This article originally appeared in the Back Bay Courant, October 6, 1998.

About 85,000 undergraduates flood the city each September, looking for a place to live. Around 18,000 of them can be accommodated by local schools' dormitories. The remaining 79 percent have to find a place to live. Most of them, as it turns out, live in three neighborhoods — Back Bay, Fenway and Allston/Brighton.

This is, to put it mildly, a problem.

I used to live at 80 Commonwealth Avenue. A half-dozen times a year we would find ourselves wakened at 3:00 AM by an incessantly buzzing doorbell and screaming from the street, "Where's the party!?"

It turns out that 80 Commonwealth Avenue in Newton is right by Boston College. We were the victims of inebriated students who had ended up in the wrong town.

Our difficulties were nothing compared to the 300-plus residents who jammed a City Council hearing last week in Brighton to complain about student problems. And they're nothing compared to the daily insults endured by residents of the Symphony and Allston communities or of half a dozen other small neighborhoods.

The real problem with students is not noise and loud parties and trash. Those are all issues that can — with enough vigorous enforcement — be managed. The real problem is that too many students can undermine neighborhoods themselves.

They do so because they drive up rental prices while at the same time shrinking the supply of housing available for families and other longer-term residents. Once stable communities invaded by students seeking housing lose their cohesiveness. Residents are driven out when housing becomes unaffordable. Student-dominated neighborhoods lose political power as well — students hardly ever participate in the local civic life (including voting) of the communities in which they dwell.

The solution to all of this is obvious. Colleges and universities should take responsibility for housing their own students. They should, in other words, build dorms.

A couple of the area's larger institutions are doing just that. Boston University claims that, once construction of its Commonwealth Avenue Armory project is finished, it will be housing 75 percent of its students. Boston College claims to be at that level now. But most colleges and universities are far from those levels.

How to right this wrong? The city needs to commit to require every academic institution to house most if not all of its students. The city has the power to do this. Larger institutions are usually subject to a master planning process, run by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, that can be used to specify enrollment levels and housing strategies. Those master plans should require a concrete commitment by every institution to build dorms and get their students out of private housing.

But residents will have to offer something in return as well. Building dormitories is not easy. The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy has just had to back off on a proposed dorm on Huntington Avenue because of residents' opposition to the site. And Northeastern University faces an enormous political struggle over its plans to build student housing along Columbus Avenue and Tremont Street in Roxbury.

So, in sum, large student populations are like nuclear waste. We all agree nuclear waste shouldn't be strewn about our neighborhoods, and is better disposed of in self-contained, secure facilities. The problem is, we all want it disposed of in someone else's backyard.