“If you’re ever walking across McKeldin Mall alone at 3 a.m.,” I used to joke, “you’re probably the rapist.” I feel very safe living in College Park, and yes, I do read the crime alerts. I have no choice but to walk home after working late in the architecture school, but there are people out at almost every hour here. I’m confident that if I was in trouble, someone would be around to step in, call the cops or just yell.
This past summer, I worked at Gifford’s, an ice cream parlor in University Town Center, the new outdoor shopping complex in Hyattsville, five minutes from the university. I expected business to be slower than at the branch in Rockville, where I’d worked before. I hadn’t anticipated that I’d be waiting around for hours without seeing business, growing impatient just to see another group of kids come in and complain about how high our prices were (we charge four dollars a scoop) before leaving. After dark, UTC is dead, and I didn’t feel safe there. If anything were to happen to me, there wouldn’t be anyone around to help.
Developers named this place University Town Center assuming that university students would be drawn to the kind of upscale shops and restaurants you can’t really find in Prince George’s County. But rather than publicize the complex through an aggressive marketing campaign, they’ve let two of the College Park area’s worst crimes in recent memory do the advertising for them. In February of this year, a teenager was shot in broad daylight outside of The Towers, a high-rise student apartment building where students from 13 local schools can pay upwards of $800 a month for a room. Less than a month later, a man was killed inside is girlfriend’s apartment.
“I’m never going back to that place again,” one of my closest friends said after the incident. She lived within walking distance of the complex. While neither of the victims were randomly selected, why should we blame anyone who’d continue going to Silver Spring or Washington for a night out rather than get caught in gunfire intended for someone else?
The perception of crime at University Town Center will only scare students and local residents away, hurting business and maybe even forcing stores to close. And let’s not forget the $200,000 condos that sit on top of all those stores, most of which are still empty after two years of sluggish sales. Fewer people mean fewer “eyes on the street,” in the words of urbanist Jane Jacobs, which creates more opportunities for crimes committed by individuals who’ll only act if they know no one’s around to catch them.
Does a place feel safe because lots of people go there, or do lots of people go to a place because it feels safe? For University Town Center, it may have to start with safety. It has a lot to offer – quality restaurants, a spectacular movie theater and much more ambiance than Route 1. A couple of isolated incidents don’t change the fact that College Park and its surrounding towns are not unusually dangerous places to live, but it’ll take some convincing to show us that those incidents were the exception, not the rule.
Dan Reed is a senior architecture and English major. He can be reached at reeddbk@gmail.com.
