In defense of your grad-student neighbors

New York Magazine readers are not so pleased with the students living in Stuyvesant Town. I knew, from visiting grad-school friends in those apartments, how hated the students were, but it now becomes clear why: the residents think they're all undergrads! The housing is, as far as I know, offered at below-market rates to first-year grad students only, but since something like ten billion people live in Stuy Town total, surely college students are among the residents. Heck, Bin Laden could be in the mix, and no one would find him. ('Where is 987 14th Street, and why is it not on 14th Street?', asked the Bush Administration team sent to look for him.)

But, onto the matter at hand, which is how terrible it is that young people go to school and must live somewhere while doing so. So, some quotes for the commentariat. OK, the fury is mostly at some real estate developers who are, contrary to their career reputation, in it for the money, but the students don't come off so well, all the same. A sampling:

"The dogs and the NYU students that the Speyers have allowed into Stuy Town are echoing thru the paper thin walls and ruining every tenant’s chance for a peaceful existence."

"they are gleeful throwing elderly out of their apartments to turn stuy town into an nyu dorm."

"As for the other type of new tenant, in the past three years, we've slowly been surrounded by students. The result? Weekend parties until all hours of the night, and the regular smell of pot smoke drifting through where my kids sleep. One Monday morning, I found a kid passed out in the hallway. Try explaining that to a five year old!"

"six years old, playing with another six year old in Playground 12 for the entire summer, thinking I had a new best friend; I was raised in a nominally Jewish family, he in an Irish Catholic family. Childhood bliss, until one day in late August when he arrived at the playground and announced that he wasn't going to play with me or talk with me any more, since I killed Jesus. Stunned, I asked, 'Who's Jesus?'" (OK, not about grad students, but every Jew had a childhood moment like this. Really! One would think all American Jewish elementary school students helped kill Jesus. I wasn't going to say anything, but...)

"NYU students are WORSE neighbors than any loud family or fighting couple."

And finally, from another NYMag item on Stuy town:

"[...] renting to the NYU and New School kiddies whose mommies and daddies pay their rent."

So, Haters, two things. One, undergrads are people, too. The System makes going to college necessary for so many jobs, it's hard to fault individual 18-year-olds for signing up, or parents who can pay for doing so. Charles Murray will get around to it sooner or later. Two, first-year grad students are not undergrads. They may live in what looks like hipster squalor, but the Stuy-town ones are working to pay for their own hipster squalor, and usually by spring semester, the parties die down and the retreat into serious adulthood kicks in. Young-looking and debauched for grad students, by February they're... low-earning teachers, or teachers-in-training, i.e. the people the Defenders of Stuyvesant Town Authenticity Preservation are supposed to want in the buildings.