Picking on Students
I read with interest the article on “mini-dorms” and college area housing (“City Seeks to Say a House Is Not a Dorm,” Nov. 5), describing a pattern of police harassment and financial penalties enacted against students that would be sharply criticized if launched against any other group. Shrewdly, local politicians realize that picking on relatively powerless, impoverished students in order to protect the “rights” of property owners is not only a safe approach to this situation, but a politically advantageous one as well. Property owners often vote, students rarely do so.
I am no longer a student, though I was one for several years as I completed both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at San Diego State University. Now, even with these degrees, I am not earning enough money to rent a comfortable apartment in a “decent” neighborhood, let alone enough to buy a house.
Furthermore, having lived in the College Area for three years, surrounded by the aforementioned “mini-dorms” and fraternity houses, I know first-hand of the noise, parking congestion, and home-life disruptions that exist in that area. However, addressing these symptoms is not the way to cure the ailment, which goes much deeper than “poor” college students who can’t afford “decent” housing. The fact is, relatively few people in San Diego can afford to buy any housing, and the rate of homelessness continues to rise, both here and nationwide.
I am part of a rare breed--born and raised in San Diego--and I have seen the value of the house my family lived in when I was born escalate from less than $10,000 to well over $100,000. I believe the sort of values at work in the housing market in this city are not only heartless, but blind to the day-to-day realities of people who live well below the $40,000-$100,000 annual earning range that it takes to purchase or rent a decent home.
In light of this, perhaps the next time a loud student party interrupts a 10 p.m. television show for one of these College Area homeowners, they could switch off their TV and consider (before calling the police) what they may have lost in terms of their compassion, even as they remain safely ensconced in outrageously priced piles of lumber and plastic.
After 11 p.m., police should be called in, but only to enforce the same rules that are applied to hosts of parties in La Jolla or Point Loma. A basic tenet of our Constitution is that selective enforcement of any law is to be assiduously avoided, despite the hue and cry of the more privileged.
And, as for legislation aimed specifically at this marginally disenfranchised group, surely there is a “kinder, gentler” way to deal with people who are in an untenable housing situation not by choice, but by circumstance. So long as San Diego State remains a commuter school, funding will be directed at parking lots, not student housing, and so the difficulties continue. Wherever the answer may lie, surely it will not be found in the type of persecution described in your insightful article.
L. R. SALDANA
San Diego
