Late one night in Cargill St, I went to pick some rubbish off the road - a beer carton, from memory - to avoid backing my car over it.
Some young people were nearby.
One rushed forward with the self-important air of a boy scout doing a good deed, picked up the offending article and threw it over the fence. I expressed my dismay.
''Oh, but it's not your house, is it?'' he replied. It was my house.
My house, my fence, my garden where almost daily I picked up rubbish that had been thrown there.
I've long pondered the assumptions embedded in that reply: that no ''old'' people lived on Cargill St?
That it was OK to throw rubbish over a fence if the homeowner didn't catch you?
Presumably the same applied to other delights of living on Cargill St: windscreen wipers ripped off, rubbish bins tipped over, garden planters smashed.
It is experiences like this that prompted me to appeal to the Dunedin City Council for tighter controls on building in City Rise, and when I picked up the Otago Daily Times the next morning (12.5.15) I discovered I was not a lone voice.
The main point of my submission to the council's long-term plan was that City Rise should not be abandoned to any one group of people, students or otherwise.
The streets around the university and polytechnic, populated almost exclusively by students, provide a stark object lesson.
The flight of families and elderly residents from this area has had drastic consequences.
I challenge anyone to walk down the north end of Castle St and say the amount of rubbish and broken glass there would be acceptable in their neighbourhood, or that the media are exaggerating the extent of the problem.
A small minority of students is responsible for the social disorder and litter.
If condemnation from their peers was widespread and overt they would soon stop.
I doubt these students burn couches and throw bottles into their neighbours' gardens at home during the holidays and they would not trash Castle St week in and week out if ''regular'' people lived there.
''The drink made me do it.''
Yeah, right. While I don't discount the role of cheap alcohol in student disorder, it's perfectly possible to be drunk every day without burning a couch, or ending up legless on Lovelock Ave with your beautiful long hair streaming down the road in a river of vomit. (Mid-afternoon, St Patrick's Day, 2014. I hope her mother never found out.)
Behaviour is more conditioned by social norms than by the amount of alcohol consumed.
This is the view of British anthropologist Anne Rice, a consultant on substance abuse for the British Army, where binge drinking is endemic.
She found soldiers keep drinking but mysteriously manage to moderate their behaviour when stationed in Gibraltar, where staggering about drunk and urinating in public leads to harsh penalties and social disapprobation.
The solution: send our kids to Gibraltar. Or perhaps Musselburgh. Or St Kilda.
Anywhere there is a mix of residents.
I talk from experience. I live two blocks from the university campus.
Noisy parties and wailing sirens regularly keep us awake, but the mayhem never emanates from our complex of flats - some owned by retirees, others tenanted by students.
Some years start badly, but the students soon adapt to the complex's prevailing culture.
It takes a village to raise a student, but New Zealanders don't like interfering with other people's kids and don't like rocking the boat. However, the disorder in the student area has repercussions for the whole city.
We should applaud those working together to find a solution and avoid sniping at those focused on a different corner of the elephant from our own.
Minimising or excusing the situation encourages the appalling and shameful victimisation of those who do speak out.
The solution will no doubt be multi-factorial: addressing our unhealthy drinking culture, harsher penalties for disorder, vandalism and littering and perhaps alcohol law reform.
It might take years to change behaviour in the inner student area. In the meantime, we must also safeguard the surrounding areas.
A healthy community is not a monoculture; it is home to people of all ages and all walks of life who care for their surroundings and each other.
Every family home converted to studio rooms represents the loss of permanent residents whose mere presence as they go about their lives adds a civilising influence that Campus Watch, despite its sterling work, cannot hope to emulate.
Meg Davidson is a Dunedin writer.
