Arkansas College Town Blocks Student Housing, Another New AI Job, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of May 17 - May 23.
Note: I use this link round-up to (mostly) focus on stories that fell through the cracks in terms of higher ed and urbanism, rather than big national news (although, sometimes I am forced to do the big stuff). Please send over any tips, authors, or content to cover.
Hogging Downtown
The Fayetteville, Arkansas, home to the University of Arkansas (the Razorbacks), City Council voted against a proposed student housing project that met all city codes for no good reason. The planned development would have been seven stories and 185 units, along with ground-floor commercial space. It shall remain an old, dirty parking lot for the foreseeable future.
Apparently, 17 people spoke out against the development, mostly citing traffic concerns. There was a demand that a third traffic study be conducted after the developer had already conducted two that the council didn’t like.
The traffic concern is absurd since the apartment building would be in the walkable downtown and a 15-minute walk to the University of Arkansas campus. It looks like mostly obstructionism, freezing the town in amber.
Public comments at community meetings are often not representative, but comments on the r/fayetteville seemed mostly negative towards the housing. Some comments on Reddit indicate they do not mind the housing style but rather they would like to see it not geared towards students, which I find more reasonable. However, it was reported that the housing would also work for “young professionals,” so the complaint is somewhat overstated.
The same thread has an angry local calling it a “monstrosity,” meaning they simply do not want the density in their downtown next to the university. I did see some voice of reason in the discussion of the Council’s rejection.
Look forward to this prime real estate on Dickson Street remaining an empty parking lot! Unreasonable veto power given to constituents despite the project meeting all code requirements.
And all the people who oppose this will still complain about Fayetteville’s housing crisis and students taking off-campus housing from local residents 😂
At the same time as blocking this unit, the city council also just passed extra rules for dorm-type development, adding more barriers. Blocking student housing just means students will continue pouring into the surrounding neighborhoods—a lot of commenters in the threads refused to understand this. No wonder housing is so expensive, espcially for younger generations.
Links I’m Reading This Week
Education Links
US universities are looking for budget cuts, and costly sports are prime targets.
Is the University of Austin just Troll U? One of the university's founders questions its direction.
The Wall Street Journal has an exposé on struggling college towns, centering on Macomb, Illinois, home of the University of Western Illinois. It echoes much of the sentiments that I wrote about a month earlier in a piece here.
With the end of the semester, students are moving out of their dorms and universities are getting creative with the junk left behind: UMass, Mount Mercy University in Iowa, and SUNY Oneonta
Western Kentucky U closes dorms due to “major structural flaws”. Only opened in the last couple of years! One dorm from 2018 will be razed after it was deemed unrepairable. Wow, scary.
Urbanism Links
Montana is allowing counties to adjust speed limits at 25 MPH (previously, minimums were set at 35 MPH), along with other pedestrian safety measures.
Why does Kansas City feel so isolated? KCisms, a local blog from the city, tries to understand it via geography.
LA now has one of the longest light rail lines on the planet. Bringing back memories of the old Pacific Electric!
Public transit nationwide still hasn’t caught up to pre-pandemic levels (at just 85%).
West Palm Beach unveils self-driving microtransit (very micro!) system, while Santa Barbara launches their own on-demand microtransit. After my article on the failure of a microtransit here in Orange County, I am looking for more examples around the county. Send them my way!
Michigan’s self-driving test track might be going bankrupt.
Around Substack
Note: I also think it’s important to shout out some fellow Substackers whom I am reading here this week. Here are a few:
just turned me on to another new job for the AI Age. Basically, we are going to be so inundated with AI slop communication that someone is going to have to swim through the sewage to find what is worthwhile. Hollis calls it the ‘keeper of secrets’ role.I like this idea and agree that this is likely a future job alongside the AI Wrangler. But it needs a pithier name. I’m calling it the ‘Sloppy Joe’.
“What do you do?”
“Oh, I’m a Sloppy Joe.”
“Ah, that’s a tough job.”
“Yes, it was the only way to get my foot in the door. But now I’m irreplaceable!”
What do you think this job should be called? Sloppy Joe, keeper of secret, or something else?
In more AI writing,
has a post in where he did the unthinkable: he asked his students what they thought about AI. What I love about this is we often talk/ write about AI usage from educators’ perspectives, but rarely hear back from the students.
My only framing going into this activity was to explain to them that a) this is increasingly a discussion taking place amongst many adults in education right now; b) there is very little consensus across educators, with lots of folks doing lots of different things; and c) student perspective often gets left out of these discussions—which was why I wanted to shut up and just listen to what they had to say.
And for something a little random:
, who runs Foreign Perspectives, has a positive review of the Andor series. I loved it, too. But I couldn’t think of a way to write an article that connected to my Substack’s niche, but Jia’s essay covers a lot of the stuff I was already thinking.
Andor subverts all these trends by having in-depth episodes which tell meaningful stories, not being an expensive vanity project, and actually striving to be something more than a disposable Star Wars spin-off. It fulfills the promises of what streaming-exclusive television should have been and is probably the closest we’re ever going to get to Underworld. Unfortunately, Disney is unlikely to do anything like Andor again.
Finally… European Dad Discovers American Biking Infrastructure
Over on X and Bluesky, a father from Austria who moved to Houston went viral for trying to bike with his kids. Go watch the full video and see just how hostile our roads are to kids.
The screengrab above is what I really noticed. Look at the size incongruence. No wonder kids don’t walk or ride bikes to school anymore.
It hasn't had much publicity but Eckerd College has had s thriving trash to treasure program going on for over a decade. They believe it's one of the most successful programs of the type.
Also, you didn't mention the controversy around AI reading student names at graduations this year. According to the company they're actually doing voice cloning.
Thank you for linking and two years later I still think that human assistants are the future. :) https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/i-want-a-squire