Whitewater, Wisconsin’s monthly Planning Commission meeting took place on Monday, September 15th.
Part of the meeting — the principal part, I think — involved a discussion of re-zoning a neighborhood near our local college campus. Much of the neighborhood has evolved from single family homes into multi-unit student apartments, and our community faced the question: Should the neighborhood be re-zoned to reflect the change in use, and permit additional transformation without regulatory interference?
I thought that the meeting went very well, especially considering how angry some residents and their political champions are about any transition of any neighborhood at any time to student housing in our college town.
One often expects to see an angry mob, furious at an economy that they cannot control, but that government must, just must, control for them.
Something like this —
Some are so worked up that they’re convinced natural change to a neighborhood is pestilence and plague.
It’s all ‘death’ of a neighborhood now.
It cannot be dead if people still live there. It’s still a neighborhood; it’s just not what some might have wanted, but that others — residents just as much — do want.
So when students move in, it becomes a dead neighborhood, a desert, or (to use a term from Judge Dredd) the curséd earth. I’ve remarked before that some speak of students as though they were rats, and at the time I though that no stronger manner of description would be available. I was wrong; opponents of student housing anywhere off campus had depths yet to plumb.
Something like this —
The initial re-zoning proposal from a consulting firm that our city retains was amended before the evening was over; the proposal as the evening began called for the preservation of a small pocket of single family homes in the proposed multi-unit area.
I understand why: the residents once asked for it. Later, seeing that it might limit their re-sale options, they came to oppose a limited single-family pocket at the meeting. They had the same problem as that of Sen. Kerry on another matter: they were for it before they were against it.
Part of good planning for the consultant would have been to see that a single-family pocket was a bad idea, no matter how much some might have initially wanted it. Part of leadership would have been for this city administration to say that although residents once asked for it, it was a bad idea, both for them and the neighborhood.
The re-zoning (including an amendment that removed the single-family pocket from the proposed multi-unit rezoning) passed on a vote of 7-0.
Where was the city administration in all this?
Hedging and equivocating.
Even the city manager’s endorsement of this re-zoning proposal was tepid and pandering. It was tepid because he never declared for the proposal in a simple, straightforward way. He might just declare: I support this change, or I oppose it.
Most people understand that his hesitant manner indicates support, but it’s hardly inspiring.
What’s pandering though, both intellectually and practically, is the suggestion that if the Tratt Street neighborhood becomes higher density, then as matter of balance other neighborhoods should be enforced to lower density.
Practically, this administration will be unlikely to enforce zoning requirements elsewhere in the city effectively. It’s just an attempt to placate a few angry people. This administration has had little appreciable success anywhere in the city with enforcement — it’s been an over and under-enforcement problem. (See, Whitewater Common Council Meeting for 9/2: Student Housing (Part 1).)
Intellectually, even if it’s true that the housing imbalance between single family and multi-dwelling units is the biggest problem in the city, the administration cannot redress that imbalance appreciably through zoning restrictions elsewhere in the city.
Only additional single-family homes, perhaps on the periphery of the city, will appreciably shift the proportional balance (one that is now in favor of apartments).
We have a black market in rental units because a few politicians and their angry supporters will not allow a free, open market to permit more apartment options. I have argued in favor of those options. (See, Student Housing in Whitewater: Our Mistaken and Repetitive Approach.)
Some want to illustrate how markets are dishonest, but the real dishonesty is pretending that we haven’t limited selfishly the opportunities for an entire community.
Let someone build modern multi-unit apartment buildings and these ‘transition’ and ‘conversion’ fears will go away. Otherwise, consign yourself to a perpetual enforcement war against student apartments in every neighborhood of the city, without end.
The Planning Commission made the right choice Monday night, but this matter is unresolved.