When Authority has no authority and racism trumps all

Of all the various types of student antisocial behaviour, this, that is still happening to one resident in Burley, is the possibly the worst: a group of originally all-white students, not just deliberately keeping the long term resident next door awake night after night with loud music and screeching, but adding racism into the mix. This included mocking West Indian forenames, doing impression of Jamaican accents, and referring negatively to people of colour. And on August 8 the resident managed to obtain this very clear recording of anti-Semitic chanting. This means that the “neighbour” who is a person of colour themselves, can add feeling threatened to the loss of any quality of life. But the situation is made all the more serious because there is no authority apparently in Leeds, not the University, not the Letting Agent, not the Anti-Social Behaviour Team, not the Police, not the Councillors, no one has the power to stop it. The sleep-deprived neighbour has played the tape of the chanting to all the relevant authorities and has now waited through August and September, and halfway through October for someone to make them stop. The police considered it a race hate crime and advised their University as such. The neighbour has worked from home all through Lockdown and beyond; the first students moved into their house on Leaving Day. All but one (the Letting Agent) of the above authorities have spoken to the students, and now they know that Authority has no authority.

The Great Collective University Inertia

My Open Letter to All the Leeds Universities Aigust 21 2020 Dear Universities, This is it. It is 10 weeks of relentless antisocial distasteful partying on an industrial level, by “entitled” young so-called adults who treat us, all year round residents like dirt, and by not pulling them up on their appalling, selfish, life-threatening behaviour, you are treating us like dirt. It’s one excuse after another. “They’re not all from our university. “ “Are you sure it was No 6?” “We can’t do anything until October.” “We don’t have all their addresses” “They’re not back at university until autumn.” “It’s the landlord/lady’s responsibility”. Out of the long-term residents in just one small street there are now three that we know of down at the local surgery on a regular basis, ill, signed off, or unfit for work, who have serious illnesses, all originating in stress-related conditions. The cost to the health service, to social services, just in monetary terms is already stacking up. Then we read there is an article in the local newspaper about why we should learn to love our universities. Apparently it’s because they benefit the Leeds economy, as so many people work for them. In Hyde Park and all over Headingley people’s careers, lives, health, happiness, families everything is in ruins and tatters just so that Leeds can be the best (really!) city in the north. In Moorland Road and Avenue alone we are teachers, university lecturers, doctors, builders, charity workers, retired people, social workers, garage mechanics, musicians, visual artists, university admin assistants, and real students (as in came here to study), a total mix of people who maintain this area the whole year around have been abandoned and left and hung out to dry by an uncaring council, incompetent police force and self-serving, self-seeking, entitled universities. Colleges who are spending their money rebranding themselves as universities and conservatories in order to enhance their status, universities spending millions on fancy new buildings, and heaven help anybody who went to university in Leeds, liked the area, and stayed on loyally to preserve and look after it. Heaven help anyone who mistook a beautiful Moor and beautiful Victorian architecture for a place of beauty and safety in which to pass a decade or two of their post-graduate life. There is a great collective inertia, and one part of Leeds in which society's have just been abandoned. Bad enough in a "normal" year, but inexcusable in a global pandemic.

When all the students come back

Well , who is looking forward to the students returning to their uni towns? I will tell you who: university finance departments, landlords and ladies, Sainsbury’s. Once this list would have included bars and pubs, and local shops. Once it would be local residents looking forward to new trends in music and art, and even philosophical debates down the Royal Park Pub. Most, if not all university lectures can be online. Practicals obviously need equipment, but possibly students could to access that at a local home university. Quite this a drastic step I realise. This would involve cooperation between institutions, but hey, this is a global pandemic, but I say where there’s a will... It seems that the exasperated parents have already dropped off and got rid of the most determinedly antisocial partygoers, probably a thousand or so, given the reports we have from Moorland Avenue, Saint John’s Avenue, Hyde Park Road, Cardigan Road, the Norwoods, Victoria Road, the Broomfields, the Langdales. But many more thousands are set to descend on the city. We hear of one uni has actually asking students to come back early. Is to this ensure they will get their fees, or to get them inside the city boundary before lockdowns return? Hopefully these are students who have come here to study. Nonetheless they will have been looking forward to freedom, freshers week and meeting up with old friends. To have them all descend on Leeds at once is the recipe for an almighty spike and heaven help the students and the unis when they get the blame for Leeds’s first football game in the Premier League to be behind closed doors and when all the pubs get closed again. We suggest that the council and the universities get together, be creative and come up with an intelligent plan.

