Your front-page article, "University of Strife" (The Argus, August 11), was greatly misleading and many of the statements made were designed to incriminate students, not landlords.

This is dangerous and irresponsible journalism, as the front-page weighting of this story could well be said to augment this "problem" and stir up rancour against the student population.

As the article mentions, the landlords are generally "faceless", so the problem is often shifted to the students. Indeed, many of the statements in the article made it clear the students are perceived to be the problem: "Hanover, The Level and Upper Lewes Road are being run down by the large numbers of undergraduates".

It is my view that students are doing no such thing, and any small disadvantages caused by students living in the city are greatly outweighed by the benefits attributed to having universities and a strong community of young people.

The statement "just 4,900 live in university halls of residence while the rest opt for cheap private rented accommodation" is simply not true.

The 25,100 students who do not live in halls of residence do so because they have no choice.

Halls are available only to first-year undergraduates, and from the second year onwards students must find their own accommodation - they do not "opt" to do so.

While Michael Cook's Hollywood-style wishes for "a street where everyone knows your name" are idyllic, most sensible people would agree that in the year 2005 in Brighton, they are simply not practical - those days have sadly gone.

It is the nature of the beast that in a university city there will be student residents who have "no attachment to their locality".

Despite agreeing with his view, I think it is unacceptable for landlords to allow their student-let properties to fall into a state of disrepair. It seems many people wrongfully feel animosity towards the students for this.

As news articles have reported recently, the average student is so in debt after their time studying that they are shouldered with this burden until the age of 35.

They certainly cannot afford to repair their houses during their time studying.

Unfortunately, Yvonne Brown, another of the contributors to the article, does not seem to give students much leeway either.

Her nightmare neighbours had "rubbish in the yard".

Surely not! Rubbish? In the yard, you say? Heaven forfend. Furthermore, Simon Tapp's apparent disgust that a student should go out of an evening to drink is equally Victorian.

As for the Green Party councillor Bill Randall's comments, they are perhaps the most outrageous of them all. Applying "tougher controls to restrict the number of buy-to-lets"? How? What would they achieve? If the houses weren't bought to let, they would, in all likelihood, be left uninhabited (possibly derelict), given the current housing market, and many students would have nowhere to live.

Is it not obvious that the restrictions, if any, should govern the state of landlords' premises, not the quantity of them?

Furthermore, his claim that the landlords are "taking a great deal from the community and not putting much back" entirely misses the point of let-out properties - it is the residents (the students) who contribute to the community, not the landlords directly.

-Lee Reynolds, Lewes