Section A · Page 8
The University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, October 31, 2000
Continued from page 7A
TWO IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER
Arly Allen, Betty Alderson and other members of the Lawrence Association of Neighborhoods say limiting to two the number of unrelated people who can rent in single-family neighborhoods will make it easier to figure out how many people are living in a house, making enforcement easier.
"When you have two students or two people, they don't behave like a group," Allen said. "The behavior pattern mimics a family and is not likely to get people in a neighborhood upset.
Sarah Dehart, Lawrence senior, moved into a house on the 1900 block of Maine Street in August. She said it was a trade-off to move farther away from campus
and downtown, but she and her three roommates were looking for a nicer place to live.
"I really enjoyed living in the student ghetto because I was between downtown and campus and around a lot of my friends," she said. "But the noise was insane. I lived in a place that basically had paper-thin walls."
Under the proposed ordinance, only two people could rent Dehart's house, making the $1,200 monthly rent virtually impossible to pay, she said.
"In some respects I can understand how certain members of the neighborhood are frustrated because students are living in their neighborhood, but I can't relate to it," Dehart said. "We don't have keggers, and no one is playing loud music at all hours of the night."
RESOLUTION...
Both sides agree on the problems but disagree on solutions.
Arly Allen and the Lawrence Association of Neighborhoods say the ordinance is the most practical option.
"If Lawrence doesn't do this, the whole center of the city will decay," Allen said. "If that happens, we don't believe Lawrence will be a very attractive community, even for the students. Nobody wants to have the University surrounded by slums."
Holly Krebs and students say the ordinance would not revitalize the city and that more immediate solutions, such as landlord registration and enforcement of the nuisance ordinance, should be revisited.
"Unrelated people are not inherently
bad renters or bad neighbors," she said. "So ordinances to address these problems should target the issue of bad renters or bad neighbors, not the demographic of unrelated people."
Even as the neighborhood residents, students and landlords debate the issue, Betty Alderson feels the noisy encroachment of renters in her once quiet neighborhood on a daily basis.
Her street, which once bubbled with the laughter of children, is now lined with cars — a symbol of the mobility of today's students.
For every good renter on her street, she says there are the bad ones — the loud
"Students are pretty decent people usually," she said. "But it's just not a compatible lifestyle in a neighborhood of single-family homes."
More information
To read a City of Lawrence staff report explaining the proposed ordinance, previous stories from the Kansan and other college towns and to see a KUJH story on the subject, go to www.kansan.com.
drinkers, the guy with the bass-heavy car stereo, the female student who got dropped off by a noisy bus after a party.
— Designed by Melissa Carr
"There isn't one area of town I know of that this isn't happening to," Alderson said. "You put four students together in a house, and you're going to have problems."
— Edited by John Audlehelm
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