Boston College administrators and city officials met with Allston and Brighton residents Thursday night to discuss problems that students who live off-campus primarily from Boston University or BC pose to the Boston residential community.
In an effort to protect both off-campus students and landlords, Mayor Thomas Menino is exploring a safety initiative for off-campus student housing, according to Paul Holloway, his liaison to Allston-Brighton.
The initiative would make students and largely absentee landlords accountable for the condition of off-campus housing, encouraging respect for their apartment buildings and, indirectly, for their neighbors. Police officers would be able to ticket irresponsible landlords as well as destructive tenants under the initiative. John Dorsey, the assistant commissioner of the Inspectional Services Department, likened the tickets to parking or trash tickets.
Dorsey said police ‘ride-arounds,’ which are most common in the first and last five to six weeks of the school year, have helped decrease crime in Allston-Brighton by 12 percent in the last year. He said the mayor’s initiative, which calls for prosecuting landlords and reporting problem residences, would further reduce crime in the area.
Currently, the ISD has a 20-page list of problem residences, most of which are inhabited by students. These addresses include 28 Ashford St., 67 Chester St., 14 Sutherland St. and 50 Gardner St. The list includes descriptions of the residences, complaints issued and violations by residents or landlords.
The ISD plans to ‘keep track of reoccurring problems and prosecute for public nuisances,’ Dorsey said.
But officers do not have the right to ticket students merely for partying, even if they are too loud for their neighbors’ taste, he said.
‘A party house does not mean we can write it up,’ Dorsey said. ‘There must be legal violations’ in order to ticket anybody.
The ISD also has compiled a list of ‘undesirable landlords’ who do not keep their apartments up to code. While the list is not being published for legal reasons, individual colleges can request a copy of it.
Bill Mills, BC’s director of community affairs, said shouldering landlords with more responsibility will play a huge part in improving off-campus students’ relationships with the Allston-Brighton community.
‘It’s been kind of a missing piece, working with the landlords,’ Mills said.
He likened neglectful landlords to bartenders who persistently serve alcohol to underage students, and added that many students move off-campus unaware of their options. The dean’s office of any school, he said, can help students find appropriate off-campus housing as well as a reliable alternative to flyers advertising apartments along Commonwealth Avenue.
Allston-Brighton residents, however, said they feel ‘universities are abrogating responsibility to the community.’
Brighton resident Barry Myer, 35, urged city officials to deny universities building permits until their students act both legally and respectfully.
Meanwhile, Mills talked with other residents about how to discourage students from moving off-campus. He said both BU and BC were building new dormitories as well as developing housing for graduate students, and that BU planned to be housing 93 percent of its undergraduate students by 2011.
He added that both BC and BU have had capped undergraduate enrollment for more then a decade, which helps to keep the student body population at a manageable level as their housing opportunities grow.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
