FREE WHITEWATER

City, Development, Hip & Prosperous, Local Government, New Whitewater

Which Homeowners for Whitewater?

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The preceding post, Who Should Live in Whitewater?, was about immigration. Here’s a second question, a bit more specific: which homeowners for Whitewater?

One hears repeatedly that out city could use more families with children. I don’t disagree: it would help our public schools to have a stable, or growing, school-age population.

Here’s where I depart from others’ plans to attract more families with children: I believe that the best program to attract families is one that invites all prospective homeowners who’ll show concern and pride for their properties.

Unmarried couples, married couples without children, married couples with children, unmarried couples with children, relatives sharing a house, houses with tenants: demand from among those who’ll care for their properties should be the principal concern. Each of these kinds of prospective homeowners could advance that goal.

Efforts to target existing families with children have been mostly ineffectual, are wrongly biased, and are misguided (in any event). One knows these efforts have been ineffectual as the fundamental composition among all Whitewater homeowners hasn’t changed much over the last decade. They’re also biased in a way I think wrong: government shouldn’t be thinking about one kind of homebuyer over another. It’s enough to have a buyer who can manage his or her own house properly.

In fact, it’s more than enough to have buyers like that: it’s a community gain. When new homewoners of whatever situation share a common desire to improve their homes, Whitewater becomes attractive to other buyers, including those with children.

The way to get more families with children to find Whitewater desirable is to stop focusing on attracting only those families, and commit instead to attracting anyone who’ll be a good steward of his property.

Free Markets, Immigration, Labor, Law, New Whitewater

Who Should Live in Whitewater?

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It’s a simple question, with a simple answer: anyone who’d like to live here.

Who those many will be, ten or twenty years on, I am not sure. One may be confident that the city will be more diverse, but in which ways there’s no certainty.

(It’s better that there is no certainty, for if there were, we’d not merely know the future, but likely know it because we were trying to control the time from now until then.)

Did some want to bring Arizona’s laws to Wisconsin, and — of all places — Whitewater? One well knows that there were some in this town who wanted exactly that, who dreamed of making something like the Star Packaging Raid the standard practice of this beautiful city. Their dreams were, in truth, the dark nightmares of intolerance and unfairness. They stood against free choice, voluntary exchange, and free markets.

The unreconstructed, nativist impulse to restrict immigration into Whitewater – an impulse that was the fuel of lies, rogue policing, prejudice, and cruelty – is finished in this city, as it is now finished in most of America. (See, along these lines, Rubio Shows Opposition to Immigration Reform is an Inch Deep.)

Those who sought to torment and roust Whitewater’s immigrants, and to build a career or legacy upon it, may now look around and see the ruin of their ambitions. It would have been better for all Whitewater if this rebuke had come sooner, but come it has.

There’ll be rear-guard actions and ferocious kicking and screaming – but a Know Nothing impulse has met its deserved rejection by the majority, a majority with a respect for tolerance and pluralism.

We’re a better city today, and will be a better city in the generation to come, for having turned away from that dark course toward a better one.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.29.13

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Good morning.

It’s a warm Tuesday of thunderstorms and sixty-degree temperatures ahead for Whitewater.

On this day in 1845, Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven:

Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” beginning “Once upon a midnight dreary,” is published on this day in the New York Evening Mirror.

Poe’s dark and macabre work reflected his own tumultuous and difficult life. Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was orphaned at age three and went to live with the family of a Richmond, Virginia, businessman. Poe enrolled in a military academy but was expelled for gambling. He later studied briefly at the University of Virginia.

In 1827, Poe self-published a collection of poems. Six years later, his short story “MS Found in a Bottle” won $50 in a story contest. He edited a series of literary journals, including the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond starting in 1835, and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia, starting in 1839. Poe’s excessive drinking got him fired from several positions. His macabre work, often portraying motiveless crimes and intolerable guilt that induces growing mania in his characters, was a significant influence on such European writers as Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and even Dostoyevsky.

Google-a-Day poses a question of literature and musicals: “Who scored the musical version of the movie that’s based on Patricia Resnick’s story?”

Business, City

Design and the Downtown

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Downtown Whitewater’s (DTWW) design committee met today, at 8 AM. DTWW is the publicly-subsidized business-advocacy association for this small city’s center-of-town merchants.

There’s much to be said for design, for the look and feel of a place. In the end, however, there are few more attention-grabbing sights than empty storefronts. (Peeling paint and trash on sidewalks are similarly harmful to commercial success.)

One still sees stores with nothing but empty windows and large for-rent (or sale) signs. No decoration, no displays, just a rental sign, awkwardly positioned in a window.

