Followup on the Obama school name choice

As most probably know and as I alluded to in a post about Tom Conlon two days ago, our school board has decided to unnamed the school at 707 Holly from Daniel Webster and name it after Barack and Michelle Obama.

I suggested a more cautious approach for the renaming earlier. Somebody has contacted me offline to suggest that I missed an important point that renamings generally ignore:

Once you name something after someone[s] you make it more unlikely that something else will be named for him/her/them.

The President and First Lady now will have a school named for them. There is a chance that in a decade or so, when they might otherwise have been in a position to have something better named for them and that they won’t be in the running for that honor.

And, now that the District is in an unnaming mood, what school might be next? Daniel Webster was not a perfect person, but there are schools in our city named after much less deserving people. Andrew Jackson was a slave owner who relocated and slaughtered native Americans. Yet we have a school in Frogtown [with high populations of both of these minority groups] which has been carrying his name for generations. And maybe Warren Harding warrants a school, but a major high school??

School board members work hard for little pay. They are responsible for large budgets for which funding sources often give them little leeway in how they are spent. They have no independent staff to give them the answers to the questions they feel they need. I do not wish to make their work any harder, but maybe they really should start looking at what else needs to be unnamed now.

Want to go to Mpls in 2015? Good luck!

I have railed quite a bit about how transit is based on bad premises and in particular on the destruction that the Central Corridor “light” rail will bring to University Avenue, the Midway, Summit-University, and Frogtown neighborhoods.

I don’t go to Minneapolis often. It’s not a bad city, but it’s not my city and I seldom have any reason to go there. But I know that a whole lot of people do need to go there [and to get here] so keeping the routes to and from Minneapolis usable is important.

Our MnDOT people know that too, so one has to be especially cynical when now we learn that in addition to screwing up University Avenue they want to make us pay to use I-94 [or at least any lane that is moving].

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

What is in a name?

For a long time Saint Paul Public Schools did not name schools after people, living or dead. When schools were significantly rebuilt they were given new, geographic names. Van Buren became Dayton’s Bluff, Deane became Parkway, Harrison became Phalen Lake. They refused to recycle an already used name [Mechanic Arts] for what became Arlington High school.

Then things changed. I think the first was allowing the new elementary school in the old Johnson building to keep Governor Johnson’s name. Quickly after came naming existing schools after the almost-dead Bruce Vento and the newly dead Paul and Sheila Wellstone. There was a lot of emotion in all three of these renamings.

Now we are learning that we might rename Webster School in honor of either Barack Obama or both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, both of whom are very much alive.

Whenever we rename something which has been named for one person to naming it for somebody else, one has to wonder why we are removing the name. Have we learned something about Daniel Webster which speaks ill of him?

We also need to remember that naming something after a living person poses risks. In 1962 and 1963 John Glenn was the great American hero. Schools, streets, and parks around the republic were named after him. I suspect that if President Kennedy had not been killed so soon after Glenn's orbits that many more things would have been given the Glenn name, but there was suddenly a big movement to name new things after the slain president. How many people would have guessed that they were naming something after a future politician? I don’t mean that there is necessarily anything wrong with politicians, but how many Republicans must have bit their tongues while they went into polling places at schools named “John Glenn” as they cast their votes?

Likewise, there were a lot of schools and other places named for Richard Nixon while he was the president.

I doubt that President Obama will do anything as embarrassing as Tricky Dick did and I know that there is some appeal in being the first [or at least first in the area] to jump on the let’s-name-something-after-Obama bandwagon, but maybe we could wait a bit.

Tom Conlon is not always right and if the DPP quotes him correctly, ["I can't think of any precedent where we named it after a living politician."] he is mistaken on this a bit since BruceVento was still living but he was terminally ill when East Consolidated was named after him, but in a way Conlon seems to make sense.

Rondo Days

This weekend is Rondo Days. This marks the 25^th anniversary of what has become one of the city’s principal festivals.

Rondo Day[s] always hits a special point on my cranium. I never lived there and never saw the street. It was taken out in the late 1950s and I did not get here until the mid 1960s. But I grew up on top of a hill in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where about ten years later the Iowa Highway Commission decided to build what became known as I-380. Like when Minnesota chose Rondo, Iowa chose our place because it provided for a nice, straight road without displacing any people of influence. It has been suggested that where freeways are straight, that they went through poor/working class neighborhoods. I think there is some truth to that.

