A good bit of news lately has touched on the increasingly visible issue of the student ghetto, like this piece on the ghettos in Albany, NY. What is a student ghetto?
It's more or less exactly what it sounds like. In college towns, where students constitute a large enough population relative to the total population, civilian residents generally prefer not to live next to or immediately around students. The reason for this is simple and understandable: student lifestyles typically mean late nights, loud parties, raucous behavior, loud music, irregular waking hours, and other fun things that most non-students would rather not subject themselves or their children to indirectly by living nearby. Once a "student" section of town emerges, other factors contribute toward the deterioration of student neighborhoods and the properties students occupy.
For one, students typically require cheap housing, which gives landlords the opportunity to treat student housing in the same hands-off manner as they might an urban slum. Two, student partying, excessive drinking, and general immaturity contribute to property damage, littering, and abundant housing code violations in student housing sections, making student housing even more slum-like, and the landlords even less likely to enforce code or repair damage year after year, as new students come in and wreck things anew. Three, the partying and code violations attracts police officers, many of whom will have come from an entirely different socioeconomic background than the privileged college students--or at least as much is often presumed by both police and students alike. The combination of all of these things creates, quite literally, a ghetto in the student housing section: low property value, unregulated and neglected destruction of the neighborhood, bad behavior, and an antagonistic relationship between law enforcement and the residents of the student ghetto.
PMB lived in a student ghetto for the better part of 5 years, which was long enough to witness a shocking deterioration of an otherwise fine part of town at the hands of a predominately affluent and intelligent student population. Recalling his experiences in the student ghetto, PMB offers the following suggestions for improving student ghettos, restoring college neighborhoods, and healing town-gown relations:
1) A friendlier approach to policing. Frustrated with rampant drug-dealing on every corner of his district, a station commander in the HBO series The Wire decides to round up all the corner boys and junkies and transport them to one of three sections of town where police will monitor violence, but otherwise turn a blind eye to the drug trade. At first these ghetto zones look disastrous, until community volunteers and public safety workers intervene to pass out clean needles and contraception, and police and volunteers help children organize basketball and boxing groups. Police begin to interact with drug dealers and addicts like human beings, rather than simply going around looking to knock heads.
Because the student ghetto is by definition a self-contained area of student housing, and because students will drink and party regardless of what police do to try and stop them, police would do better to take a friendlier and more realistic approach to policing the student ghetto. Running into and searching every house with a party, often without a complaint call and sometimes in clear violation of constitutional rights, and bashing the heads of drunk and belligerent students has proven widely ineffective. Instead, were police officers to patrol student areas with an eye out for violence, destruction, or brazen violations (public urination, etc.), rather than storming houses, students would likely become more cooperative, and learn to respect their boundaries.
2) Crack down on absentee landlords. When responsible students can't get their landlords to fix basic problems with the house, like a faulty heater or a leaky faucet, students rapidly develop the attitude that because the landlord doesn't care about them or the property, they ought not to bother with keeping it clean and keeping damage to a minimum. The result is usually an accumulation of little damages and a few large ones over the years, all of which go unfixed by the landlord, who lives on the other side of the country and only shows up once a year to collect rent money from the local agency he employs to "look after" his properties in the area. If landlords will live remotely, as they have every right to do, students need better resources and support from both the municipalities and the universities to crack down on landlord violations and slumlord practices. It's a lot easier to trash a property that's long since been in the process of being trashed, and about which nobody seems to care.
3) Affordable university housing. One answer universities have provided to deal with student ghettos is building more university owned and regulated housing for students. The problem: this kind of housing is typically of the revenue-generating mold, meaning they're expensive and aimed at the richest students. Universities then justify the high cost of such accommodations by packing them with amenities like gyms, commercial food courts, expensive cable television plans, and redundant computer labs. Low-income students who might otherwise live in university accommodation end up saving hundreds of dollars per month in rent by living in the student ghetto. The price disparity between university housing and private housing in the ghetto diffuses any sense of competition for the business of large groups of students, which means that university housing can continue to be overpriced (taking money from rich students who can pay) and ghetto landlords continue without any pressure to make their properties more attractive to students by cleaning them up.
4) Enforce basic housing code policies during the day. Rather than tussling with drunk students at night, send police vans around during the day. If houses have indoor couches on the porches and on the roofs, remove them. If a student's front lawn is strewn with beer cans so thick you have to kick them away to reach the front door, fine the house. If the residents ignore the fines, arrest them and bring them to court. Few students will take resistance far enough to get cuffed and dragged out of their house unexpectedly during a game of Madden.
5) Don't conspire with the university. Work with it. In PMB's student ghetto, a common police trick went as follows: university police, who had no jurisdiction outside of university property, would ride by off-campus houses in the student ghetto and hear parties. Since they had no jurisdiction, they would phone in a fake noise complaint to the municipal police who did have jurisdiction, so the municipal police could come in and bash heads. Once students were cited with municipal violations, and punished accordingly by the municipality, that information was shared with the university. The university would then level a second punishment, effectively doubling-up the punishment for what was a non-violation in the first place.
Instead of practicing these kinds of bullying tactics, universities and municipalities should get together and determine in what ways the university can compel (or require) students to complete community projects as part of their studies. PMB was fortunate enough to partake of one such project, a work-study internship with the local (you might have guessed it) housing code administrator. Learning about the inner workings of community building and community policing can be illuminating experiences for students, who too often fail to grasp the notion that they live in a community beyond that of the university.
