Dear Editor,
Delivering pizzas to the One Miramar Street graduate student housing complex is always a frustrating experience. I have yet to find the desired address within one drive down the street. It often takes a back-and-forth flashing of the brights on a couple of startled grads to locate the four wooden numbers.
Dim yellow lights in cheap bulbous spheres leak a thin sheet of comfort on the apartments. The shrubs, grassy knolls, gravelly driveways and cracked concrete walkways weave in and out of the splotchy luminance.
Walking across the lawn, I realized two things. One: the grass had recently been watered (damn my hole-ridden work shoes). Two: this would be a good place to rape somebody.
Where there is darkness, there is a greater likelihood of illicit activity. The grad student housing is dark, dingy and damp. When a five-minute pizza drop off gets me looking behind my back (no matter how neurotic I might be by nature), I take that as a sign there is a definite problem to be addressed.
Grad students aren’t the only ones in danger, either.
A lot of undergraduate students walk from the east and Regents parking lots to their homes around University Town Center, and that entire edge of campus is a poorly lit catwalk of young collegians. Take your pick, creepy hat-wearing guy from the campus alert drawings, it’s a smorgasbord of potential victims!
So now I’ll put forth a solution: Install some fluorescent bulbs near that street and around the grad student housing!
To protect the safety and comfort of our own (namely the women who live here), I’m sure the university will agree that we can spare no expense.