As far as I know nobody has ever attempted to do any kind of festival for our neighborhood in Iowa. Maybe we didn’t have the organizers. Maybe too many have left the area. Maybe the lack of a central, defining ethnicity which felt displaced have never inspired anybody to try. [There were a lot of people of Czech and Slovak ancestry in the corridor, but there were a lot more elsewhere in the city.]

But I do wish the Rondo folks well every year and trust that everybody involved will have a good and happy festival. I envy their commitment.

Jimmy Lee

I think I met Jimmy Lee once. It would not have been a personal meeting but I think he was introduced at a community meeting in the Summit-University area in the early 1970s. I do know that I was aware that he was involved in athletics and the teaching and officiating of sports and that he was the first black man to officiate at the levels he did, at least here in Minnesota. When the city decided to rename Oxford Recreation Center after him, it was easy to understand their thinking.

The overruns and continuing ongoing problems connected with building the new recreation center do not do anybody’s memory well, but it looks like the project is almost finished, even if there are fewer houses in the neighborhood to provide clients. And the reviews have been good.

I would hope in time that people forget about the costs and snafus and just enjoy and use the facility and appreciate people like the man for whom it was named and others like him who have gone on to another arena.

An article about Mr. Lee inspired this post and can be found here.

What to do about Sober Houses?

The City Council is about to pass an ordinance defining “sober houses” and establishing spacing and other requirements for some of the larger ones. There are a lot of them in our City. Merriam Park and West Seventh seem to be the most desired neighborhoods for sober house landlords to set up shop in. After pressure from District Councils and other community groups the city did authorize the Planning Commission to study the matter and submit suggestions. Simply speaking, that is why the Council is looking at this ordinance now.

The issue gets tricky for several reasons. Application of the Federal Fair Housing Act has stated that recovering alcoholics are protected from housing discrimination as disabled people. Nobody seems to know just how many of these places there are or how well the “clients” are doing in their recovery. Neither does anybody seem to know how many automobiles the residents need to park in the neighborhood and nobody seems to know what other problems the residents may have.

Local and/or state land use regulations and/or funding requirements control treatment facilities, but nobody receives any treatment at a sober house. These facilities have various requirements that they need to meet, including spacing requirements. One reason for spacing requirements is to avoid creating disability-concentrated, ghetto-like areas.

The advocates for this housing speak of creating new “families” of recovering people and seem to think that those who oppose them are either near-sighted, bigoted, or both.

But when a family lives in a house, they just sign one lease and send one check to the property owner. In other cases where each individual sends his/her own check to the landlord, they are covered under Boarding or Rooming House licenses. These are licensed by the city for safety, spacing, and consumer protection reasons.

The owners also use the analogy to housemates who share living units. This analogy breaks down for some of the same reason that the family argument does, that there is only one lease and one check. And the law specifically limits housing units in this city to four unrelated adults. Following this train it seems that the sober house advocates seem to feel that being a recovered alcoholic [or actually just a teetotaler] gives one rights that others do not have.

So it seems like under present rules and regulations that if I were a landowner that I could rent a large house to any number of unrelated adults at monthly rates of a few hundred dollars each. If the renters are willing, it may be free market capitalism, but exactly how free the market is is debatable, since many recovering people have seriously compromised financial situations as a result of their problem[s]. If I can get five or six people to pay $400 each it might beat having a group pay $1200-$1500. And if it turned out that one or more of the folks got tipsy and disruptive, it could be passed off as some poor soul who misstepped. I am not a treatment provider so it would not be my direct worry.

The proposed ordinance is pretty mild. It only affects larger houses and imposes minimal spacing and distancing requirements. The distance is 330 feet. For reference note that the spacing requirement for Community Residential facilities is 1320 feet [one-quarter of a mile] and the average city block is 330 feet by 660 feet [street rights-of-way included.] It also allows for some fire and safety codes and inspection thereof for the larger houses.

