COLLEGE LIFE- Housing Part 1: Whiney, scared baby-boomers

First real post! Yay for me! Despite the topics I outlined in my introduction, I’m going to talk about something completely different. On the agenda for tonight: Housing.
Now, I’m not going to write about low-income housing, gentrification, homelessness, or anything of that nature. No, there’s enough of that sort of thing around already and, to be perfectly honest, I really have no interest in it. What I’m going to write about in this post is an housing issue of far greater significance to myself and many of my associates. I am going to write about student housing.

 
I go to Northwestern University, which has been the site of some controversy in the past year in regards to Evanston’s “Brothel Law,” a city ordinance that prohibits the cohabitation of more than three unrelated persons in a single domicile. While this probably seems like a reasonable, if odd, rule to an outside observer, it’s a bit of a problem for us students. Often, groups of students will band together to pay for the use of a house or large apartment unit, actions that would violate this “Brothel Law.” Still, the problem isn’t so much that you can’t have more than three students living together, but rather that the law is suddenly being enforced.

 
The message that this sends is that we, the students of Northwestern, are not wanted in Evanston. We have gotten something of a bad reputation in Evanston because of the hordes of students that can be found stumbling about drunkenly on most any night, but that’s not the entire reason for this animosity toward students. Complaints stream in, typically from landlords living out in the suburban wastes who care for nothing but high property values, claiming a fear of the development of “student slums.”

 
There are a few problems with the fears of these whiney little baby-boomers. For one thing, the drunkards who they seem to despise so much aren’t really a product of students living off campus. While I was living in Bobb Hall, the building would routinely empty, most of its denizens flocking to frat parties and bars. I’ve got plenty of gripes with fraternities, but those are gripes for another post on another day. The point is, students living ON campus are getting drunk, and when they’re doing it in Evanston, it’s usually because they’ve been going to shady bars that don’t do a good job checking IDs. If you’re going to whine about “the epidemic of underage binge drinking” (as I heard one blustery fifty-something cry at a public lecture at the Evanston Public Library), why are you bothering with apartments? First thing’s first, you should storm down to Grove and Elmwood and shut down the Keg if that’s what you’re worried about.

 
Then, we have this fear of “student slums.” Oh no! Poorly maintained and built apartments are going to appear to accommodate students! They’ll lower the property values! Let’s all piss our middle-aged pants! Of course apartment buildings are going to be poorly maintained if the owners don’t maintain them, and they’re going to be poorly built if the owners are shoddy businesspeople, but the people who are doing all this whining ARE the landlords! That’s like me refusing to write a paper on the grounds that I don’t think I’ll write it well. Besides, we already have crappy buildings for students to be packed into. They’re called dorms.