There are two stories from yesterday’s Janesville Gazette that describe the pressures of student housing:
Students Spread Out in Whitewater
City, School Address Housing Concerns.
The stories ably describe arguments that residents of Whitewater have have made against student housing for years with no change in demand.
I certainly don’t believe that demand for student housing is the single biggest challenge facing the city. For an affected homeowner, though, it might seem that way. (I’d easily say municipal leadership and administration of justice is a far greater challenge.)
It’s typical of Whitewater’s anti-market impulses that the way out of these challenges seems to be more “aggressive enforcement.”
It’s a futile option. There’s a conflict because there’s an unwillingness to meet demand for student housing. Attempts to restrict supply through ordinance enforcement will prove intrusive and ineffectual.
The answer to demand for housing would be to permit construction of several off campus multi-unit student apartment buildings with typical amenities.
I would guess, however, that Dane Checolinski, a UW-Whitewater student
and member of our Housing Task force has it right:
These people don’t want students living in their neighborhood, but they have no suggestions for where students should live,” he said. “They want the university to house every single student.”
(This observation applies only to the most obstinate critics of student housing; others are more accommodating.)
Unwillingness to accept a few significant off campus student apartments leaves Whitewater locked in a perpetual war with a large student population that will not go away.
It says all one needs to know about our city administration that after years of debate, and a Housing Task Force, the administration has no standards to measure progress:
City Manager Kevin Brunner said…. “We’ve made a lot of inroads,” he said. “How do we measure that? I don’t know.”
The solution to demand is off campus supply, but that’s the last solution that this admintration will take. All the pamphlets in the world won’t create new rental space.
Until that happens, we’ll have this same discussion every year.