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.