Barely two days into the new academic year, and Penn State Vice President Damon Sims showed up Tuesday at Ernesto Marin’s front door.
So did university police Director Tyrone Parham, State College borough Manager Tom Fountaine and Courtney Lennartz, vice president of the University Park Undergraduate Association.
If Marin was startled at first — and he looked it — he recovered quickly.
‘The house is a mess,’ the Penn State junior from Miami, Fla., conceded. ‘But you’re welcome to come in.’
The roving foursome from local officialdom politely declined, launching instead into the day’s key message:
Welcome. Enjoy the academic year. We hope you’ll get to know your neighbors and establish a rapport. Maintaining this community — for both students and more permanent, seasoned residents — is an all-hands endeavor, after all.
That, in general terms, was the theme behind the fourth annual LION Walk, a ‘Living in One Neighborhood’ community initiative sponsored by State College borough, Penn State and the Off-Campus Student Union.
More than 120 students, police officers and borough and university officials and employees joined forces for the two-hour walk Tuesday evening. Many of them split into 30 diverse teams of four or five people apiece, each group knocking on about two dozen doors in the Holmes-Foster, Highlands, West End or College Heights neighborhoods. (Click on the image above to open a couple photos from the LION Walk.)
Participants aimed to have several-minute conversations at each home they encountered, hoping to strike an upbeat, collaborative tone and foster healthy neighborhood relations for the 2011-’12 academic year. At each stop — even at houses where no one was home — they left behind a bag stuffed with material: a guide to neighborhood living, an alcohol-poisoning-aware card, details about a raffle, and other local information.
Lead event organizer Kate Doe, with State College borough, said the groups approached about 750 homes, including student and non-student residences — up from 500 homes last year.
‘That’s an amazing expansion,’ Doe said at a pre-walk gathering in the borough municipal building.
In fact, the LION Walk included nearly 40 percent more participants than it counted last year, when foul weather complicated plans, borough officials said.
But good weather wasn’t the only helpful element this time around. Sims, who oversees Penn State student affairs, said many more people have come to assist the walk for a number of reasons.
He cited, in part, a growing sentiment that the community needs to collaborate in setting a positive tone. Challenges such as State Patty’s Day, an unsanctioned drinking holiday, have ‘helped bring the community together in some important ways,’ Sims said.
The expansion of student rentals in traditionally single-family-home-oriented neighborhoods also has stirred increasing sensitivity in some quarters. (Borough planning commissioners recently endorsed a proposal for tighter limits on the student-rental growth.)
With all that as a backdrop, Sims’ LION Walk team — Lennartz, Parham, Fountaine and Sims himself — set out Tuesday evening to visit the 600, 700 and 800 blocks of West College Avenue.
They discovered a few things along the way — namely that a lot of rental houses there are home to university athletes — and listened to residents’ thoughts. Everyone they visited seemed to receive them well.
‘We’ve got really good kids,’ Carol Houtz, a decades-long resident on the 700 block, told the roving foursome. Brothers at a nearby fraternity named Houtz and her husband as honorary members, she said.
She said the young men also come to shovel snow from the Houtzes’ sidewalk.
‘People say, ‘Do you mind’ living among students?’ Houtz said. But ‘it’s the only place you live where you can get new neighbors every year.’
Sure, she said, she has had a few things stolen from her porch. Excessive drinking is probably to blame for that, and sometimes the neighborhood party noise can be excessive, too, Houtz said.
‘I think they drink too much,’ she said of some students.
By and large, however, Houtz appeared happy with her surroundings — and with the borough police department when she needs it.
Across the street, Penn State senior Andrew Cope said strong community relations begin with initiative.
That is, simply being outgoing and engaging can go a long way in fostering a welcoming environment, he said. Individual outreach — neighbor to neighbor, household to household — is a key in building trust and comfort, Cope went on.
‘When those things don’t happen, it’s hard to say that you are part of a community,’ he said.