Open Letter to All Leeds Universities

Open letter to All Leeds Universities

As one university spokesperson wrote to us, indeed your students are not solely responsible for the situation. In many ways the students are just victims, collateral damage in a system, an infrastructure which which has evolved, consisting of entitled students and their entitled parents, lazy and unscrupulous landlords and ladies, and the criminal drug pushers who work for themselves at the expense of us all. (And of course it isn’t all landlords/ladies, it isn’t all students, but it is all druggies.) Let us also add in a council and a police force who either genuinely don’t realise just how bad the situation has become, or don’t have the will or the capacity to change it.

However, as far the students are concerned, they may not be solely your students, and it is not all students, but the party-goers are all students. And the students are only here because the universities are here. And this gives the unis both the responsibility and ability to do something about the situation.

Presently there are two distinct types of party-type antisocial behaviour. The raves such as the one that happened on Woodhouse Moor were not organised by students and were mostly locals and nearly all from other areas of Leeds. But in the late afternoon the organisers were conspicuously walking round the back streets round our way so presumably they were looking for students to invite. And students’ parents and the universities should be really worried about this.

 Only five years ago my daughter came back from work at the pub to find that someone had climbed the tree in our front garden and then dropped onto the pavement where she then died. Only later did we discover that she been persuaded to take drugs for the first time and, the very next day, was going away to university to do a post-grad course. How tragic this was was brought home when her parents came up from her hometown to see where she died and meet the person who found her. As they stood in the garden looking at the tree and described the life she had been about to lead we just felt that their daughter was our daughter or sister.

But this letter is not just about noise, parties drugs and alcohol abuse. Anti-social behaviour also includes incompetent  waste management. Students either don’t care or don’t know how to recycle and, for example, don’t realise or care that you can’t, in Leeds, put glass into a green bin, and that you should not leave bins out on the pavement. Also, on Leaving Day just wheeling mattresses and sofas out onto the street for someone else to deal with is the disgusting height [or depth] of anti-social behaviour.

Hyde Park Road Leeds

And then  there are few things more insensitive than parking in front of a neighbour’s drive. Obviously the council hasn’t helped by painting white parking lines down some streets (eg Moorland Avenue), but you would think that the presence of a parking area, especially if there is a vehicle in it would be a giveaway. The implications for anyone who has to drive to work [and arrive on time] are frightening.

In general the graffiti and the fly-tipping (apart from the aforementioned mattresses) aren’t directly the students’ fault, but by treating the neighbourhood badly you invite others to regarding it as a dumping ground.

Local residents who live here all round keep the area afloat - just. We keep the shops, the takeaways and the pubs (what’s left of them] ticking over. Without us the area would die altogether. So when the two entitled parents told one particular resident on two separate occasions within one week in July 2020 that she living in the wrong area, said parents should realise that without us, their children would not last the distance.

 

What are the Lettings Agents' Responsibilities when their Tenants Take Anti-social Behaviour to these Heights?

This is us at Moorland Residents Inc writing to the letting agents, wondering what their role would be regarding their tenants and their tenants' behaviour. 

We are writing to you as you are the letting agent for a number of multiple occupancy houses in the area.

As you may be aware from local newspapers [Yorkshire Evening Post, Leeds Live, Radio Aire], a number of students are regularly hosting loud parties, often starting in the afternoon and continuing into the early hours of the morning. This has been going on years at the weekends, but the parties and attendant anti-social behaviour escalated at the beginning of June when students who had left Leeds at the beginning of lockdown returned to their student accommodation.

The anti-social behaviour includes hiring sound systems, partying in the gardens and in the streets, stealing wood to burn and chairs to sit on from other houses. It includes overt drug taking and excessive alcohol consumption, and screeching with laughter until 6am.

Apart from the partying the students leave the bins in streets, overflowing, with no differentiation between recycling and landfill rubbish, and this rubbish includes glass bottles. The state of the bins encourages rats, invites the regular fly-tipping of white goods and broken furniture, some brought out from the HMOs themselves.

The noise levels are at the worst they have ever been. Longterm local residents are suffering from the psychological and physical effects of sleep deprivation, made worse by the fact that many residents are having to work from home. Plus some students are ignoring rules regarding social distancing and limited numbers in houses. In some instances, they are also causing property damage to the houses they are renting.

Since March 23rd the police have acted on multiple noise disturbance and lockdown breaches, and then on July 1st, the Council brought in a Public Space Protection Order and I’m reporting a breach of this PSPO at [as well as instances of flytipping. This has made the area unsightly and created health risks.

To make matters worse, some students have come already come back to Leeds, almost as if for a holiday. They are certainly not working themselves, and the universities aren’t back yet.

