College Town Issues, a website maintained by Miami University employee Bob Karrow, has collected more news and information about students and non-students trying to coexist in college towns than you’ve ever seen in one place. It’s written from a townie perspective but with a high degree of sanity, especially regarding drinking laws.
Also, there’s this porch couch cartoon on Arbor Update.
After our train from Chicago left Kalamazoo today, the conductor asked, “Did you see her? The girl from ‘Blossom’?” Apparently, we’d been sitting just a few feet from where Mayim Bialik was filming a movie called “Kalamazoo?” (The question mark is part of the title - that’s right, Adult. fans.)
This seemed like the kind of story that Amtrak employees might make up to pass the time on an hour-delayed train, but it turns out that there actually is such a movie in the works and it actually is being shot on location in Kalamazoo. The Kalamazoo Gazette describes the plot thus: “[T]hree friends named Carol, Maggie and Joan return for a reunion only to find that a time capsule that contains their past dreams will be revealed. To avoid embarrassment, they set out to destroy its contents. Along the way, their deceased grandmothers exert an otherworldly influence on them.”
“While the fire hazard is the biggest concern,” writes couch ban proponent Tony Ramirez in a letter to the News, “aesthetics also matter.” We had no idea that this proposal might have benefits besides keeping students safe.
The Daily runs a news piece about the couch ban that adds two new phony excuses from councilmember Joan Lowenstein to the well-worn rats-and-fire arguments: porch couches allow thieves to climb on them and get into windows, and they provide sleeping places for homeless smokers, leading to the ultimate nightmare scenario: a homeless rodent living under a porch couch climbs through a first-floor window with a lit cigarette and steals something. Is this the best they can do? We think they could be far more creative. What about conservative pundit Tucker Carlson with one of those creme brulee blowtorches? There’s nothing preventing Tucker Carlson from using a blowtorch or sitting on a porch couch.
Of course, if couches really are helping thieves break into houses, the city council should consider passing a resolution requiring that outdoor couches be placed on front lawns, away from any windows.
One quibble: the Daily describes non-student houses as “permanent residences.” We’re not crazy about this terminology. When you live in a town for four years - sometimes more for PhD students - it’s just as permanent a residence as anyone else’s in this age of rapidly changing careers.
Elliott Mallen takes a searing look at couch porches in today’s Daily. “Any sense of camaraderie between students and homeowners that comes from shared liberal values is overridden as soon as property values come into play,” he writes, noting that said homeowners make up only 45 percent of Ann Arbor’s population. Geoff Larcom’s decidedly un-searing look in today’s News doesn’t really take a side, but he seems to be under the impression that Boulder’s reputation as “a liberal soul mate of Ann Arbor” somehow made its couch ban more unlikely.
Mary Sue Coleman has a history of standing up to anti-student city officials. As president of the University of Iowa, she defied a 2002 Iowa City proposal to withhold degrees from students who had not paid city fines. “I am not going to function as a police agent for the city,” she said. “The city cannot withhold diplomas.” In response to a proposed ordinance targeting noise, she said,”I don’t think we should ever tell students, ‘You shouldn’t have a party.”’ (from a Daily Iowan piece that isn’t online.)
This porch couch thing could be the issue that finally makes students warm up to our perceived-as-standoffish prez.
Let’s be clear on one thing - this porch couch ban is not an idle threat, not a non-issue, not a bit of political grandstanding that has no chance of becoming law. Similar bans have passed in similar towns.
We almost hesitate to post this USA Today piece from last year about college towns taking action against “student slums” - it might give the OFW Association ideas. Among the initiatives that, as the reporter puts it, “get students to be better neighbors”:
All of this almost makes Ann Arbor seem less overrated - although the U of M hasn’t needed any help from the city in deciding not to create new student housing.
The article also quotes a Tuscaloosa city council member, elected as a student, who had a couch on his own porch. Now he tells students who want to keep theirs, “We have to do our best to make our community better while we’re here.”
A 1998 Reason article discusses a porch couch ban aimed not at students but at working-class residents of Wilson, North Carolina. “The committee came up with some lame excuses about eliminating breeding places for rats and fleas, but the real objection was that the stuff just looks so trashy,” writes UNC professor John Shelton Reed. (A journalist’s defense of the “irretrievable right to take a leak off [one’s] own front porch” quoted in the article may or may not help the cause.)
Yes, we’re really pushing this porch couch thing. It encompasses everything about Ann Arbor that we started this site to protest. It’s an attempt by A2 pseudo-liberals to enforce gentrification, eliminating the voices of those likely to disagree by waiting until they’re out of town and convincing the more ambivalent with disingenuous arguments about fires and vermin. And it will have a real effect on many students’ lives. (Somehow, we suspect that the distinction between upholstered and non-upholstered will become conveniently blurred when they come to take away the “outdoor” bamboo-frame couch on our own porch, which is covered with “indoor” cushions.) So we hope you don’t get bored with all the porch couch posts, and we’ll see you on the 19th.
“I’ll offer a reasonable and rational observation: People who want to outlaw comfy couches on porches are selfish, elitist, classist, statist, knee-jerk, pretentious, under-achieving cowards,” wrote Boulder Weekly columnist Wayne Laugesen of that town’s ban on porch couches.
Common Monkeyflower has obtained an e-mail exchange between councilmember Leigh Greden and concerned Old Fourth Ward resident Tony Ramirez on the impending porch couch ban. Writes Ramirez, “While the
obvious reason for those of us who are permanent residents in student
neighborhoods is that they’re unsightly, there’s no question that
they’re also a fire hazard, and probably a health hazard. The
all-too-common combination of young students, couches, barbeque
grills, and old wood-frame houses is dangerous.” He urges a ban “before the students come back in September.”
“I agree with you completely,” Greden writes.
The Council will be having a meeting on this subject on July 19. The couch porch ban supporters urge others to write to their councilmembers - Murph provides a list of e-mail addresses so we can do the same.
