University District, Kingston

The Kingston Student Ghetto is a residential area surrounding Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada that is inhabited mostly by students of that school. The ghetto’s borders are not clearly defined, but it generally includes homes within a twenty-minute walk of campus, especially along the north/south running University Avenue. Because the ghetto has a very large student population, the area is known for being loud and active on weekend nights, and close to empty over holidays and during the summer months. The student ghetto is especially infamous for its street parties; the best known of these being the annual Aberdeen (Street) homecoming party.

The area is not truly a ghetto, but is so called because of the low quality of several houses in it. Negligent landlords have not cared properly for many of the houses, and many of the structures are very old. Most houses are owned by private individuals and are rented to groups of four to twelve students on yearly bases; many landlords live in either Toronto or Montréal and have a reputation for taking a long time to respond to complaints. Other houses are owned as part of a group by ether a local citizen, a co-op, or the university itself.

The student housing area in Kingston is quite large relative to those in comparable university towns; an overwhelming majority of undergraduate students above first year live either in the ghetto itself or on its outskirts. There are numerous reasons for this:

• Queen’s University only has enough undergraduate residences for a small number of students after first year. This may change in upcoming years, as extra spaces were created to accommodate the one-time surge in enrolment due to Ontario’s double cohort year.
• The level of roads, public transit system, and on-campus parking in the city make it impractical for thousands of students to commute every day.
• The city of Kingston limits developers’ ability to build large apartment buildings near the city’s core; there is currently only one building that noticeably stands above the city’s skyline, which was constructed before the bylaw took effect.
• The AMS, Queen's University's undergraduate student government, does not allow Queen's students to be members of a fraternity or sorority, so the lodging commonly provided by frat houses in the United States is non-existent within Kingston's core.