Why SU community members say graduate students are forced into unsafe housing areas

Pat Burak asks many of the typical questions uttered by someone who seems angry, frustrated and fed up.

She can’t shake the memory of two murders of students on Syracuse University’s campus in 1996 and 2005. She’s tired of hearing about students who get off the bus and walk home, only to be harassed, or sometimes burglarized, in their own neighborhoods.

“(They) asked for his cellphone and his wallet,” said Burak, the director of the Slutzker Center for International Students. “It was only twilight and they were verbally harassing them.”

The perpetrators scattered when a neighbor stuck their head out the window and threatened to call the cops.

Others, like the student who was killed near the Ivy Ridge Apartments and the other who was on Ostrom Avenue, weren’t so lucky. So she asks those typical questions: How many deaths do we have to have? How many assaults do we have to have before this is a problem?

“You don’t forget those things,” Burak said, referring to the murders.

Yet it seems that a sizable portion of SU’s student population feels forgotten — its approximately 4,800 graduate students. Several members of the SU community say graduate students are shafted when it comes to housing, and as a result of that, are forced into unsafe neighborhoods just off campus, where they can fall victim to crimes such as robbery, assault and burglary.

From 2013-15, SU’s off-campus neighborhoods saw 2,556 crimes, according to the Onondaga Crime Analysis Center. While some crimes are concentrated in areas where undergraduate students live, a map shows that the crimes increase the farther away they are from campus.

The map was compiled by Alexander Lynch, a senior citizenship and civic engagement major, using data from the Syracuse Police Department and Department of Public Safety. Lynch’s study includes a proposal to install 45 CCTV cameras in off-campus neighborhoods as a means of deterring crime. His report estimates the cameras will cost approximately $500,000 total, each camera individually costing about $11,000.

SU currently has 750 cameras installed on campus — 100 of which were put in place in the last year.

The reason graduate students end up being more at risk than undergrads is because they aren’t afforded early access to the housing market, said Rajesh Kumar, a graduate student who will serve as Graduate Student Organization president next year. Undergraduate students may begin looking for housing more than a year before they actually move in. First-year students are also added into SU’s housing lottery.

Kumar said graduate students will often choose their housing before getting to Syracuse, and before they’re able to see the property. And by the time they’re able to select housing, the properties closer to campus are typically taken, he said.

Many graduate students also cannot afford the rents being charged for properties on Sumner, Ackerman or Lancaster avenues, whose rents are usually in the range of $600 or $700 per month.

Lynch’s report doesn’t cover areas on Columbus Avenue or South Beech Street, which Kumar said is where many graduate students live.

Graduate students gravitate to that area because the rent is much cheaper, costing around $300 per month on average, Kumar said.

But the price of cheap living comes with the other, sometimes unforeseen, cost that is a lack of safety, Kumar said. He knows many people living in areas like Columbus Avenue who have witnessed crimes, or worse, been a victim of one.

Just two days after his friends arrived in Syracuse, they heard gunfire across the street from their home on East Fayette Street. Kumar said he knew of numerous incidents, many with similar storylines to this one.

The problem is that some of them are international students who believe, based on cultural norms, that they’d be better off not reporting it to DPS. One of Kumar’s friends was touched on her back by a stranger and despite feeling very shaken, chose not to report the incident, Kumar said. He noted the irony that the friend is from Mumbai — a city of almost 11.2 million people — and yet it took an incident in the comparatively smaller city of Syracuse to make her feel afraid to go outside at night.

“They try to keep themselves safe because they already know they’re living in an unsafe area,” Kumar said. “They take precautions, but you know, it’s not good to live in that kind of fear.”

The violence isn’t just restricted to graduate student neighborhoods. Lynch’s map shows a high concentration of crime on the 800 block of Ackerman Avenue as well as the 800 block of Ostrom Avenue.

A junior in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, who asked to remain anonymous, detailed his encounter with two surgical-masked gunmen in his home on the 200 block of Ostrom Avenue in October 2015. One of the perpetrators held a gun to his roommate’s head as they demanded keys to their car, cellphones and other valuables. The gunmen got away with their car, but the Syracuse Police Department was able to locate it and their valuables later that night.

“Even though in the end everything went well and thank God we were all safe, I could go on and on about how bad I think SU’s security is and how they could definitely improve it,” the student said via email.

SPD Detective George Hack said in an email that no arrests have been made yet in the case.

In October 2014, an attempted burglary occurred just down the street on 700 Ostrom Avenue, according to a DPS bulletin. Another robbery was reported within in an hour of that incident on the 200 block of Ostrom Avenue.

As far as resources for graduate students go, Burak said more housing needs to be built for them that’s closer to campus. In some areas, buses are too full to transport graduate students, or they live in areas that don’t have bus service, she said.

“We need to have quality, affordable housing for graduates within a safe range of access to the university,” Burak said. “… We’re not looking for the Taj Mahal, not Park Place.”

Kumar said graduate student housing is an issue that he plans to take to SU Chancellor Kent Syverud next year.

He said moving forward, the university needs to stop wasting time poring over numbers or evaluating peer institutions and take action. The numerous stories and reports are enough evidence that this is a problem, he added.

“You (administrators) should be the leader. This is a major issue,” Kumar said. “We need to work on it.”

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