Well, well, well—it turns out that Durham’s going to have to shoulder at least some of the blame for the “out of control” student population in the neighborhoods around East; most egregious paragraph in bold:

[Council member Thomas] Stith’s point about a crackdown addressed neighborhood complaints that lax [not lacrosse – ed.] code enforcement by the city has contributed to a party atmosphere on the edge of campus.

In addition to police, who deal with overt disturbances of the peace, the job of enforcing Durham’s regulations belongs to the City/County Planning Department and the city Department of Housing and Community Development. The planning office handles zoning matters, while the housing department probes violations of Durham’s minimum housing code.

City/County Planning Director Frank Duke said Thursday that his department hadn’t received or investigated any complaints about 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in the past four years, and had handled only two complaints targeting houses anywhere on North Buchanan Boulevard in that time.

Both those complaints targeted homes on the 700 block. One alleged that a house had too many occupants, but was dismissed because the landlord proved he was entitled to an exception because the practice was entrenched long before the city established a maximum number of occupants, Duke said.

The other alleged that Duke students living in a house had posted commercial beer signs on the building. Inspectors upheld the complaint and made the students remove the signs, Duke said.

A similar accounting was not forthcoming Thursday from the housing department.

Its director, Mike Barros, said he’d forwarded an inquiry from The Herald-Sun e-mailed to him on Tuesday to his assistant director, Constance Stancil, and that she was looking into the matter.

So, we have private property owners and leaseholders of legal contract age, and yet the university gets the blame for the rowdy behavior that goes on outside its jurisdiction. A pox on all my neighbors, student and Townie alike.