While the police can act on breaches as they occur, we would like to know how yourselves as letting agents will act to ensure that PSPO orders are obeyed as well as dealing with repeated breaches. Besides impacting on the health of residents, the breaches are damaging the resident-student relationship and the marketability of the properties themselves. We residents are keen to restore good relationships with student occupants but in order to do this, steps do have to be taken to resolve the problems caused by non-compliant individuals.

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Landlordism 21st century in Hyde Park Leeds

There is more to the nuisance neighbours than the student neighbours themselves. They are almost collateral themselves as the unwitting agents of landlordism.

In pre-Covid times the student parties would reach antisocial heights shortly after exams then would continue until Change-over day, then we locals would be able to relax over summer.

But not exactly. With summer, come the letting agents, the builders and cleaners. The house owners don’t actually get their hands dirty themselves. In fact some of them don’t even live in Leeds

The un-builders, on the house owners’ orders, via the agents have quite dismantled and looted the beautiful Victorian buildings of Hyde Park Leeds. These houses were built by their predecessors from an age of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and said predecessors worked till they dropped to install all the beautiful banisters, architraves and ceiling roses. These days, with the removal of the banisters and the stairs themselves there is space enough to create another little flat in what had been the entrance hall, and is now just another money earner. And the age of Victorian architectural facades is exactly that today, not just looking at the difference between the backs and fronts of our houses, but the front exteriors and all interiors.

Besides the builders there is another subgroup which you could call cleaners but with a by-line in fly-tipping. The ex-tenants-to-be themselves start by leaving unwanted possessions in and around the bins. The fly-tippers take the rest and just leave them anywhere in the street. Most astonishing of all is that in our particular area they leave filthy sofas on St John’s Grove which is a private road and a cul-de-sac, where there is absolutely no passing traffic or trade. And there they stay until a local long-term resident neighbour calls the council. This has a knock-on effect on Moorland Avenue, the in-effect back street to Moorland Road and Avenue, being the street that outsiders dump their unwanted fridge-freezers in, as well.

There is a convention whereby, if you want to recycle some items you leave them at the bottom of your path or garden, and if they’re not taken within a few days you just take them to the tip yourself. But to leave rubbish of this size and unquality on the one street which no vehicles were supposed to go down and goes nowhere is mind blowing. And to think that is acceptable to drive to the through road backstreet and leave tall freezers ready to topple over on our 4 year-olds is sickening. Despicably dangerous.

Hyde Park - not a Student Village Actually

letter to papers June 16 plus 2020

So far we’ve had no known cases of Covid 19 in Hyde Park, but the students doing a Cummings seem to be trying their best to change that. In a backstreet only 1000m long we had no less than three parties this Saturday night (14 June) keeping ourselves and our children awake, presently almost unable to function as we face another day and week working from home, often juggling childcare with paid work.

25 years ago we had problems when the drug dealers chose Moorland Road and Hyde Park Road for some pitched battles with the police, and on July 10, 1995 we watched in dismay as the local pub went up in flames and our cars were torched, night after night.

After that local residents decided enough was enough and they created Unity Day (sadly cancelled for Covid this year), in which all people of all walks of life could come together as a community on Woodhouse Moor and take part in activities from dogshows to world music.

But here we are in Hyde Park, a quarter of a century later, many of us ex-Leeds University students ourselves, and the area is falling apart again. Graffiti is not just daubed on walls, it stays on walls, bins are all over the pavement, green and black with the same rubbish in them, regular fly-tipping saw two fridge freezers appear in our back street in the last two weeks [placed upright ready to fall on a child],  and then there’s these parties. And of course there’s drug dealers pulling up in the back street as we sit in the daytime with our kids and grandkids on their scooters and watch small packets exchange hands out of car windows. Sometimes the drugs are delivered to the door, only they get the wrong door – can be rather a frightening experience.

And despite the best intentions and best efforts of Noise Nuisance, they just don’t have the person power, the actual power or the PPE to stop them. The team attends, they leave, the music goes back on. The University Neighbourhood Helpline  knowledges the program the problem but can’t solve it.

We who have settled here have in effect become the protectors of the area, this part of Hyde Park actually being a conservation area, despite which landlords and ladies have paved over three back gardens [creating 8/9 spaces] in the last few months and charge non-residents to treat the street as a carpark.

But what is really keeping us awake right now are the parties. There’s no social distancing, not enough toilets, with partygoers stealing wood from some residents and treating the others gardens as toilets. And the party-goers spill out into St John’s Avenue. The morning after the street is littered with broken glass, vomit, condoms, beer cans, shards of glass.  

If there are police to guards statues of of 18th century racists, surely there’s police enough to stop selfish students keeping us from living our normal lives , and from spreading this virus as they do.

Yours faithfully

                                    [on behalf the Moorland Residents Group]