Rowdy TCNJ Students Living Off-Campus Making Ewing Residents Crazy – Should the Landlords Be Held Responsible? [POLL]

School is back, and the normally “placid” township of Ewing is becoming party central…at least as far as some TCNJ students are concerned.

Since much of the housing stock in and around the college has become off-campus living quarters for undergrads; many have had late night parties leading the year round residents to call police at all hours to quell the disburbances.

And, as you can imagine, this has led to an impasse between the students and their not too happy neighbors.

So when renters act up, who to blame?

The renters themselves…which makes sense, or the landlords…who for the most part are absentee.

According to this:

In the past two weeks, since college students began returning to town, police have responded to at least eight complaints about noise and disorderly behavior, resulting in one arrest and several summonses.

Mayor Bert Steinmann said he plans to meet with officials at The College of New Jersey to talk about off-campus behavior.

Steinmann said town officials will not tolerate rowdy behavior that disrupts residents.
In the initial days of the fall semester, township police received calls from residents reporting a variety of disturbances — including massive groups of disorderly co-eds walking in and out of traffic on Pennington Road.

Neighbors called police Sunday evening to report a makeshift college party at a rental property on Bittersweet Road. Police reports indicate the party was hosted by members of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity of TCNJ.

Officers had responded to the same home on Aug. 23 to shut down a party, and on the second occasion, police issued summonses to four tenants.

Officer Lalena Lamson encountered a group walking along Pennington Road on Monday coming from a gathering at a property occupied by college renters in the 1600 block of Pennington Road. More than 100 young men and women poured out of the home when the officers approached, Lamson reported.

The home, Steinmann said, is one of two large rooming homes in the township that have been constructed in recent months, with capacities to host more than a dozen students each. The mayor said even first-time offenses will result in summonses. Students can plead their cases before a judge and be held accountable for their actions, he said.

“I am not saying not to have fun(but to) be responsible in having your fun.”

What’s funny is that nowhere did the suggestion of having the landlords be responsible for their tenant’s rowdy behavior ever come up…as it did a little over a month ago, according to this previous post.

Do you feel landlords should be responsible for the rowdy behavior of their tenants?