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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

City, Planning, University

The University’s Role in Town-Gown Issues

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Yesterday, I posted on housing density in the city, and the push to move sudent housing to the northwestern part of Whitewater.  See, Old Whitewater Dreams of a Student Rez. 

A recap: the plan won’t work because (1) student housing is widespread in the center of the city by voluntary choice that cannot be undone and (2) pointing to the northwest corner of the city without actual, additional housing in that area is an empty solution.   

(That’s the point of a reservation theme: wanting people to live in an area without market forces, or even state forces, to support housing isn’t a practical solution.)

A longtime reader, very sharp, wrote in reply to yesterday’s post, and one of his points was that I had neglected the university’s role in all this.  (He had several very solid points, all appreciated; I wrote yesterday in direct reply to his message.)  

He’s right, of course: I seldom write about the university.  It’s my mistake. 

But what of the university, in all these years of contention over student housing? 

The easiest way, really, to think about the university is as a planned community, where some of the consequences of their planning are confined to campus, but other consequences reach far beyond.  In this regard, university planning has been a decidedly mixed bag.  

There have been unalloyed university successes (new on-campus classrooms, more competitive enrollment, nationally-ranked athletic programs). 

There have also been some equally obvious problems: (grant-chasing for a now-struggling tech park building, failure to provide sufficient housing options, a laughable tendency toward exaggeration of faculty and administration accomplishments, and a descent into crony-capitalist schemes that – in the unlikely event that any of them should ever turn a profit – would benefit primarily a few salaried, white-collar academics. 

The accomplishments of many the university’s athletes – genuine and enduring triumphs – are among the best of recent achievements.  Those young men and women did not pretend to be nationally talented – they truly were and are. 

By contrast, the university administration’s tendency toward professional exaggeration – silly insistence that everything is the best, the greatest, in all North America – is embarrassing.  Many in the city, knowledgeable and well-read, are neither shocked nor awed by ceaseless puffery.  It’s very close to a 24/7 confidence game, the marketing of exaggerations as truths. 

The university (1) has seen an increased student demand for residential housing but not committed to similar increases in student housing on campus, (2) has spent money on headline-grabbing projects over additional housing, (3) may not have the money (or the will) to build more housing now.

What’s to be done, if the money’s not there for big construction?  (I’m not sure it is, and I’m even more convinced that the city’s fiscal account, weak economy, and hectoring over zoning only further reduce the incentive for additional, high-density private construction.) 

Quick suggestions for the university administration:

1.  The university will have to advocate for students, and commit to this community, beyond committees that have made no practical difference.  There will have to be a day-and-night effort to aid the integration of students into the whole community. 

How do I know a few committees have made no practical difference? 

Because if they had, we wouldn’t be arguing about zoning and enforcement all these years later.

2.  Commit to additional, residential construction near the (public) Starin Residence and the (private) Element. 

The university has asked Whitewater for millions in city bonds (municipal debt) to fund the tech park.  It’s time to seek money for residential housing from non-city sources.  

3.  Private works better than public: time to lobby Whitewater to create enterprise-style zoning for construction in the northwest corner of the city.  Here’s a goal: the fewest regulations possible in any Wisconsin community for that area. 

I heard a councilmember in March declare that he didn’t want Whitewater to wind up like Houston.  It won’t; between Houston and our stagnant present there’s ample room for a very low-regulation area.

It’s unpersuasive that Old Whitewater’s stalwarts want building in the northwestern corner if they can’t – or willfully won’t – understand that their regulatory schemes and profligate spending have impaired private capital investment. 

Pointing to the northwest corner isn’t enough: there will have to be buildings there.

4.   The university should do everything it can to get its faculty to live in town.  They work here, why won’t they live here?  I’d not compel, but the university’s not even trying.  I am well aware of recent academic studies on housing that (a) compared Whitewater with other, nearby towns, and (b) of student housing in particular. 

Overall, though, what has the university done to encourage faculty to become residents?  Not much, as more and more of them seem to be living beyond Whitewater.

