Crime in the University District

'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.