Being located one block from the University, the only reason why someone would want to live at 143 Fearing Street would be either to attend or work at the school. Unfortunately, over the years UMass has deteriorated both as an educational institution and a neighbor. Since the time that I purchased 143 Fearing Street and attended school at the University, the cost of education has gone up and the quality of education has gone down.
But what is not captured in the statistics about UMass is the deterioration of the attitude of the students who attend the school. At one time, attending a university was a privilege granted to the few who could afford the years from their lives to study their chosen profession. At that time, the students who attended UMass had more of a reverence for why they were there and a respect for the community they lived in while they were at school. Now the attitude of the students who attend UMass is that going to college is their right, and they feel they have the right to destroy the town where they go to school like rock musicians trashing a hotel room.
Now that the students’ attitudes have changed, 143 Fearing Street is one of the worst places in town to own a home. It is a small wooden house that UMass has grown up around. The Southwest residential towers are the largest on campus, housing 5,500 students in five high-rise towers and eleven low-rise residence halls, and are located only one block from 143 Fearing Street. Worse, 143 Fearing Street is the last residential house on the street that students travel to get to and from the Southwest residential towers and the bars in the center of Amherst. This means that on any given weekend, hundreds of students walk by the house on their way into town with a goal of blowing off steam and then walk back past the house drunk on their way to the dorms.
Because it is the last house before the dorms, and students are not allowed to carry beer bottles with them back onto campus, every weekend they throw them into the bushes and onto the lawn. Trying to maintain 143 Fearing Street is a constant process of pulling bottles out of the bushes and picking broken glass up off of the walk. On particularly rowdy nights, there were even times when I needed to clean the egg off my car. Worse, it is common to see students stop to urinate in the bushes before continuing on to the campus.
A friend of mine kept horses and surrounded their pen with an electric fence. One of his dogs had a habit of raising his leg and urinating on fence posts around his property. This dog had a particularly unpleasant experience when he decided to pee on the electric fence. I never did it, but I had the idea of putting an electric fence around my bushes so that students peeing on my property would have that same unpleasant experience. I asked my lawyer if I could actually set this up, but he told me that I would be liable if anyone actually got hurt. As I learned when I lived in Amherst, there are no laws that protect you when you live at 143 Fearing Street.