I’d choose Whitewater over any other city, and they would, too, if only there’d be a greater effort.  (Telling people sotto voce that it’s better to live in Fort Atkinson is both discouraging and wrong.  Whitewater’s the place to live.)

These are hot-button issues, but I don’t write to be popular.  I write because I believe these points to be true.  I know that the Old Guard prefers to discourage alternative points of view.   They may prefer as they wish, but to no avail; they’ll never have that closed and controlled media scene again.     

More ahead, tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Zoning Debates are Often Just a Distraction from Failed Criminal Enforcement Strategies.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 10.9.13

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Good morning.

Our midweek will be sunny, with a high of seventy-one, and south winds around 5 mph.

On this day in 1635, Roger Williams is banished from Massachusetts. He later founds his own settlement:

Religious dissident Roger Williams is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the General Court of Massachusetts. Williams had spoken out against the right of civil authorities to punish religious dissension and to confiscate Indian land.

After leaving Massachusetts, Williams, with the assistance of the Narragansett tribe, established a settlement at the junction of two rivers near Narragansett Bay, located in present-day Rhode Island. He declared the settlement open to all those seeking freedom of conscience and the removal of the church from civil matters, and many dissatisfied Puritans came. Taking the success of the venture as a sign from God, Williams named the community “Providence.”

Among those who found a haven in the religious and political refuge of the Rhode Island Colony were Anne Hutchinson–like Williams, she had been exiled from Massachusetts for religious reasons–some of the first Jews to settle in North America, and the Quakers. In Providence, Roger Williams also founded the first Baptist church in America and edited the first dictionary of Native-American languages.

Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about satellite launches. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)

China has built and launched a satellite for which African nation?

City, Local Government, Planning

Old Whitewater Dreams of a Student Rez

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Poverty_in_Colombia_by_Luis_Perez-480

Old Whitewater – an outlook rather than an age, a group rather than an individual – is having the hardest time adjusting to a changing city.  All these years, and all their many political champions, and still they’ve not solved even a single major problem facing the city.  Residential harmony between town and gown is one those problems, and although not the worst, it’s still unremedied.

All their talk, all their task forces and ad hoc committees, all their manipulation of the levers of power and boundless sense of entitlement, and what’s their solution? It’s a student reservation on the northwest corner of the city.    

Well, gentlemen, you’re years late and millions short on a scheme to insist that high density be located only on the edge of the city.  You may point all you want to comprehensive plans that suggest this area for high density, but you’ve done too little, and it’s much too late, to make that scheme work now. 

Having wasted millions on failed TIDs (and we have more than one in trouble), millions on a nearly-broke tech-park building, lies on supposed big-ticket development schemes, all the while 44% of the children in the area are economically disadvantaged, you’ve no credibility whatever on political or economic solutions.   

The Old Whitewater faction ran this city for the last generation, and in only one direction: into the ground.  Look around, and see the truth of their dishonest insistence that all is well: they’re reduced to last-minute whining that the Zoning Rewrite is part of some plot to increase density in the center of the city.

No, and no again: over the last decade, voluntary transactions between buyers and sellers in a free market have led to increases in density in parts of this city.  These increases have not been from planning, but from free choices of ordinary people. 

Here’s Old Whitewater’s predicament: hundreds and hundreds of other people, over a dozen years, have rejected their restrictive planning and proposed ghetto in favor of an integrated and diverse city.  These many rejected that other narrow way, despite insistence from a reactionary few that they are so very important and matter so very much above other residents.

In the same way, the city has rejected Old Whitewater’s political candidates, time and again.  They’ve no effective clout to drive their preferred national, state, or even local candidates to victory in Whitewater.  When the whole town votes, when all residents with the franchise make a choice, that tired faction’s candidates lose. 

They no longer command a political majority of Whitewater’s voters at any level of government.  They’ve just a string of losses.  Their endorsements are more a curse than a blessing.

In the marketplace, where people vote with their dollars and their feet, Old Whitewater has lost even more: no planner has made the center of the city a high density area; people voted with their money, time, and ingenuity to find a place within the city. 

