Except for the neighbors.  Student noise is a big issue in one Burlington neighborhood near UVM on Front Porch Forum right now.  Just posted there today from Stephanie…

Your voices have clearly been heard and now students are aware of the complaints. Below is a copy of the email sent to all off campus students. The noise thread has gone on for several weeks now and everyone has had equal opportunity to voice their opinions. I believe it is now time to “kill” the noise thread… clearly UVM, the city and everyone else on FPF have heard your concerns. Thanks a bunch!

From UVM…

Greetings Off-Campus Students – If you are in Burlington this summer and new to renting hopefully by now you are starting to settle into your off-campus apartment.  As the summer swings into full force with the 4th of July holiday weekend, we wanted to give you the heads up about some of the neighborhood concerns being expressed by long-term residents, UVM students, and recent UVM graduates which have been circulating on Front Porch Forum:

• My husband and I have been awoken by noise on our street from time to time since we moved in last August, but recently it has gotten out of hand.  Some of the worst examples are 3:30 Saturday morning having people bat beer cans on the street followed by banging around garbage cans, and then at 1:30 this morning we had fire crackers go off.  I have resisted calling the cops because I just want to fall back asleep, but this has really gotten out of hand.
• The combination of all-night skateboarding, drunks returning from downtown at 2 a.m., and, worst of all, fireworks has been such an annoyance we regularly wish we could afford to move.
• I like a good party as much as anyone but I (and my roommates) also have to get up at 6 am to go to work. Fireworks at 2am don’t really help much in the sleep department. Wary of coming off as a killjoy or grumpy next door neighbor, but especially when it starts getting hot it would be nice to be able to sleep with the windows open without being woken up by that stuff.
• For all you college students who are NOT participating in this debauchery, can you please remind your friends and roommates to party respectfully  It would mean a lot to the rest of us in the neighborhood. Thank you.

As tenants and residents of Burlington we appreciate your help to make our neighborhoods safe and livable places for everyone. Please help us spread the word to those people that may not be aware that their actions are impacting others.

Important Info to be Aware of & to Let Others Know About:

The Noise Ordinance is in affect 24hrs a day. Designated city quiet hours are 10pm to 7am – up to a $500 fine per person on the lease and 3rd offense is criminal. There are Open Container, Minor in Possession, Public Urination Ordinances that are also enforced – up to a $500 fine for each offense. Fireworks are illegal in the City of Burlington. They are also very dangerous and  disruptive to unsuspecting neighbors, children, and pets – up to a $500 fine.

For more info on city ordinances and helpful tenant resources check out the UVM Off-Campus Living Survival Guide. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact… the UVM Office of Student & Community Relations (OSCR) at 656-9405.

Thanks,
OSCR Staff

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

For those of you familiar with De La Soul, y’all know that three is the magic number. For those of you unfamiliar, check this out. Three is the magic number for us because that’s how many pairs of tickets our friends at Higher Ground have graciously donated to Front Porch Forum. As a result, all of our neighbors (that’s you!) have the chance to enter a raffle for a FREE PAIR OF TICKETS.

Grammy award-winning hip-hop group De La Soul is performing at Higher Ground August 21.  If you’d like a shot at a pair of tickets all you need to do is comment on this post.* You can post about whatever you want – how you use FPF, why you like De La Soul, an awesome show you’ve seen at Higher Ground, whatever – any comment gets you an entry into the raffle (limit one per person).

Here at FPF we use this blog to keep our neighbors (and everyone else in the blogosphere) up to date about Front Porch Forum happenings. These include unique success stories, updates about our progress/expansion, and fun raffles like this De La promo. La la la la lah, this is a D.A.I.S.Y. age.

*TO ENTER:  Comment on this blog post below by 7 PM EST on Aug. 20.  Comments on Facebook will not get your name in the hat… you must comment at http://frontporchforum.com/blog Winners will be selected at random on Thursday night and will be notified via the email address attached to your comment.

The obvious question is: “Why isn’t Front Porch Forum integrated into the BurlingtonFreePress.com site or the sites of the New York Times, WSJ or other newspapers that serve those in your community?”…

To our wonderful neighbors: thank you so much for all of your help in finding our lost cat, Calvin.  It was one of you readers who eventually found him for us (only a block away from our house!), and I am so appreciative to have him back safe and sound after he spent 5 nights on his own.  We received several emails/phone calls from people who had thought they’d seen him, and I have been absolutely blown away by this kindness and thoughtfulness.  When I was trying to decide where to go to graduate school, I knew that Burlington would be a special place, but I had no idea how amazing the people would be.  Thank you, Front Porch Forum. Thank you, sweet neighbors.  All the very best, Sarah, Drew, and Calvin

Live off campus? Join Front Porch Forum

If you live off campus then you should definitely join the Front Porch Forum. Front Porch Forum is an online community or your neighbors. In my forum (the South Union Neighborhood Forum) I receive word about trends in vandalism, break-ins, road construction, yard-sales, help-wanted, help-offered, and all sorts of other things going on just a few doors down from mine. Living downtown means you have neighbors and you’re a resident of a community. Front Porch Forum offers you one easy connection to that community. Check it out!

