Sir - You report (May 16) that councillors rejected a bid to build accommodation for 125 students on the Cowley Road, although council officers had recommended the plan.

This is comforting evidence that local councillors are listening to their constituents. East Oxford has suffered from the inappropriate expansion of Oxford Brookes University in a residential area, which is now at such an extreme as to imbalance the population and the local facilities. The Cowley Road has lost most of its shops to fast-food outlets to service the large student population; many family houses have gone into multiple occupation because of the demand from students leading to higher rents. Such a dense occupation of students also leads to problems with noise in residential areas and it worsens the parking and traffic situation.

Elsewhere, smaller houses in the neighbourhood of Oxford Brookes University have been turned into letting units and so removed from the stock of houses available to young families. Any spare land in the neighbour of Marston, Headington and East Oxford immediately receives attention as possible student accommodation, despite the need for green space and the needs of the young and the elderly, who are ignored in the rush to service the expanding population of Oxford Brookes students. This distortion has to stop to enable the residential nature of the area to recover. The housing stock has deteriorated through the increase in the number of let properties, shops have been lost, and more cars are brought into the area. The community's needs have been displaced by students' needs. It is time for planning applications involving student expansion to be rejected, so that the long-term health of a balanced community in East Oxford has been prejudiced.

Kerry Patterson, Oxford