If students have pride in their campus community, they are less likely to burn it to the ground.

This is the basis behind the riot task force’s theories concerning property ownership, and the role it plays in preventing such behavior.

“We need to get rid of the type of neighborhood where this type of behavior is acceptable,” said Wayne Garland, Buckeye Real Estate’s representative on the task force.

A main point of the task force’s report has Ohio State buying property as one of its recommendations. The report said the university should look into buying strategic properties around campus that have become problems.

David Andrews, head of the task force, said a large part of the problem is many areas in the University District consist of undergraduate tenants.

“We don’t have any specific properties in mind, other than we know that what we would like to do is change the density of student housing in the neighborhood so that there aren’t quite as many of the same age group in close proximity,” Andrews said.

Most of the students who live in many of the problem areas are 19 to 22 years old, said Bill Hall, vice president for Student Affairs.

With its plan for strategic buying of properties, part of the task force’s hope is that people in different age ranges – like graduate or professional students or people with families – will move into these areas.

“It might help to have people that are more sensitive to noise ordinances and loud, stupid drunken people,” said Margaret Winnen, a junior in English and resident of 13th Avenue – the site of the post-Michigan-game riots.

However, older students and non-students may not want to move into problem areas because of the undesirable reputation the area has earned over the years, Winnen said.

“I don’t think having grad students and families move into campus-area housing would do anything, because I don’t think any grad students or families would want to live on 13th after what is known about 13th,” Winnen said. “The reputation OSU students have given this area is that we drink a lot and party hard.”

While both Andrews and Hall were tentative about singling out any specific areas around OSU, Sgt. Brent Mull, spokesman for the Columbus Division of Police, said a large part of campus, in particular the 43201 area code, has required some sort of police response at one point or another.

“The problem areas seem to change. From quarter to quarter, the areas change down here,” he said.

Pat Steane, real estate company Kohr Royer Griffith’s representative on the task force, said any area is a potential problem area.

“Every street around campus can have problem properties because there will always be problem landlords and problem tenants,” she said.

Ohio State will never have enough money to buy all the residences in the 43201 area code, so a lot of the task force’s suggestions will never happen, Garland said.

“A lot of that stuff is everybody’s pie-in-the-sky wish list,” he said. “I think they did not want to offend anybody, so they just included everything everyone suggested.”

Even though the university does not have enough money to buy all of the properties around campus, if it did buy enough property in certain areas it would have some influence on coding and zoning laws.

With that type of power, Ohio State could dictate whether or not students can have things like couches on porches. The University of Michigan, for one, has areas with leases that say porch furniture cannot be stuffed.

“We are not interested in managing all of it by any means, nor do we think that it is appropriate, but having an influence so that there is a greater sense of ownership and that kind of pride in the community,” Andrews said.

Chris Wagoner, a sophomore in political science and a resident of Chittenden Avenue, said the subpar look of many areas around campus makes residents less inclined to keep up the look of their place.

“That is a big part of what it is all about,” Wagoner said. “People live in crappy apartments and don’t care what happens to their stuff, so they might as well party and make it worth it.”

He said last year he lived on 12th Avenue and threw parties all the time that ended up trashing his property. If the area had been better, Wagoner would have been more conscious of the status of his residence.

“If my place had been really nice, or there had been a lot of nice places around me, then I wouldn’t have been so inclined to throw huge parties every day,” he said.

Andrews said part of making students proud of the area they live in is having them stay in the same place for more than one year – unlike Wagoner, who is living in his second residence in the off-campus area in as many years.

“The fact that there are blocks where the expectation is that students will live there for a year or so and move on somewhere else doesn’t really create any sort of pride of ownership in that living arrangement,” Andrews said.

Other than bringing in a greater diversity of students, the task force suggested Student Affairs should try to establish some of its living-learning centers in student neighborhoods.

Hall said right now there are about 30 such centers, which house students with similar interests – like major or nationality – on campus. Occasionally, there has been a living-learning center off campus, but they are not very common.

The closest thing the university has to an off-campus center are the fraternity and sorority houses, which line the central part of the 43201 area code.

“I would say we’ve had excellent leadership out of our greek community in the past few years,” Hall said.

The districts with greek life in them haven’t caused any major trouble in recent years, he said.

“What we are eventually hoping for is areas where we can have student peers that can be liaisons – not policing students – between the students and the university,” Hall said.

While many of these measures are trying to keep riots from ever starting, they will not be useful if a crowd starts forming, Wagoner said.

“When the Michigan game riots happened, what I heard about most of it is that most of the people who were rioting weren’t even students at Ohio State,” he said. “People who don’t live here aren’t going to care as much about the property as the people who do.”

Wagoner said if a riot starts at Chittfest – the unofficial, annual block party on Chittenden Avenue that has erupted into a riot the last few years – he and his roommates are planning to just lock themselves inside their residence until it is over.

“Once the mob gets started, the mob gets started. There’s basically nothing you can do,” he said.