The city of Binghamton’s Commission on Housing and Home Ownership recommended turning parts of Binghamton’s West Side into a “college town” and limiting unrelated tenants to just three per home in the R-1 zone last week.

The Commission, which has been scrutinized closely by the student community since it began its work one year ago, envisions an area of period lighting and banners supporting school spirit in small businesses-like cafes and bistros in an approximate six-block area bound on the west by Chestnut Street, on the south by Leroy Street, on the east by Oak Street and on the north by Seminary Avenue.

“The majority of students, young professionals, they head to Ithaca on the weekends,” said Commission chair Alycia Harris, who works for the Binghamton Housing Authority. “Wouldn’t it be great if they stayed in Binghamton? That’s what we’re striving for.”

The Commission is one of four organized by Mayor Matt Ryan’s office to examine city finances. It includes representatives from Off Campus College, local landlords and developers, but no students. It released a 65-page report Wednesday on how to increase home ownership and how to improve the quality of life in city neighborhoods.

The proposed student area, technically called an overlay district, would be a part of an R-2 zone, one of three residential zoning districts in the city. R-1 is a single-unit, low density area; R-2 is a mixture of one- and two-unit dwellings with low to moderate population density; R-3 is a multi-unit dwelling district that allows for moderate to high population density.

According to the report, most Binghamton University students are concentrated on Binghamton’s West Side in the areas bound by the proposed overlay district.

Part of what led to the commission’s creation was an incident on Lincoln Avenue last spring, where BU students were living in an R-1 district and had disturbed neighbors to the point that they complained to the city. The students and their landlord were found to be in violation of a clause in the city’s Zoning Code that is applicable to all three R-zoning districts that states residents in those zones must be a “functional and factual family equivalent.”

The process for enforcing that rule, as it stands now, is complaint-driven. Now the Commission recommends a rental registration program to cap R-1 homes to three unrelated tenants. R-2 and R-3 zones would not be changed from the current complaint-driven process.

Exceptions include waivers to ease the transition as well as grandfather clauses, according to the report.

The overlay district would fill the demand for students who want to live in groups larger than three or four.

Most recommendations in the report must be passed by City Council before they can be enforced. Commission members said they did not expect all recommendations to be adopted and that some would likely get altered before being passed into law.

Dave Husch, director of Off Campus College, sits on the commission as the primary liaison to BU’s community. There were about nine permanent members on the commission.

“I’ve been around here 13 years, and [Lincoln Avenue] is not the only case I’ve dealt with. I’ve seen a lot of them over the years,” Husch said. “While it will be somewhat inconvenient for the students, balance kind of seems to be the key phrase. If this was easy we would have been doing this last September instead of going through an entire year of debating, and there was a lot of debate specifically over this topic.”

A council between local homeowners and BU students would be developed as part of the proposal. The overlay district is considered a pilot program, Husch said, and could be expanded to areas where other student housing exists, such as north of Main Street.

Students said they felt they were being singled out by the Commission’s work in a forum with Mayor Matt Ryan on campus on March 9. There was also concern over one Commission member’s involvement with a local real estate development group that is planning a new student housing complex Downtown.

The voices of not only BU, but everyone were taken equally into consideration, Harris said. The Commission gauged general public feeling with a forum at City Hall in December.

“We really listened to the concerns of individuals and we tried to address it so that everybody was a stakeholder; everybody had a part in this final report,” she said.