'An easy target'
The high level of street-level crimes - thefts, robberies, assaults and break-ins - in the University District is no coincidence.
"What we're seeing is … a shift into the university area where [criminals] are finding that students are an easy target," said Tom Wildman, the Code Enforcement & Safety Committee chair of the University Area Commission.
In the past six months, 680 street-level crimes were committed in the district, according to a Lantern analysis of crime data from crimereports.com, which takes its information from the Columbus Division of Police. These statistics include only the off-campus areas of the district, and not the OSU campus itself.
These numbers dwarf the statistics for Columbus' less densely populated core downtown area, which tallied 301 street-level crimes over the past six months, according to crimereports.com data.
Students' habits and lifestyles leave them vulnerable. The No. 1 reason for a break-in, in either a house or a car, is an unlocked door, Wildman said.
"It's probably simply because [students] were very well protected when they were growing up by their parents, and there's a lot of trust there," he said.
Sometimes, the thieves are even the unwitting students'guests.
"[Students] have a lot of parties, so some of these parties will swell up to three, four hundred people at a time in a house, they don't see who's coming through," Wildman said. "They assume that everyone there is someone that's alright, that's cool, but what you see at those parties sometimes is … homeless people that live in tents, are wandering through their houses, taking a look at what's there. So are the criminals."
Pockets of crime
It's not just the carelessness of students that makes them attractive to criminals. The student population is highly transient, with students moving around at a rapid rate.
Transience, however, doesn't explain the recent surge in crime, Wildman said.
"The transience of students has always been an issue. Sometimes in any given house you can have changes of people living in a house from month to month."
The real root cause of so many of the University District's problems, including crime, has to do with its neighbors.
Just ask Pasquale Grado. Grado is a long-time resident of the district, having lived first in the OSU dorms as a student in the 1960s and then in an apartment above Progressive Audio on High Street for 27 years. He is a former OSU architecture professor, an author of influential University District planning proposals, a key member of several University District community organizations, and a bit of an unofficial folk historian of the area.
The growth of crime in the district is due in part to pockets of federally-subsidized, low-income housing created in the late 1970s, Grado said.
In 1976, science research firm Battelle lost a multi-million dollar court judgment to the city of Columbus. As a result, 540 properties that Battelle owned in Victorian Village fell into disrepair, effectively becoming a slum.
Federal money paid for a cleanup of the properties, driving out low-income residents. To house the displaced people, the city built low-income housing with federal money.
While these housing projects were supposed to be scattered across the area, the developer acquired clusters of apartments in the Weinland Park area at the southern end of the district.
"You just ended up with this high concentration of low-income building, and that was never the intent," Grado said.
Along with the low price, housing in the district is appealing to criminals because it allows them to stay in the same area where they make their living.
With the concentration of low-rent housing came drug dealers and gang leaders who prey on the poor, Grado said. The pockets of low-rent housing soon became hotbeds of crime.
"That concentration of crime breeds on the adjacent neighborhoods," he said.
Indeed, the southern end of the district, particularly the Weinland Park area, had a substantially higher rate of reported street-level crimes in the past six months (see graphic). Click here to check out crime statistics in your area.
'You got more people, you got more crime'
Although Grado said that the district has made "great progress" in dealing with the growth of crime, citing the development of the Community Crime Patrol and the University Area Safety Coordinating Committee, the modern off-campus housing market is presenting new challenges.
"Ohio State University is building more dormitories, bringing students back on to campus, which is a good thing, but at the same time that means all the houses that are owned by property managers suddenly don't have the students living in them anymore. They now have to rent out to other people," Wildman said. "Some of those other people … are part of other areas of the city that are troubled, but they find the rents are cheaper in the University District, which brings in a lesser quality person."
It's not just who the neighbors are that matters - it's also how many there are.
"Logically, you got more people, you got more crime," Grado said.
The district includes three of the densest census districts in Columbus, Grado said. The 43201 and 43202 zip codes, which include the off-campus portion of the University District, had estimated 2007 population densities of 11,053 and 7,648 people per square mile, respectively, according to city-data.com.
Combined with 16 to 18 hours of activity on the streets in the district by about 110,000 people per day, this population density fuels crime, Grado said.
With 680 street-level crimes in the past six months, the University District's residents were the victim of more than twice the number of street-level crimes committed in the downtown Innerbelt area.
Considering population density, however, the district had a lower rate of crimes per person per square mile than the Innerbelt, the core downtown area. The Innerbelt area makes up the majority of the 43215 zip code, which in 2007 had an estimated population density of 2,007 people per square mile, according to city-data.com.
'There's a sex offender on my block'
The Innerbelt also has more sex offenders per capita than the University District, which has a population that is overwhelmingly composed of residents over the age of 18, according to hellocolumbus.com.
Since Medary Elementary School was shut down as a permanent public school, however, the sheriff's department has put more sex offenders in the area, Wildman said.
Ohio law prohibits sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school.
"I hear more people who live very close to Medary saying, 'There's a sex offender on my street. We never had that before because Medary was open,' " he said.
