It took Peterson and his roommates until after Christmas to get their furnace fixed, they say, and they don't have a smoke detector. But they're afraid to report violations to the city of Boulder because they're breaching the Hill's occupancy code, which allows only up to four unrelated people to live together. Property owners, in turn, say they are unfairly scapegoated for student living conditions. There are a lot of landlords who spend their summers rebuilding their homes because the tenants have destroyed them. Longtimers say seven riots on the Hill in the past four years exemplify the state of the neighborhood at the hands of college students.
Some students agree.
Police cited 13 people for underage drinking. Jan Clason, head of the Martin Acres Neighborhood Association, said students increasingly over-occupy rental homes in her South Boulder neighborhood. When you live on a block of 10 houses and half of them are student rentals, it brings down the whole area a little bit. Although this year's record freshman class is 12 percent larger than the class of 1999, university officials contend the explosion in the population and job market countywide is largely to blame for Boulder's affordable housing problems. Boulder County grew 21 percent to 273,112 people from 1990 to 1999, and the city of Boulder estimates its population grew 15 percent to 96,727 since 1990.