We’d just like to take a break from the negativity and give it up for the number 3 bus, which gets us to North Campus without making 30 lurching stops on the medical campus and actually stops somewhere west of C.C. Little. Our carless commute has been cut from 45 minutes to about a half hour, and best of all, it’s free under the MRide program. If only we’d known about this earlier.
Back to your regularly scheduled negativity tomorrow.
The New West Side’s Dale Winling and U of M Housing Public Affairs director Alan Levy square off on the student housing situation in the weekend section of today’s Daily. Levy’s painstakingly “balanced” perspective doesn’t offer much hope that the university will act as a student advocate:
Two successive years of very large freshman classes with the attendant pressure on being able to house both returning on-campus residents with contracts for the new academic year along with all those freshmen has generated some media attention and campus commentary that U-M and Ann Arbor have a student housing “shortage.”
…
While there are some landlords who press prematurely for students to make decisions about next year’s leases, there are students (and sometimes parents) who want first crack at the “best” housing and prod landlords to finalize lease signing before they would otherwise choose to do.
So that’s why the landlords have been so supportive of the mayor’s proposed ordinance that would push back lease-signing and free them from all this unwanted prodding.
Meanwhile, Dale hits most of the important points, but we have to disagree that, unlike native Midwesterners, “Arrivals from Boston or San Francisco think they’re getting a great deal for living in a cute downtown with amenities like museums and music venues within walking distance.” As a Boston arrival, we can say that this is not always the case. He’s right about Chicagoans being justly appalled by A2 rents, though. We recently visited a friend of ours who just moved into the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. That’s Lincoln Park, the upscale North Side yuppie haven immortalized as the home of the Lincoln Park Trixies. The rent on her two-bedroom third-floor walkup, within a few blocks of the L and DePaul University, is $800 a month.
In the same issue, Murph talks about the local blog scene while presenting himself as a strong contender for best-dressed A2 blogger. If we ever launch “How Do I Look?: City Council Public Comment Edition”, (”Tie-dyed sweatshirts and two-tone hair are the latest looks for OWS fashionistas”), we’re going to need some stylish bloggers.
The Calthorpe report met some tough criticism yesterday, including that of a former planning commissioner. The News reports: “‘It’s a waste of time and money,’ Thorp said, adding it was ‘riddled’ with errors and gobbledly-gook.” Is “gobbledly-gook” [sic] now official News style?
Blogger meetup at Leopold’s tomorrow! Hobnob with celebrities (?)
“I generally don’t have occasion to think about parlor games,” says Judy McGovern. Already we can tell that we’re going to have trouble relating; we can hardly go a day without envisioning a good game of charades or snap-dragon. But McGovern has recently been preoccupied with the game of telephone as a metaphor for the greenway discussion. It seems that the game started out with someone saying, “I want a huge park going through downtown,” and somehow it got garbled into, “I want a huge park going through downtown and it’s going to cost the city money.” Of all the ridiculous miscommunications. Especially when, as McGovern points out, the Greenway Conservancy already has $1000 to pay for their project.
“This sprawling metropolis can be called a million different things, but ‘college town’ isn’t usually one of them,” writes Yahoo! Sports columnist Dan Wetzel of LA in the grip of Rose Bowl excitement. “It’s too big, too diverse and too distracted to be confused with Ann Arbor or Tuscaloosa or Gainesville, or someplace that lives and dies with the fortunes of the local college football juggernaut.” Tuscaloosa? What kind of comparison is that? They probably don’t even have the tastiest water in their region.
Nordlinger Watch! The A2-born conservative commentator has this to say about the Coke boycott:
Needless to say, the University of Michigan isn’t a serious place. I feel I can speak with some authority, having grown up in Ann Arbor and attended the university. The place is like lefty kindergarten. It’s far more Michael Moore than, say, Antonio Gramsci. You can count on the kids, and much of the faculty, to be stupid — but why does the university administration have to bow to them?
Antonio Gramsci? Now he’s just making up names. (Okay, maybe not.)
Also, it’s early in the year, but “Man steals fruit pie armed with air gun” is going to be hard to beat for best News headline of 2006.
Of the holiday break break-ins that we’ve seen the News report (more in previous papers), all of them have involved forcing a door open or entry via a fire escape window. So much for negligent students who don’t bother to lock their doors.