There’s probably someone who foolishly thinks that merely displaying a large FOR RENT sign makes a shop easier to rent.

It doesn’t.

First, if these signs — alone — worked so well, those vacant shops wouldn’t be crying out for tenants month after month, to no avail.

Second, the empty window space only tells prospective tenants that some landlords in the district are too ignorant to see how debilitating the look of empty space is.

Third, it also tells existing merchants that nearby landlords and agents leaving only signs in their empty windows don’t give a damn about the overall look and feel of the downtown. The sign in a vacant shop may say FOR RENT but the message for the rest of the area is GO TO HELL.

A hundred commercials can’t overcome a prospective merchant’s walk around the block.

Private shops – including empty ones – should be free to decorate as they wish.

They’re not free, however, to assume that most people don’t see and understand the fundamentals of a successful look and feel. One wants this downtown to succeed, but those with property there are going to have to resonate a better understanding.

Emptiness, candidly, is as far from success as one can get.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.28.13

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Good morning.

Monday in the Whippet City begins with drizzle and fog, and a high of forty-one.

This morning, Downtown Whitewater’s Design Committee meets at 8 AM. This evening, the open session of Whitewater’s School Board begins at 7 PM.

On this day in 1986, America suffered one of her most tragic space-faring disasters:

At 11:38 a.m. EST, on January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Christa McAuliffe is on her way to becoming the first ordinary U.S. civilian to travel into space. McAuliffe, a 37-year-old high school social studies teacher from New Hampshire, won a competition that earned her a place among the seven-member crew of the Challenger. She underwent months of shuttle training but then, beginning January 23, was forced to wait six long days as the Challenger’s launch countdown was repeatedly delayed because of weather and technical problems. Finally, on January 28, the shuttle lifted off.

Seventy-three seconds later, hundreds on the ground, including Christa’s family, stared in disbelief as the shuttle exploded in a forking plume of smoke and fire. Millions more watched the wrenching tragedy unfold on live television. There were no survivors.

On 1.28.1959, the Packers made a wise choice:

1959 – Lombardi Named Packers Coach
On this date Vince Lombardi was named head coach of the Packers. He had been the offensive backfield coach of the New York Giants for the previous five seasons. Lombardi went on to coach the Packers for nine years, winning five NFL Championships and victories in Super Bowls I and II. [Source: Packers.com]

Google-a-Day asks a history and geography question: “What city, that became a capital in 1991, saw protesters gather to oppose the elimination of a fuel subsidy that doubled the cost of gasoline in their country?”

Twitter

Recent Tweets, 1.20 to 1.26

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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.27.13

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Good morning.

So, we’ve a near-certainty of a wintry mix for Whitewater today, with freezing rain and sleet, and a high of thirty-three.

On this day in 1967, a tragic setback struck the Apollo program, as “Astronauts Virgil I. ”Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo I spacecraft at Cape Kennedy, Fla.”

On this day in 1888, the National Geographic Society comes to life for “the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge”:

The 33 men who originally met and formed the National Geographic Society were a diverse group of geographers, explorers, teachers, lawyers, cartographers, military officers and financiers. All shared an interest in scientific and geographical knowledge, as well as an opinion that in a time of discovery, invention, change and mass communication, Americans were becoming more curious about the world around them. With this in mind, the men drafted a constitution and elected as the Society’s president a lawyer and philanthropist named Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Neither a scientist nor a geographer, Hubbard represented the Society’s desire to reach out to the layman.

Nine months after its inception, the Society published its first issue of National Geographic magazine. Readership did not grow, however, until Gilbert H. Grosvenor took over as editor in 1899. In only a few years, Grosvenor boosted circulation from 1,000 to 2 million by discarding the magazine’s format of short, overly technical articles for articles of general interest accompanied by photographs. National Geographic quickly became known for its stunning and pioneering photography, being the first to print natural-color photos of sky, sea and the North and South Poles.

The Society used its revenues from the magazine to sponsor expeditions and research projects that furthered humanity’s understanding of natural phenomena. In this role, the National Geographic Society has been instrumental in making possible some of the great achievements in exploration and science. To date, it has given out more than 1,400 grants, funding that helped Robert Peary journey to the North Pole, Richard Byrd fly over the South Pole, Jacques Cousteau delve into the sea and Jane Goodall observe wild chimpanzees, among many other projects.

Here’s a Society clip describing a possible discovery about parrotlets:

Google-a-Day asks about someone who gave a gift: “Who presented Tonga’s royal family with the animal that, when he died, was believed to be one of the longest-living animals on record?”