Since I’ve been back on campus this semester, I’ve heard and read a lot about the off-campus housing situation here at Northeastern. It seems like every time I pick up this paper there’s another article about students being bad neighbors on Mission Hill or the pros and cons of living on campus as opposed to off.
These issues pop up every fall and we, once again, are wasting our energy trying to ameliorate the problems.
How can we lower the cost of living? Why doesn’t my landlord answer my phone calls? How can we stop the students from getting drunk and urinating off their porches?
It’s simply too much pontification over issues that don’t deserve them.
First of all, we all understand that living off campus is different than living on campus. It’s a choice students make after assessing their redundant situations and figuring out which option is best for them. There are cons to both, but the focus always seems to be on the costs of off-campus housing.
You can complain all you want about the high cost of living – and it is high – but you know what the landlords and management companies are going to do about it? Nothing. We have to live somewhere and they know that, so it doesn’t matter if Alpha Management raises the price of a studio on Hemenway Street to $3,000 – someone’s going to live there.
We know that some landlords couldn’t care less if there’s a small family of raccoons living under your bed. But maybe that’s a sacrifice you’re willing to make if it means not having to sign that random girl into your dorm at 2 a.m. when you’re 12 beers deep and just trying to smash.
The more important issues surrounding off-campus housing have to do with community respect. Whenever you’re dealing with college students, the norm of community respect will be different than any other age group. The college lifestyle is not a traditional lifestyle. When you have an urban campus like Northeastern’s, you put college students and their lifestyle right next to families and their lifestyle.
Administrators can urge students to be more respectful of their neighbors and community all they want, and hey, maybe some of them will be. But college students are going to be college students and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. It’s not a symptom of Northeastern or Boston or Mission Hill; rather, it’s a symptom of 18- 23-year-olds living in their own apartments with all their friends, away from parents and any overbearing authority, and doing what 18- 23-year-olds do.
And nobody is saying that destructive, drunken behavior should go unpunished, just like nobody is saying that it should go unrewarded if it’s really, really funny, like pushing your friend into a bunch of full trash cans.
Of course students are going to get arrested and cited for doing dumb stuff, and this will deter them from doing it in the future. At the same time, if you think that this sort of behavior will stop under any circumstances, save for the complete implosion of higher education, then all I can give you is a copy of “Animal House” and my pity, because you’re an idiot.
Bottom line, off-campus housing is an imperfect situation. College students and families aren’t going to mix. And yes, we should try to respect the community, but there are always going to be noise complaints and fights and broken beer bottles in the streets. You just can’t stop it, the same way you can’t stop Long Island girls from saying “coffee” funny.
The sooner we can stop acting like this is the first time a college neighborhood has ever experienced these problems, the sooner we can get back to talking about the real issues, like why they give us toilet paper to dry our hands with instead of paper towels in the Marino Center locker rooms.
– Justin MacGrego is a senior
business management major.
