And now I suddenly feel the need to stand up on behalf of people four years younger than myself and say: drunk college douchebags are people, too. They have equal rights and an equal stake in governance, too.

Sure, but the issue in this case isn't about rights or governance, it's about local issues caused by non-local individuals. Vancouver has a similar issue, where the drinking/clubbing/partying district, Granville Street in the heart of Vancouver's downtown, is a huge destination for partygoers from all over the region; not just Vancouver, but outlying cities and suburbs as well; a city of around 600k has to take on the responsibility of hosting the drunks, clubgoers, partiers, concertgoers, etc. of a region of 2.8m people, and many of those party people live and work outside of the city, pay taxes outside of the city, pay rent outside of the city, and only come downtown to party.

That results in an increased cost of policing the area (since all drinking and clubbing establishments are forced together), the increased cost of cleaning (everything from garbage and smashed bottles to a surprising amount of vomit), increased regulation, transportation congestion, medical care, etc.

It also results in a neighbourhood which goes from a mostly pedestrian mall-esque area full of shops and boutiques to a shitshow where you might get punched for no reason (as happened to a friend's boyfriend as they were walking home from the movie theatre; shattered his jaw, which had to be wired shut).

The problem isn't necessarily 'outsiders are bad', but rather that these people come downtown, drink, have a good time (or a bad time), but feel no responsibility for the area. They don't have to walk through it after a bad night to get to work and see the catastrophe they caused, so they may never realize the social and economic impact of bad behaviour. If it were their mailbox kicked open or their doorstep puked on or their neighbour hospitalized, it might encourage more restraint, or at least more consideration, but unfortunately that's not usually the case.

I think that's generally the problem with the 'drinking district' in a lot of cities; people from everywhere but there go there to party and have fun, and if they don't, they cause problems and then head on home, lost in the crowd, and probably don't even remember it the next day.

There would be a lot fewer problems with out-of-towners throwing up in "drinking districts" if:

1) Nightlife and fun weren't utterly concentrated into single small districts, forcing people to commute to go out for an evening.

2) Cities and towns dealt civilly with college students instead of treating them as pinatas.

Nightlife isn't concentrated into small eras because of licensing. If you want bars and nightclubs spread out through an area, you are arguing for liquor licensing.

In neither the Vancouver example nor the Wrigleyville example is the problem "college students".

Tax/fine the bars?

I somehow doubt that those people would stop going out and getting drunk during the evening if there were fewer/no taxis. They'd just be driving themselves.

Sure, maybe you could push it out of one neighborhood and into another, and the residents of Wrigleyville might be all for that, but is that actually much of a net gain for society in general?

I'd rather have drunks clogging sidewalks and taxis clogging roads, than drunks clogging roads.

He's referring to the liquor licenses, I think.

I see... I guess one possible solution would be to make liquor licenses non-transferable, and then only issue them to businesses that are not located close to some threshold of other license holders.

Calibrating those thresholds to not generate more traffic (as people barhop with cabs instead of walking between bars) and to not kill the nightlife completely would probably proof challenging though.

If you only issue licenses to businesses that aren't close to other businesses, you've created an artificial scarcity. That's fine, but the economically optimal solution to scarce licensing is auctioning or, if that doesn't work, secondary markets.

The same happens to all areas with bars were night life is concentrated, whether there's taxi present or not.

There are completely similar places were ("drunk bar clientele from outside the area makes it difficult to live in") without any taxis (e.g in Amsterdam or Barcelona). Or places where the drunks prefer to drive (don't ask). In a dense city people can just walk there from a different area, or use the metro.