For more than half a century, newspaper readership has been declining – and so have a variety of other indicators of civic and community engagement, such as participation in PTA’s, membership in bowling leagues and turnout on Election Day…

What I’ve been wondering about is whether new technologies can, in any way, help rebuild social capital among people who live in the same community. We know that online communities enable people with common interests to build powerful connections even if they are halfway around the world from one another. I’m intrigued by the possibility that we could apply these online community tools to strengthening local bonds.

It’s also hard to ignore that when conversations about the news occur on the Web, they often turn ugly — or, at best, fail to advance the discussion beyond ranting and raving…

Evidence that local media can play a role in fostering community conversation can be found in newspaper history. David Paul Nord’s fascinating book, “Communities of Journalism,” for instance, describes many instances in which newspapers served as community forums…

Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com – [argues] that online communities can foster isolation and division by enabling people to connect only with those whose characteristics and attitudes are like theirs.

What I might challenge our students to do is come up with ways to improve online conversations about the news — to build social capital and raise the quality of these conversations.

Of course, this is what Front Porch Forum is all about!

So I was especially pleased to get this wonderful note from Jennifer today…

Hi Michael, you are amazing. All I can say is, your life changed mine, and I am ever grateful. After you spoke to my Community College of Vermont Business class, I signed up for my FPF Neighborhood Forum, it enhance my life in a way I can’t explain, but I feel at home now. Thanks for everything you do!

Also, she’s started her own business and is looking to advertise it on Front Porch Forum.

Which brings me back to this morning several states south of here… I was watching a maple tree drop  hundreds (thousands?) of its helicopter seeds on a Pennsylvania yard… and I’ve seen this same tree dump as many in the spring.  And from all these thousands of seeds… I’ve seen one or two saplings rise up and take root.  So it goes.

I absolutely LOVE what you’re doing. I think that Front Porch Forum is one of the best things to happen as a result of the internet. Everyone actually reads the emails and it’s a great way to connect with folks that you otherwise would have little interaction with.

Wow!  Very nice.  I know that all college students are supposedly on Facebook and YouTube 24/7, but I keep meeting local young-uns who aren’t that enthralled with the idea of living their lives through their laptops and cell phones.

 Hello – I am a UVM student about to spend my first summer in Burlington. All year long I’ve been dreaming of joining a CSA for the first time. I’ve done my research, found a farm, and am totally pumped for fresh local veggies. But, of course, there’s one problem: money. Like any typical college student, I have some financial woes, namely that I have very little cash at the moment. I have a job lined up for the summer with the Vermont Landscape Change Program (check it out at http://www.uvm.edu/landscape) which is funded by the National Science Foundation, and is therefore well-paid. I can afford a CSA, just not until I start getting paid in early June, which, unfortunately, goes against the very idea behind CSA (ie cash up front).

Since everyone on this forum seems to care about community programs, local business, and general camaraderie, I thought it wouldn’t kill me to at least ask if there is anyone out there willing to give me a loan for 200 dollars. I realize this sounds a little sketchy… I am more than happy to talk for hours, meet up, provide references, and even draw up a contract. I’d also be thrilled to bake you pies all summer long! I realize you can’t get a good sense of me via e-mail, but if there’s any chance that you might be able to help me out, I would be so, so thankful. I promise that my intentions are totally honest and that you will get your money back. thanks!

Now, less than 12 hours later, I just stumbled across her blog posting…

Yesterday I asked my neighbors for a loan to get a CSA share at a local farm. By 10 am today, I had six (SIX!) offers from strangers, happy to loan a college student a couple hundred bucks. I couldn’t be a less safe bet (I mean, come on, I’m a college student who spent two weeks scrounging for food!), and yet so many people were willing to give me a shot. Wow.

So here’s my conclusion: there are, actually, more good people than bad people out there, but the problem is that they don’t ever really show their ‘goodness.’ If everyone were just a little less shy, then we could all do a better job helping each other out. That said, everybody should join the Front Porch Forum (frontporchforum.com)