Our Precious Bodily Fluids - er, Urban Fabric
We are not alone in advocating that the university build more student housing. J. Bradley Moore, in today’s News letters page, is, if anything, equally insistent. He decries the “deteriorating, poorly maintained” houses that are “some of the most expensive housing units in the city.” “This cancer,” he writes, referring to the student areas, “will continue to erode the urban fabric of our city.” (He uses the word “urban” three times, so it’s pretty clear that he does mean to imply that A2 was urban at some unspecified time in the past.)
It’s nice of him to be concerned for the students’ welfare and all, but couldn’t he have picked a less lethal disease to equate us with? Maybe a benign colon polyp?
It’s kind of hard to tell whether he’s referring to the students or the physical structures themselves as a cancer. I think it would be healthy if AA began to view the students as more like a benign brain tumor - a little frightening maybe, but not worth the risk of operating to remove them. But he does seem to place the blame on the U for the situation, which is interesting.
posted by Nick on December 15th, 2003 at 3:50 pmWell, I think the “U” does deserve a lot of the blame, but he’s coming at it from a different angle than I am. I’m saying, “These expensive, run-down buildings - what a bunch of slumlords for charging that much!” He’s saying, “These expensive, run-down buildings - how dare anyone occupy them who isn’t going to put up little garden doodads from that drive-thru art store on Ashley?”
But I think we can work with these townies. After all, we want some of the same things.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on December 15th, 2003 at 4:08 pmRight. Who doesn’t want a nice neighborhood - aside from being more pleasant to look at, you can at least not feel bad about being overcharged. But I think the pressure on the slumlords has to come from local homeowners. It’s funny - where I moved from, entire towns have very strict regulations on the appearances of homes and apartment complexes, even down to what kinds of holiday decorations you can put up. All related to obsession with property values. Do people here just not care that the words “Ann Arbor” may come to be associated with the words “run-down shithole” some day?
Oh, and that’s a nice Strangelove reference in the title to this post.
posted by Nick on December 15th, 2003 at 4:49 pmI was thinking more that neither we nor the townies want to live near each other.
I don’t actually want to live in a nice neighborhood if it means all those draconian regulations. I’d rather live down the street from the hippie with “Peace is harder to make than war…but way more intelligent” scrawled on his porch. I like that your house here can have a patch of dirt instead of a lawn, and you can have a couch on the porch. (Drunk people stealing all but one of our couch cushions makes it less cool.)
posted by ann arbor is overrated on December 15th, 2003 at 5:00 pmWell, there are lots of happy medians between AA neighborhoods as they are now and the iron rule of a homeowner’s assn. The problem is that you can’t find them in AA - the neighborhoods are either totally ragged, or pristine and very far from campus. I think the townies might not dislike living around students so much if there was more middle ground.
Personally, the charm of dirt lawns and couches on the porch is lost on me, but to each their own.
posted by Nick on December 15th, 2003 at 5:33 pmWell, I’d have you remember that there are plenty of weird-ass townie lawns around here too, like the guy on Spring near Miller, with the old traffic guard cut-outs and insane junk sculptures.
posted by js on December 15th, 2003 at 9:05 pmi’d be willing to make compromises about keeping the mouldy sofas inside if it means that drunk people can sit on my bare porch without fear of the party gestapo.
posted by elise on December 15th, 2003 at 10:23 pm