It is interesting that as I watched the replay of Wednesday’s City Council public hearing that I did not detect any testimony from doctors or treatment professionals saying that their clients needed this kind of housing. Testimony seemed to be primarily from landlords and people representing them.

I understand that the city is limited in what it can do and do suggest the Council pass what they have in front of them if they are afraid to be more aggressive in protecting both recovering clients and their neighbors, but seriously wonder why they cannot move the spacing requirements up and the minimum number of residents defined as a sober house down.

You may send your comments telling me how much of a bigot I am.

Earlier postSober Houses, Neighborhoods, and Planning [2/24/08]

Another Voice on Central Corridor

Sometimes as this "Central Corridor" has moved on towards its seemingly inevitable and certainly destructive end, I have felt like the only person concerned with the “little person” on University Avenue, the only one who was thinking on the right track about light rail on that street. Even Governor Pawlenty's veto [referred to in Grounds for Hope on Central Corridor? 4/7/08] seemed to be only a minor impediment.

I just read an article by kitkat on mnblue which helps make some of that sense of loneliness evaporate.

I don’t want to get too carried away with agreement. Kitkat seems to be a believer in transit which I still believe a tool of economic segregation [Cf. Transit and Taxes, 12/7/07] but he/she does see the injustices of the University Avenue proposal and points out its anti-progressive nature.

Kitkat notes that business ownership is one of the few means through which poor people can accumulate wealth and that University Avenue provides three things which can lead to profits for people who don’t have wealth to start out with – high traffic, affordable rent, and frequent public transit which comes within a block of the business.

Bringing through a train which stops at one-mile intervals and cutting busses back to half-hour intervals would damage those business not near the stations severely and make rents or purchase prices near the stops prohibitive, kitkat notes.

Making the neighboring businesses and residents suffer for some planner’s idea of progress still does not seem fair. As I noted in another December post, [Moving the Train, 12/16/07]

It beats me how a train that doesn’t stop and pick up people can have more riders than one which does, but leave the wonks [who, of course won’t be riding the thing themselves or trying to run businesses on University Avenue, or sleep in a house on Sherburne or Aurora] to come up with some kind of explanation.

Kitkat has put more work actual footwork into this matter than I have and seems to have reached similar conclusions on this particular project and I commend his/her post [which will be seen by a lot more people than the dozen or so who look here] to your attention.

Grounds for Hope on Central Corridor?

Governor Pawlenty has vetoed $70,000,000 for Central Corridor funding,

Representative Alice Hausman is quoted as saying,

"In my opinion the governor single-handedly killed the central corridor,"

[from Minnesota Daily:]


I don’t know enough to know if this will actually kill the train or not. There may be some hyperbole here or it may be just that somehow this will go through anyway with costs being shifted to local taxpayers.

But we can hope.

It would be overly simple to note that His Excellency is from Eagan and that people who live in Eagan and other suburbs live in those places because they are the enemies of city people and that Governor Plenty’s dislike of us combined with the absence of any Republicans in our city’s legislative delegation does not make it the easiest to obtain any funding for our interests, so I will likely be putting more up about the governor’s line-item vetoes announced today most of the news does sound like bad news to city people, but I want to examine things more first.

Westover: The Vandals have sacked Rome

I’ve railed about transit before and continue to be amazed at how the phony ideas behind it seem to have been elevated to some kind of generally accepted, almost Biblical truth.

I comment Craig Westover’s column in today’s DPP to everybody’s attention.

I have excerpted the last paragraph as a teaser:

[C]urrent transit planning is not being done for the benefit of the public. The transportation policy being railroaded through the Legislature is about convenience for the well-connected and a legacy for the legislative elite for which everyone else pays. It's cool. The current dust-up among the Met Council, the Legislature and the counties is just more of the $6.6 billion entertainment value of the "historic" transportation bill, which is the best most of us can hope for.

In combination with Dave Orrick’s article on the front page of the Local section [“Draft of a Dream”] about how the manipulators hope to redesign University Avenue with little concern for what happens to the present residents and business people along the Avenue, we all ought to be just a tad scared. [WARNING: Open House tomorrow, 10 am to 1 pm. 1080 University, aka the Old Library]

Previous posts:

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/county-now-deeper-in-transit-ripoff.html [3/26/08]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/moving-train.html [12/16/07]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/big-lake-ripoff.html [12/13/07]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/transit-and-taxes.html [12/7/08]

Central Corridor again

Governor Plenty says that we need compromise to reduce the scope of the Central Corridor Light Rail.

