Students that live in neighborhoods that surround campus don’t always realize their next-door neighbors may be a family.

Sometimes students and these families living in the same neighborhood can disagree and clash over issues and cause a rift in these communities.

Neighborhood associations in these areas don’t want to push students away from them, said Barbara Pleasants, current president of the South Campus Area Neighborhood Association (SCAN).

“We’re not anti-rental or anti-student, but it changes the nature of a neighborhood when a large portion of homes are occupied by people who come and go every year,” Pleasants said.

Pleasants said they want stability.

The Iowa Legislature passed a law last spring that rescinded an Ames ordinance that keeps more than three unrelated people from living in a house together, which had been in effect for years. So the City Council has been trying to figure out how to regulate student housing.

For Pleasants, this is not good news.

“When enforced, [the ordinance] was good. There are other problems that caused issues, but the occupancy ordinance helped us,” Pleasants said. “I don’t think anyone complained about the ordinance itself.”

Pleasants saw one of these other problems with the ordinance being the enforcement, or lack thereof.

“Enforcement is based on complaint. So nobody was going around checking who was in a house, it was up to neighbors to report violations,” Pleasants said.

Pleasants said she hasn’t seen the ordinance as properly enforced.

“The ordinance itself was about the best one could have though — it is very common all over the country in college towns because it works,” Pleasants said.

Pleasants hopes the city and the university will work together to solve some of these problems.

The South Campus neighborhood has seen a large shift away from family-centered houses, Pleasants said. Fern Kupfer, who founded SCAN, agrees.

Kupfer said she is also worried about what such a shift might have on affordable housing in the neighborhood.

“Preserving neighborhood integrity and keeping housing affordable is what we need to focus on,” Kupfer said. “It hurts the community when you basically have college slums.”

Kupfer moved out of the neighborhood due to how much she saw it changed. Pleasants, however, has stayed for the last 34 years. She said she doesn’t want to leave, and neither do any of the families there.

If they’re going to stay, Pleasants said they need to find “creative solutions” to resolve the issues of a new ordinance to find something that works for everyone in the neighborhood.

Kupfer agreed, but still sees students as a large problem beyond just the occupancy ordinances.

“If you’re a homeowner, you don’t want to be in a neighborhood… [where you are] surrounded by students who are always partying,” Kupfer said.