Let’s be clear: so many of Old Whitewater, who would call themselves proud conservatives, are truly little more than regulatory reactionaries – they talk free markets, but they truly want regulated markets that are to their peculiar liking.   

It’s more than odd that men who spent a lifetime on the public payroll (that is, supping on the taxed wages of privately productive citizens), often in university positions, want to shunt students into one part of the city.  They’ve profited from students’ tuition and Wisconsinites’ taxes, yet they’re among the leaders who seek to herd those very students into a narrow corridor. 

How zoning in a particular neighborhood will go I cannot predict with certainty.  Of the future of the city, however, one can be confident.  Old Whitewater’s demographically doomed, and a New Whitewater – more energetic, productive, tolerant, and of broad-based prosperity – will supplant the complaining faction that now descends into its very own autumn.

Update – Coming tomorrow: a post on the university’s role in town-gown issues.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 10.8.13

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Good morning.

Tuesday in the Whippet City will be sunny with a high of seventy-three.

Tonight, as part of a years-long series, there will be a joint Common Council-Planning Commission meeting to discuss the Zoning Re-write Project, beginning at 5:30 PM. One can expect all the fuss in the world over this, from more than one politically unreconstructed resident, as though there never was and never will be a greater issue for Whitewater than this. (More on this topic later.)

On this day in 1871, the Chicago Fire begins:

…flames spark in the Chicago barn of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary, igniting a two-day blaze that kills between 200 and 300 people, destroys 17,450 buildings, leaves 100,000 homeless and causes an estimated $200 million (in 1871 dollars; $3 billion in 2007 dollars) in damages. Legend has it that a cow kicked over a lantern in the O’Leary barn and started the fire, but other theories hold that humans or even a comet may have been responsible for the event that left four square miles of the Windy City, including its business district, in ruins. Dry weather and an abundance of wooden buildings, streets and sidewalks made Chicago vulnerable to fire. The city averaged two fires per day in 1870; there were 20 fires throughout Chicago the week before the Great Fire of 1871….

At the same time, in Wisconsin, a fire also strikes, and causes greater loss of life:

1871 – Peshtigo Fire

On this date Peshtigo, Wisconsin was devastated by a fire which took 1,200 lives. The fire caused over $2 million in damages and destroyed 1.25 million acres of forest. This was the greatest human loss due to fire in the history of the United States. The Peshtigo Fire was overshadowed by the Great Chicago fire which occurred on the same day, killing 250 people and lasting three days. While the Chicago fire is said to have started by a cow kicking over a lantern, it is uncertain how the Peshtigo fire began. [Source: Wisconsin Electronic Reader]

Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about basketballs. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)

In 2006, the National Basketball Association introduced synthetic basketballs to replace the traditional leather ones. How different is the bounce of these new balls?

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 10.7.13

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Good morning.

Monday will be mostly sunny, with a high of sixty-four, and west winds of 10 to 15 mph.

China, one reads, faces an insect threat:

The world’s biggest hornet is wreaking havoc in northwestern China, where 42 people have died after being swarmed and stung in Shaanxi Province, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua.

Some 1,600 others have been injured since the outbreak of the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) began in July, the regional health authority reported, and attacks continue even as local authorities take action, including destroying hundreds of hives and improving medical treatment for victims.

See, along these lines, Beware the Giant Hornets:

On this day in 1774, Wisconsin’s French flare becomes formal:

1774

1774 – Wisconsin Becomes Part of Quebec
On this date Britain passed the Quebec Act, making Wisconsin part of the province of Quebec. Enacted by George III, the act restored the French form of civil law to the region. The Thirteen Colonies considered the Quebec Act as one of the “Intolerable Acts,” as it nullified Western claims of the coast colonies by extending the boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River on the south and to the Mississippi River on the west. [Source: Avalon Project at the Yale Law School]

Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about meteorites. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)

Where is the largest crater on earth produced by a crashing meteorite?