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Five things UB could (and should) do in regard to the Heights

Published: Thursday, March 7, 2013

Updated: Thursday, March 7, 2013 21:03

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Spectrum File Photo


“You’re in charge of your own safety.”

That’s one of the main points on UB’s Off-Campus Student services page and the highlight of the last few weeks of our nearly one-sided conversation.

In other words, as Vice President for University Life and Services Dennis Black so encouragingly puts it, “We’re not in the protection business.”

Several articles, editorials and interviews later, The Spectrum’s question remains the same: Should UB take responsibility for the University Heights? And so does the answer:

Yes.

The higher-ups clearly disagree, but if UB shouldn’t take responsibility and the Heights aren’t really a problem, then why have our inboxes been flooded with messages that say otherwise?

So to help them out and save them yet another public relations strategy meeting, here are five things The Spectrum feels could – no, need to – be done on the topic of the Heights.

1. Acknowledge there is a problem

When we asked President Satish Tripathi last week to respond to the aforementioned question, hisanswer was one of little substance. Despite all the underlined and accented implications of unit, there is nothing in its contents that instills confidence in UB’s students – off campus or on – that they will be safe. No promises, no suggestions – just, as one commenter said, “a lot of pretty words.” And that unity only exists in writing. Otherwise, we would not be having this conversation. There would be no talking of rising crime rates or of South Campus falling behind North Campus if we were all in this together.

Consider this UB’s intervention. The first step is admitting you have a problem. It takes credit for the good and pushes the bad into the “deal with later” pile. Except it never actually gets dealt with. Not once have the students heard anything that resembles responsibility, nor do they feel like the university is even interested in what they have to say. Instead, it finds the easiest possible way out of the situation: blame games and carefully worded letters that say “we’ll take care of it, don’t worry about it” rather than “this is what we’re going to do to take care of it.”

Because of that, the student residents get the blame for what is done and not done in the neighborhood. Part of UB’s plan for safety is to help students realize what they’re doing wrong. They’re told to keep their porch lights on and be hospitable and warm to their neighbors and are given brochures on how to be a better person. They’re told if they don’t feel safe in the Heights but need a cheap option, they should go live in other neighborhoods like Allentown, even if accessibility and transportation is not available to them. They’re told the Heights aren’t that bad by people who are only there for a couple of hours on the weekend. What they’re not told is how the school will help them if they need it.

“The problem is that nobody takes ownership for the students in the University Heights. The university doesn’t, the community does to some extent, as long as they’re well-behaving,” said Fred Brace, University District Housing Court liaison and Heights resident of 25 years. “For some, it’s a priority for the police because they consider it to be just kids acting up and they’re stupid walking around at 1 o’clock in the morning. You blame the victim is what it basically boils down to.”

UB even blames the students on its University Heights FAQ, citing vandalism and other “nuisance crimes” and referring to more serious incidents as rare – if your definition of rare equates to over 500 crimes of homicide, assault, rape, larceny, robbery, burglary and vehicle theft recorded last year. And Black told The Spectrum he thinks most crimes in the Heights are student-on-student, which is just untrue.

2. Own up to its size

 In case you haven’t noticed during your morning cram into a Stampede bus to the Student Union, UB is not a small school. However, it’s noticeable by their actions – or lack thereof – our higher-ups believe the opposite. The Heights FAQ addresses this when mentioning why it doesn’t buy properties in the Heights: “UB simply doesn’t possess the resources needed to purchase large numbers of private residences and then provide the services required for this type of student housing.”

Most likely untrue, especially when we’re paying our president more than we’ve spent on the Heights. UB has spent approximately $150,000 in the Heights on things like security cameras, doorhangers and police patrols on peak weekends. University of Pennsylvania, a slightly smaller school but with admittedly bigger pockets, has spent $185.7 million on its off-campus residences. Canisius has also made efforts in its surrounding neighborhoods.

Unfortunately for UB, nobody believes for a second that this is too big of a deal for it to handle, especially when it’s shoveling students’ money into expansion programs and upgrades elsewhere.

3. Give University Police joint jurisdiction in the Heights

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2 comments

Anonymous
Fri Mar 8 2013 23:32
Parkside, Central Park, Delaware, Museum, and Elmwood Districts, ALL of which are safe and have excellent housing options. There is also the option of living on either campus and enjoying the security and protection of the university's police force, blue light emergency phones, safety escorts, security cameras, etc.

While living off campus may be cheaper, you get what you pay for, and when it comes to a better sense of personal safety, it's a tradeoff. Common sense says that if students refuse to rent poorly maintained homes in the Heights, the owners of those structures will have no choice but to eventually clean up their acts in order for prospective renters to sign contracts. When that happens, the neighborhood improves.
Bottom line, if you don't like what they're selling, don't buy it. It's not rocket science to figure out that spending a bit more to live on campus (either North or South), or a different neighborhood, gets you a safer environment.

Students also need to check their behavior. By partying the timbers off of a house for frat parties or what have you, landlords have little incentive to maintain their properties, only to have them abused or destroyed repeatedly. Piling 150 people into a house, spilling beer on hardwood floors, damaging the structure in myriad ways, creates a disincentive for landlords to repeatedly make expensive repairs. And thus, a student ghetto is born, and it feeds upon itself. You can't have a student ghetto without students. And who is to say which is the chicken and which is the egg? It doesn't matter anymore, because it has become a vicious cycle. Students are irresponsible; landlords are resentful; rinse and repeat.

