No moral regard for students, residents in Lower Doon

Re: ‘Not in my backyard’ sometimes means ‘Please don’t wreck my home’ — April 21

As a homeowner in Lower Doon this editorial made a lot of sense to me. The only thing that made no sense is that the current dispute over new student housing development in Kitchener’s Old Lower Doon neighbourhood was not mentioned.

Old Lower Doon — the historic epicentre of Waterloo Region — is and has been under serious hostile fire from student landlords and developers for years. Homeowners in Lower Doon are “far from being aggressors and are only playing defence” just as the editorial said. The outnumbered permanent residents down here are not playing NIMBY. We don’t dislike the students. They are generally nice kids, and we know they need a place to live, but too many of them is just plain too many.

Shouldn’t we get some support to help maintain some sense of this historic and formerly diverse community? Many of the landlord/developers appear to have no moral regard whatsoever for the actual welfare of the students other than as a lucrative source of monthly income; or for the permanent residents of Lower Doon whose lifestyle has been decimated. This should be a national historic site (along with Upper Doon) and not turned into a student ghetto.

Lower Doon consists of eight short streets on less than a square kilometre of land right beside the Grand River, designated as a Canadian Heritage River in 1994. How many Waterloo Region residents know that Old Lower Doon is really the start of human habitation in Waterloo Region and needs to be protected? Apparently not enough.

How can this be happening in the area that was home to Indigenous Haudenosaunee peoples for centuries before contact with European settlers? How can this be happening where the original Mennonite founders of Waterloo Region first arrived around 1803? Or where lowland Scots from the Ayrshire area of Scotland arrived about 1830 and founded the community of Doon named after the River Doon in their homeland? Does none of this matter to anybody but us?

Mary Cunningham

Kitchener