site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

lots of the (good) places were 55+ and obviously not available to students.

and if there was student housing on that magic dirt, I'm sure the neighborhood would be just as good. (neighborhoods can be geographically advantaged, but that generally isn't the determining factor.)

Yeah, living in an off-campus apartment really made me understand why homeowners fight student housing tooth and nail. Students are young, transient, and generally not personally responsible for their own finances, which is a triple whammy red flag for "will absolutely destroy the neighborhood."

Plus, beyond drunken destruction, the presence of student housing is inversely related to how responsive the local government is to community issues. Students don't pay property taxes and are often still legally domiciled (and therfore are registered to vote) at their parents' home, and will be gone within a couple of years anyway. So nobody at city hall cares about their complaints and the infrastructure all goes to shit. Landlords don't bother keeping up with capital maintenance and don't care as much about the quality of public infrastructure since they have a guaranteed renewing pool of cost-insensitive and naive tenants who tend to be unreasonably tolerant of conditions more established tenants would demand be fixed.

College students make terrible neighbors, even when they're well-behaved teetotalers, because they're fundamentally foreign tourists with no long-term stake in the community.