Ultimately, the university bears no responsibility for a student who chooses to live off campus. If you argue that it does, then you could also argue that it bears responsibility for a student who chooses to live near the Buffalo Zoo, three miles away. Where do you intend to draw that line? One block from campus? Two blocks? Twelve? West, but not east? Dennis Black is absolutely correct--the school is not in the protection business. If anything, university resources should be devoted to constructing new student housing on the south campus. A high rise similar to Goodyear and Clement, using a small footprint given the more compact campus, could be constructed on the Bailey side of Clark Hall, where the former football stadium was. This would give those who feel they must reside near south more options, that are safer. Such a building could easily house 1,000 students. Those non-student, families who reside in the Heights may just be relieved to get their neighborhoods back. Let's face it, households of 19 year old groups can get pretty old.

A neighborhood can revive itself in any number of ways. It is up to the businesses and homeowners of the Heights to carry that banner, along with some activism and municipal law enforcement. The university can be a party to it in the sense that they keep their students accurately informed and reach out to the neighborhood in a supportive manner, but they are in no way responsible for funding its renaissance, to the detriment of its educational mission.

Last, the degree of sensationalism The Spectrum regularly employs in its reporting has gotten old. Your seeming need to exaggerate, or to sometimes "create" a story where none really exists, is a transparent effort to manufacture a titillating angle or scoop. It is a sophomoric, self-important tactic to get attention or readership, which is unsurprisingly low.

Anonymous
Fri Mar 8 2013 23:20
As a parent/alum who has two kids at UB, one whose classes are primarily at South (who lives on the south campus), and one whose classes are primarily at North, I couldn't disagree more with your assertion that the university's purchase of homes in the Heights makes sense. Certainly, everyone wants a safe neighborhood to surround the south campus, but the university exists to educate students, not to acquire hundreds of poorly-maintained houses in various states of disrepair in the sprawling University Heights neighborhood. The writer is truly uninformed regarding the extreme costs involved in such an undertaking. Individual houses are the least efficient--and the most expensive-- way to provide student housing, and each house has its own set of mechanical or structural problems that are the result of homeowner negligence. As a result, each would be its own money pit of aging housing stock. And no, cheap student rents do not easily cover a $20,000 roof, or a $7,000 furnace, for example. If UB poured endless resources into such an endeavor, programming at the school would certainly suffer. No thanks.As a precedent, the writer cites UPenn and Canisius. These comparisons are completely ridiculous. It's high time The Spectrum rose from the ashes of rag status and did some real investigative journalism as opposed to writing things that are poorly researched, and therefore a waste of time to read. Simply put, UPenn's endowment is 7 BILLION dollars. UB's endowment is $510 million. Enough said.As for Canisius, even the slightest bit of research would have revealed that Canisius is a mere fraction of UB's size both in terms of student population and its physical plant. It is completely landlocked and has outgrown its campus. Their acquisition of a handful of homes (NOT hundreds, as you suggest UB should do) immediately adjacent to campus were primarily about satisfying Canisius' student demand for housing either on or immediately adjacent to campus, AND about controlling the fate of the real estate (the actual land) on the campus' border. Canisius also has a history of acquiring adjacent structures (a church, elementary school, rectory, former Sears store, public parking ramp, the former high school across the street, etc.). They have done this to avoid building new structures, opting instead to renovate and re-purpose these structures for the school's use, for everything from a performing center to their health sciences department to their art department. They had no choice but to acquire parts of the surrounding neighborhood structures if they wanted to grow. The adjacent houses you cite are no exception, as they had no further land upon which to build a dorm. Further, your comparison is faulty because Canisius is hemmed in by an expressway to the north and east, and a massive, wrought-iron-fenced cemetery (Forest Lawn) to the west. While it's certainly still possible, there is little of an unsavory nature that will encroach upon the campus. In contrast, there is really no end to UB's vast surrounding area of the south campus in every geographic direction. As such, problems can find their way to the campus' surrounding neighborhood from multiple directions. Try as you might, it is utterly unrealistic to believe that the campus' surroundings can be completely controlled. The university should absolutely not devote an enormous amount of capital to such an undertaking. If, for example, UB could buy the houses on streets 1 and 2 as some kind of buffer, there will still be problems on streets 3 and 4. Just how wide of a radius do you propose? Blocks? The entire neighborhood? Miles? Where does it end? The writer makes no effort to explain how university ownership of off-campus housing would magically make a difference. Whether owned by UB or individual landlords, the fabric of the neighborhood is still the same. The negative forces that sometimes find their way to the area are unchanged. An unsavory type bent on doing crime isn't going to stop at an imaginary line drawn by titles to houses that are held by UB. The writer also ignores the liabilities that the university would assume if owning random houses throughout the neighborhood, off campus. A student gets hurt somehow on Lisbon Avenue, a lawsuit is brought seeking damages, the university is financially exposed, and a trend begins. I don't wish to see my university mired in litigation over such matters. Yes, they are in the business of also housing and feeding the students they educate. They do it well, and safely, on campus, on their own turf. That isn't a bad thing.The writer glosses over and weakly attempts to discredit the suggestion that students who feel unsafe in University Heights could choose to live elsewhere. This is, in fact, an excellent option. If a student lacks a car, UB's free shuttles, including the Blue Line that runs a continuous loop downtown, the subway, and the metro bus can be used to reach neighborhoods in the Allentown,...




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