary because the term ‘ghetto’ carries too many negative connotations. Slums where Jews were forced to live under the Nazi regime were called ghettos and, more recently, the term has been applied to inner-city neighbourhoods in cities such as Toronto.
The AMS should be applauded for choosing a more neutral term to replace a potentially offensive one.
Most of the houses in the student Ghetto don’t merit such a harsh description, but most of them couldn’t accurately be described as part of a village—which suggests a clean, ordered space—either.
It’s unlikely an institutional name change will be reflected in the vernacular and most students probably still refer to the area as the Ghetto. Although Tye might say some of the homes average half a million dollars, a lot of them look like they would cost that much to repair.
The neighbourhood could arguably be characterized as having ghetto-like qualities if the term refers to an area inhabited by a specific population; the city seems to have created a double standard where students are at the lower end of Kingston residents. Some students living outside the area’s widening boundaries have reported better recycling collection and snow removal by the city.
In the Ghetto, students’ recycling is often dumped onto their front lawns when it hasn’t been properly sorted, and sidewalks aren’t ploughed in the winter. In a village, both of these issues, among others, would need addressing.
Some landlords haven’t enforced even basic safety and housing standards on their properties.
In that light, the name change could have a positive effect on the city and could prompt landlords to treat Queen’s students like regular residents and improve their living conditions.
But calling the area a village can only do so much to create a positive image of the neighbourhood; the rest must be made up of students’ efforts to keep their lawns clean, pick up broken bottles and treat their neighbours with respect.
Actions speak louder than words and the AMS must treat the name change as merely a first step in improving student housing.
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