We need to eliminate the hookup to the Union Depot or the University campus tunnel or both. And we certainly cannot add stops at places where they might be useful.

I have a suggestion:
Eliminate the whole thing.

Earlier posts: Moving the Train [12/16/07], Transit and Taxes [12/7/07]

Moving the Train

Another truth about Transit that I did not mention in earlier posts.

Transit people believe the stuff they say, that they have a kind of civic morality which justifies any amount of civic iniquity. They believe in the rightness of their cause and their own personal goodness that things like whether right or wrong is done to others do not bother them.

About a dozen years or so ago, these wonderful people who give us our metropolitan transit service conducted a survey about how to make the busses run faster.

After spending a bunch of public dollars the Transit people were given a conclusion which I don’t have the exact word for but which can be reasonably paraphrased as, “Busses will make better time if they don’t have to stop to pick up or drop off passengers.”

You can picture the Metropolitan Council execs slapping their foreheads in amazement. Who would have ever thunk it?

Well, now they’re telling us that to have the University Avenue light rail stop at half-mile intervals instead of one mile intervals will make the train take too long, be too expensive, and reduce ridership. It beats me how a train that doesn’t stop and pick up people can have more riders than one which does, but leave the wonks [who, of course won’t be riding the thing themselves or trying to run businesses on University Avenue, or sleep in a house on Sherburne or Aurora] to come up with some kind of explanation.

University Avenue is under attack and all that our city, county, and state leaders seem to be able or willing to do is to discuss how to carry that attack out. Light rail [also known as street cars without stops] isn’t the only thing attacking the Avenue, but it is one of the biggest and it is one where the role of the state is most evident.

University Avenue is a street. Streets are indeed part of a public transportation system, created to move people and things to and from the private properties which adjoin them or to other streets which do the same thing. Historically, University Avenue has seen horses, locomobiles, street cars, cars, trucks, bicycles, and trucks. It will continue to see most of these later uses even after light rail is built, if it ever happens.

People have bought or rented property along University Avenue to operate business or to live or bought property near University Avenue in Frogtown, Aurora-St. Anthony, Midway, and other places because its proximity of the Avenue brings them commerce or allows them conveniently move about.

The businesses along the Avenue need the traffic lanes and parking the Avenue provides. The Powers That Be seem intent on removing most of this so that people who operate trains can operate trains. They say that this is progress and that in the long run properties along the Avenue will have a greater aggregate value

They fail to consider that an aggregate increase of value does not mean that anything good will happen for the owner of a specific property, that whatever increases in property value do develop are probably going to happen around the stops, because that is where people will be able to get without having to find the elusive parking place.

However, it seems that most of this increase of property value will do nothing for property values and therefore property taxes. Construction, both old and new doesn’t line up with the stops. The Capitol complex doesn’t pay taxes. Rondo Library doesn’t pay taxes. The Wilder Foundation will be occupying a good chunk of Lexington.

I haven’t supported this boondoggle. Previous posts reflect that. [link, link.

So it makes sense that if we can only have stops at one-mile intervals that we move the stops. We don’t need a stop by the Capitol. It’s not going to be taken down anytime soon.

So I have this idea which I haven’t seen posted anyplace: Let’s put the stops at Western, Victoria, Hamline, and Fairview. Let the economy move things there. Target [a company which I personally do not patronize for personal reasons but which is a large Minnesota-based enterprise] recently jumped through a whole lot of hoops to build a new store at Hamline. Probably some of these hoops could have been lessened if there were to be an exit at Hamline. Think of what could happen at Victoria or Western. Perhaps some of the small business there might be able to survive or at least be able to receive just compensation from somebody else who could use the opportunity instead of being left to wither like the present plan calls for.

Of course, if they really wanted to get people between the downtowns they would have chosen a different path and left University Avenue to do what it always has done. Alongside the Great Northern [which really should have been the path for I-94] or somehow along the present I-94 would have made more sense.