Quote:
Originally posted by 33girl
If you move into a college town, next to student housing, and start complaining, you're an a-hole. No argument there.
But if the college has grown over the years and kind of "taken over" the town and the people who have lived there forever - I mean in houses their family has owned for generations - I can see where the residents have some sort of complaint. The point is, the college should have a plan for growth and expansion and work with the town. Too many colleges overadmit and don't have room in the dorms, so even if the students don't WANT to live off campus they have to.
Or if the college buys up land in the town, it goes off the tax rolls, and that makes things even worse on the townspeople - so even if the students are angels, there's some natural antipathy there. Clarion's definitely dealing with this and I'd bet the other state schools here are too.
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That's what's going on at SDSU. There's a HUGE campus redevelopment program that includes a trolley station, numerous new apartment buildings, frat row, hotel, etc, much like the UCLA Westwood Village.
My theory is that in the early 90s, when the Greek system here was at it's strongest, greek parties were greek only. When that stopped, a bunch of new risk management problems arose (more than before), and the school decided to stop working with us and started imposing gastapo-like restrictions on us. The parties then spread out around the school because frat houses weren't THE place to party at anymore. I also think this is a HUGE reason membership is down; people know they don't have to be greek to get into a party, so they figure "why bother when they'll let me in for the fun stuff?"
So, now it's spilt so far that we've lost the community's support, and now they're becoming more harsh every year. I understand where they're coming from of course, but I think the greeks are more responsible about it. The ones who always cause trouble are military and other non-SDSU students who are also allowed in.
I just think they should stop pointing the finger just at us and look at who really wants to act rowdy around here. We want to party, but we know we don't to lose our charter.