More Like Zillow Gone Mild, Cool Hometown Signs, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of Sept. 21 - Sept. 27.
Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.
Is This That Wild?
I am usually a fan of the Zillow Gone Wild genre, which are posts that show interesting, weird, or strange Zillow listings. But one caught my eye recently that I think illustrates the key problem in American sensibilities for urbanism.
Here is the house in question:
Granted, I do not think this place in Dallas, Texas, is particularly good-looking. The two-tone paint job was certainly a bad choice. In the Reddit post, though, users of the group were incredulous. They just couldn’t believe how the thing looked.
What zoning board allowed this shit?
Texas needs to institute drug tests for architects and builders.
Quite possibly the worst thing I’ve seen in this sub.
The over-the-top responses illustrate just how blunted American imaginations have become when it comes to anything outside the standard single-family home dictated in so many neighborhoods. There was even a recent article on it in The Dallas Morning News.
“The narrow, 64-foot-tall home on that itty bitty lot feels out of place. The story behind its building is almost as strange as the structure itself,” says the author Nick Wooten in equal disbelief as the Reddit group.
The newspaper uncovered that the home builder was a high school art teacher who wanted to build something a little funky in the area, which is just a mile south of downtown. But he ran out of money before he could complete it. The house, apparently, has met all the city codes so far, too.
For me, I think it’s ugly, but I do not think it’s crazy. You can poke around the area for yourself. It is close to downtown, right across the street from other large apartment complexes of similar height, and in a growing area with bars and restaurants. This is the kind of thing that should be happening in more places to thicken them up, especially sprawling Dallas.
I made a short video outlining the site and tracing the route to downtown:
My final verdict: NOT wild. Zillow Gone Wild? More like Zillow Gone Mild.
Links I’m Reading This Week
Education
Azusa Pacific University offloads one of its student housing complexes for $92 million. I’m usually not a fan of universities selling real estate unless they are in dire straits. This is especially true for real estate in Southern California!
Conversely, Cal Poly Pomona buys a local private student housing for $126 million. One thing of note is that the university uses a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit to actually make the purchase and manage the housing. A model to watch.
Likewise, Houston Christian University buys back a property from local hospital. The property was being used as a senior living facility, but will now add to the growth of the college’s housing stock as it continues to grow.
Since Tulane started forcing students to live on campus for three years, local landlords around the university have been struggling to fill rooms. Tulane has spent $200 million expanding dorms recently to prep for the policy. Supply and demand in housing win again!
China gets its first robot doctoral students. The Shanghai Theatre Academy has added Xueba 01 to its Department of Stage Design program, in what is being labeled as “experimental training methods.”
More colleges are shuttering their Chinese partnerships: U of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon U and U of Arizona. These have reportedly been due to political pressure from the US.
Urbanism-ish
In some China urbanism news, the government there is looking to expand the so-called “15-minute” community. The government wants to make sure people have basic services and community right around them, especially with the rapidly aging population. I’m sure the use of the “15-minute” term will give fodder to conspiracy theorists in the West!
Yakima, Washington, is looking to renovate one of its streets that still runs a trolley. The renovation calls for removing the tracks and closing the service. Locals are rallying to save the beloved trolley: “the last intact example of an interurban electric railway left in America!”
Check out the Yakima Valley Trolleys website for more info on how to help. The Federal government just announced $42 million in funds to Florida to upgrade track safety around Brightline trains. Great news, as the rail service there has been the deadliest in the country, mostly due to bad local governance, though.
On the flip side, St. Louis cancels a hope for expansion of its MetroLink Green Line. City officials said the Federal government would not approve the costs. They are switching the plan to a bus service.
New metro station opens that was designed by a famous artist. And, I am sorry to report, it doesn’t look good. It looks
Around Substack
Note: I also think it’s important to stay connected to the growing Substack community. Here are a few I am reading this week:
wrote an extensive annotated bibliography on Government Administration at . It is quite detailed! While it has some new entries, I especially appreciate some of the older entries going back more than a century.
Chester Maxey – Readings in Municipal Government (1924)
Local government reform was one of the key issues during the early 20th century. As it was a heated debate, there was much more creative thinking than today. This volume collects key early readings about municipal reform—different methods of organizing cities (and the case for each), the debate over municipal civil service, and much more. A fair amount of it is outdated, but many of the problems it highlights are evergreen issues. Available free on Google Books.
A lot of knowledge is lost if we only value the very recent. He highlights some crucial perennialism in the entries. Good Bookmark.
Next,
at has a good piece on how cities represent Democratic governance. He discusses how the dysfunctions and anti-social behaviors that have been tolerated in cities reflect on the Democrats as a whole.
Unsheltered homelessness is a massive threat to our political project because it makes the ape mind scream. To that end, here are some statistics that do not appeal to the ape mind at all:
-West coast cities have the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness in the nation and are also America’s safest.
-Unsheltered homelessness is primarily driven by high housing costs.
-The vast majority of homeless individuals do not have mental illness issues.
I have long had similar thoughts. I may flesh them out in my own piece in the future.
Closing Time… Hometown Signage
My hometown is not that glamorous. And I never thought anyone would confuse that part of Oklahoma as such. But I recently saw some wonderful illustrations in my neck of the woods that did make it look pretty cool.
These are from a local graphic designer named Bobby Chandler. “Im a huge fan of old signs and have a particular fondness for the signs that served as landmarks of my childhood in and around Midwest City, Del City and Shawnee, Oklahoma,” he said in a post on social media.
Indeed, I can attest that Bobby has captured these signs well through these stylized works. Now, I must admit that what we might find below the signs wouldn’t make for iconic-looking room art. But I do appreciate his enthusiasm for memorizing our shared home, especially, the area rapidly changes and the signs come down.
“Some of these are still up (Uptown and Planet Bowl, maybe Van’s?) but I fear not for too much longer,” he wrote. The local artist plans to make larger prints to hang, and I hope he sells them! I think a lot of others would want to memorialize these icons, even after they are gone.
