“We’re going to play a game,” says Maxine Gross, chair of the Lakeland Community Heritage Project. “Guess which of these houses are owner-occupied and which are rented by students.”

We walk under red maple trees down the shady sidewalks of 51st Avenue in Lakeland, just a few blocks east of the College Park Fire Department.

The first residents of Lakeland moved here more than 100 years ago, free blacks from plantations in Calvert County and around Montpelier Mansion in Laurel. They moved here not because the land was good, but because it was cheap. Lakeland Road flooded after every major storm when the Paint Branch and Indian creeks jumped their banks.

Residents struggled to make a living and educate their youth during segregation – a time in which, when white residents of Prince George’s County wanted a school, they merely asked for funds from the tax revenue. But when black residents wanted a school, they had to band together as a community to save up money to purchase the land for the schoolyard, and applied for private funding from foundations such as the Rosenwald Fund to construct the schoolhouses. Inequalities in education remained far past desegregation and even lingered after schools in Prince George’s were finally integrated in the 1970s.

But the black community stayed, banded together by the welcoming pews and humble brick visages of the First Baptist and Embry A.M.E. churches.

This was a broad community, running west from Route 1 over the Baltimore and Ohio railroad tracks, and east to the Indian Creek.

This was a broad community, that is, until urban renewal carved Lakeland into pieces: Its eastern end was razed to make way for Lake Artemesia when WMATA engineers dug out the lake to provide gravel fill for the Green Line, while its western end was destroyed to make way for student-friendly housing, such as the Parkside Apartments and the Alden-Berkley Townhomes.

Now, all that is left is the shady section around 51st Avenue. We walk past homes with Huffy bikes sitting on the porches and ’80s-vintage Crown Victorias in the driveways, homes which have been passed down by families through the generations. We walk past homes with beer cans in the grass and Volvos in the driveways; Ms. Gross’ game is all too easy to figure out.

We arrive at Navahoe Street, once the main thoroughfare through Lakeland, now broken up and bookended, with the University View on one end and Parkside on the other.

As Ms. Gross bids us farewell with the hopes we’ve learned something by walking through Lakeland with her, a late ’90s Paseo with New York plates speeds by, and a boy with shades, a buzzcut and cheeks ripe from downing countless red cups of light beer hangs out its window with his arms flailing. His poor taste in beverage found its way to his taste in music: He’s belting out, “How can we be lovers if we can’t be friends?” in a perfectly pitchless imitation of Michael Bolton.

The Paseo revs its engine and speeds off as we hear the song continue on for a few more blocks.

Somehow, though, in the midst of his witless idiocy, Beercheeks asks a salient question: How can we, the students, have a loving and mutually beneficial relationship with the city when we aren’t even on friendly terms?

How can we be friends when we feel so entitled – entitled to our education, entitled to housing, entitled to douchebaggery?

How can we be friends when we overflow into the city, driving up rents and driving down the quality of life of permanent residents?

How can we be friends when we’re ignorant of the culture and history of this place?

Benjamin Johnson is The Diamondback’s opinion editor. He can be reached at katsuo@umd.edu.