Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:25 and sunset is 8:34 for 15 hours 9 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 31% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1762, Catherine the Great becomes Empress of Russia after having her husband, Peter III, arrested and forcing him to sign a document of abdication.
These recent years in Whitewater have seen a determined, if economically ignorant, effort to impede the construction of new housing in Whitewater. It has been an anti-growth, anti-progress effort to bolster a few local landlords at the expense of the community. Along the way, a self-interested few have advanced any number of outcome-driven arguments to preserve a housing oligopoly in this small American city. Needless to say, while an outcome-driven approach may serve the self-interest of a few, it’s an intellectually deficient approach. See Outcome-Driven Argumentation Is a Deficient Approach.
Consider, in a town with both a high school and a university, a contention advanced by these men while arguing against more single-family homes: that “jobs bring people” and that the way to bring more housing was first to create more jobs within the city.
CLAIMS:
“Jobs are what bring people in. Plain and simple. If you’re going to be an investor and you go into a community and put money into that community, you look at their industrial park.” Public comment, July 17, 2025, at Whitewater Community Development Authority.
“Jobs bring people. People do not bring jobs.” Public comment, October 13, 2025, at Whitewater Planning Commission.
“I would think that you would have businesses come in, give them the land for free so that you get the jobs here. And then people will commute here and then to those jobs and say, hey, this is a great place to live, so let’s buy a place or even rent.” Public comment, January 20, 2026, at Whitewater Common Council.
ASSESSMENT:
These claims about Whitewater’s economy are both too simplistic and, as it turns out, false. Anyone who understood Whitewater’s economy and presented it honestly would know that Whitewater already has more people working within the city than employed residents living within it. Indeed, there are nearly 1,000 people who work in this city but commute and live elsewhere.
A presentation from the Community Development Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Division of Extension notes both that there is no one-way relationship between jobs and residency and that — critically — Whitewater already has a surplus of local jobs over residents:
See City of Whitewater Strategic Plan 2023–2025, app. 3, Community and Economic Data, Presented March 8, 2023 (2023).
If jobs alone were sufficient to bring residents, more of Whitewater’s workers would already live here. We have large numbers of workers in the city without residences here. We already have the jobs, so to speak. (This libertarian blogger will not argue against even more job creation — keep going. The key point is that the claim that we need more jobs to justify housing is false.)
This worker surplus relative to resident workers has been true for years, and yet when speaking before Whitewater’s public bodies these gentlemen have the temerity to tell Whitewater’s own representatives that what’s well-known is false.
Their claims are feeble attempts to convince people to accept a self-serving falsehood over the truth of this community’s daily life. Anyone of normal powers of observation and familiarity with our local economy knows we have a jobs surplus in Whitewater. Who will you believe, so to speak: these landlords or your own eyes?
These claims are merely one more embarrassing attempt to undermine housing options for residents, for their own self-interest.
These gentlemen present themselves as bears but reason more like hamsters.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Lethal tornado tears through Chinese province amid devastating storms: