Opinion: The Infrastructure of Trust: Why Amherst’s Future Relies on More Than Pipes and Permits

Social Injustice Goes Global

Amherst runs on two timelines.

In one, the Town Manager’s report sounds like an operations log: pipes replaced, roads repaved, permits approved, directors hired. Infrastructure hums along, the machine keeps turning. There’s even a touch of gratitude for the Town Council’s “aspirational vision” — the polite nod you give someone for dreaming while you’re stuck managing emergencies.

In the other timeline — the one on the Council’s 2025 goals list — Amherst looks like a blueprint for a better world. Climate action. Social justice. Affordable housing. Words that sparkle like a promise. The Council doesn’t talk about maintaining; it talks about transforming basically imagines a town where inclusion is policy, not poetry.

But between those two Amhersts, the pragmatic and the idealistic, is a widening gap you can drive a moving truck through.

A Town Between Maintenance and Meaning
Town Manager Paul Bockelman’s latest evaluation reads like a case study in crisis triage. Staff turnover. Rising health costs. Construction delays. He praises “leadership stability” a euphemism for surviving a year of putting out fires while juggling department head vacancies.

To be fair, things got done. The Jones Library expansion broke ground. The Fort River School moved ahead. The Historic North Common is now walkable and ADA-compliant. The Centennial Water Treatment Facility is operational and even the roads got their overdue facelift.

But these wins live in the language of asphalt and budgets, not people. Meanwhile, residents are asking a different question: Who is Amherst really for?

The Politics of Affordability
A mile from Town Hall, two young advocates at the Amherst Farmers Market stand between jars of honey and stacks of arepas collecting signatures for a 5% rent cap initiative. Their advocacy site, KeepMassHome.com, doubles as both policy explainer and digital art project. It’s where data meets desperation — part grassroots, part graphic design, all urgency.

Their math is simple: if you earn $20 an hour and pay $2,200 for rent, you’re working 110 hours a month just to keep a roof over your head — before taxes, groceries, or student loans.

That’s not sustainable and not even survivable.

The statewide 5% rent cap petition aims to fix that — modestly. But under Massachusetts law, Amherst can’t pass its own rent control. The state banned local rent caps in 1994 after a wave of landlord lobbying. The only legal path forward now runs through Beacon Hill.

Even with the Community Investment Tax Credit (CITC) — which returns 50% of ACLT housing donations as cash back from the state, affordability feels like a privilege, not a policy. The Amherst Community Land Trust (ACLT) has already leveraged $150,000 in CITC to secure $300,000 in community donations but that’s a drop in the bucket when the average one-bedroom apartment costs $1,824 in monthly rent.

Leadership at a Crossroads
The 2025 Town Council goals include six priorities: climate action, social justice, economic vitality, infrastructure, leadership, and community health. On paper, they’re progressive masterpieces. In practice, they’ll collide headfirst with fiscal limits, slow construction, and state preemption.

Councillors Pamela Rooney, Jennifer Taub, and Ellisha Walker have voiced strong support for sustainable housing and equity, while Andy Churchill, running at-large, pushes for pragmatic growth and accountability. Maura Keene, another voice in local politics, stresses balancing “university impact with livability.” It’s a polite way of saying: UMass keeps expanding while the town foots the rent crisis.

Meanwhile, residents like Kathy Schoen have publicly argued that new downtown luxury projects should pause until UMass builds enough student housing — a move echoing how Princeton decentralized its off-campus rental market to reduce landlord speculation. Her stance resonates with a town growing weary of “market-rate” projects that feel anything but.

The Millennial Divide
For millennials and Gen Z residents, the tension isn’t just ideological personal geography. They did everything right: studied, worked, borrowed, believed. Yet the reward is a childhood bedroom, not a mortgage asically “staying local”; the parents call it “coming home.”

The American Dream has quietly been replaced by a Massachusetts compromise: live near where you work, if you can; live with your parents, if you can’t.

Every signature on that rent-cap clipboard at the Farmers Market is more than policy support is a small act of rebellion against the idea that housing should be a speculative game. Amherst has 40,000 residents, 13,000 of whom live here year-round, and a swelling rental base of students, service workers, and displaced families. The ratio says it all: belonging here is increasingly for those who can pay to stay.

Rebuilding Trust
This fall, Amherst voters face a choice larger than one election cycle. Do we double down on cautious management — the pipes, permits, and polished reports — or do we finally invest in the infrastructure of trust: housing stability, transparent leadership, and shared accountability from Beacon Hill to UMass?

Progress doesn’t have to mean chaos but caution shouldn’t mean paralysis.

If Amherst truly wants to honor its reputation as a “People’s Republic” of progressive ideals, it has to prove it — not through slogans, but through roofs, rent relief, and policies that make staying here possible for the next generation.

Because right now, the streets may be freshly paved but the path to belonging is still full of potholes.

Rizwana Khan is a writer, educator, and human rights advocate in the Town of Amherst.