Medary Elementary, which closed as a full-time school in the summer of 2008, is in the far northern end of the University District.
Sixteen sex offenders live within a one-mile radius of the former school, according to eSORN, the electronic sex offender registry maintained by the Ohio Attorney General's office.
Four sex offenders live within a half mile of the school, and one lives within a quarter mile.
For the University District as a whole, though, the prevalence of sex offenders is lower than many of Columbus' neighborhoods.
The section of the University District south of East Oakland Avenue makes up the majority of the 43201 zip code, which has approximately one registered sex offender (home or work address) per 449 residents, according to a Lantern analysis of current eSORN records and the 2007 population estimates from city-data.com.
The remainder of the University District makes up a smaller portion of the 43202 zip code, which has one registered sex offender per 1,746 residents.
By comparison, the 43215 zip code, which contains the Innerbelt area, leads Columbus' 25 zip codes with one sex offender per 75.4 residents. The 43201 and 43202 zip codes ranked 13th and 20th, respectively. The 43221 zip code, which contains most of Upper Arlington, has the lowest concentration, with one sex offender per 2,792 residents.
'Fueling their addictions'
The population density of the University District and the laid-back attitudes of students contribute to more than just street-level crimes like robberies and assaults.
These characteristics make the off-campus area attractive to panhandlers, said Rimar Villasenor, a sophomore in operations management and marketing who serves as the chair of the University Area Commission's community relations committee and as USG's deputy director of city council relations.
"I think that the problem really is derived out of not necessarily the prevalence of all these panhandlers, but rather the lack of knowledge that [passersby] and the citizens have toward the issues," he said.
Students who donate to a panhandler may be paying for more than they bargain for.
"Usually people operate under the assumption that panhandlers are just hungry, but in reality, the panhandlers on the street are those who did not seek professional help and so just decide to stay on the streets and to fund either a drug habit or alcoholism," Villasenor said. Giving to panhandlers is just "fueling their addictions," he said.
The south campus area of the district is a hotspot, but aggressive panhandling is a problem throughout Columbus, Villasenor said. Villasenor is pushing for collaboration between OSU and the city government to address aggressive panhandling.
Recent revisions to the Columbus city code tightened the restrictions on panhandling, increasing or establishing the distances from ATMs, financial institutions, pay phones, parking meters and outdoor patios within which panhandling would be automatically considered aggressive.
The legislation, which took effect in March, was written by City Councilmember Andrew Ginther with input from numerous groups, including USG, according to USG's Web site. Ginther acknowledged the role of USG in drafting the legislation in a September interview with The Lantern.
Following the models of cities such as Santa Monica, Calif. and Denver, Villasenor also wants to see alternative giving methods implemented in Columbus. These methods include donation boxes in stores and sidewalk meters that would fund homeless shelters and food banks.
"That'd be an alternative way rather than just giving directly to the panhandler who's most likely - statistically - to use that money to fuel a drug habit," Villasenor said.
'No one's watching'
Like panhandlers, loiterers are highly visible symbols of crime in the University District.
At first glance, loitering doesn't appear to be particularly dangerous. It's what loitering represents, however, that's troubling.
The sight of loiterers "tells you that no one's watching, and [the loiterers] know it," Wildman said. "And because of that, they know they can come in and do whatever they want."
Loitering and drug sales go hand in hand, and Wildman has seen an increase in loitering in his neighborhood.
"People still want to loiter somewhere in the university area, because part of those people who loiter, their biggest trade is not just crime, it's the drug trade," he said. "And who's buying the drugs?"
The answer is college students, Wildman said.
"If you're going to trade to students, especially Ohio State students, you want to be staying in that area to keep your trade alive. So if you get kicked out of one area, you're gonna want to find another area nearby where you can still do your trade."
Graffiti is another highly visible indicator of the growth of crime in the University District.
"We used to just have problems where they're just tagging the garages and the houses and the telephone poles and the garbage cans," Wildman said. "Now they like to tag cars, sides of houses, instead of just the garages, but this new cool concept of doing graffiti letters that are 10 feet tall is the latest thing."
Like loitering and aggressive panhandling, graffiti represents a bigger problem than the crime itself.
'I think it's just to show that no one's watching'
The city's ability to watch for crime near OSU has been stretched to the breaking point by the poor economy. Columbus needed $1.25 million in federal funding from February's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to be able to hire the 25 police officers of the latest recruit class in March, who would have otherwise been jobless.
"The city of Columbus, like all cities across the United States, the economy has gotten into such shambles that their city budgets are so tight they're now stuck at cutting services," Wildman said.
Homeowners are watching and calling in police reports, but the transient student population is not watching out for suspicious characters, Wildman said.
"They should be, because those very people might be the suspicious people that need to be called in on a regular basis," he said.
The University District is bounded by Glen Echo Ravine to the north, the Conrail railroad tracks to the east, Fifth Avenue to the south, and the Olentangy River to the west.
Check back Monday, April 18 for Part 2 in our State of the University District series.
Dan McKeever can be reached at mckeever.16@osu.edu.
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