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Junk Drawer NEWS Duke
Alumnus Donates $200,000 to Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership Kenny is chair of the Neighborhood Partnership’s national advisory board. The Partnership was started in 1996 to connect the university with local nonprofits and residents in 12 neighborhoods close to campus to improve the quality of life and boost student achievement... Town
and gown issues Some relationships are successful. Others, city and university leaders say, could use some help... Trend
to infill spreads "I didn't come to Athens to live in suburbia," the bartender and recent University of Georgia graduate said. Despite some concerns about aesthetics and gentrification, the practice of redeveloping and filling in established neighborhoods - known as infill development - remains popular in Athens. Infill development, long common in neighborhoods along Prince Avenue like Cobbham, Boulevard and Normaltown, also is spreading into East Athens and Rocksprings... Urbana
urges UI to help save area "Central Illinois will never be able to offer a mountain range or ocean for scenic backdrop," one college of Business professor wrote. "However, neighborhoods such as West Urbana do offer a setting many Universities can only dream of." Truel was accompanied by Betsey Cronan, whose husband John heads the University's department of microbiology. Cronan said the walking-distance closeness of West Urbana accommodates the demands of both work and family. "We were able to raise two kids with just one car," Cronan said. "My husband could come home for dinner and then walk back to the lab at night." The neighborhood association's primary argument is that without active preservation efforts the profit motive to convert single-family homes to rentals will prevail... New
life for worn student housing Students have been moving out of the homes, which are privately owned, in the near West Side neighborhoods in recent years, choosing instead to live in newer apartment buildings and residence halls, said Gary Brown, UW director of planning and landscape architecture. Because of the "degraded quality" of some of the homes, landlords have had a hard time finding new renters, he said. So, the university hopes to persuade faculty and staff, as well as workers at nearby Meriter and St. Mary's hospitals, to buy the homes, fix them up and live in them... UW
unveils pilot project for housing The university has held preliminary meetings with Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority, Fish said. The university plans to invite Meriter and St. Marys hospitals to participate on behalf of their employees, he added. Under the early version of the proposal, UW employees could be eligible to purchase and renovate affordable housing in the neighborhood by combining their money with funds from the city's Community Development Block Grant program and WHEDA, Fish said. The idea would be to target a specific area within the neighborhood for home purchase and renovation. That would show a noticeable turnaround in that area, Fish said... Cooking
up a day with the neighbors OK, so maybe you don't want your wife playing Twister with Derek from down the street. But wouldn't it be nice to know your neighbors beyond a wave from the car as you pull in and out of the driveway? Lorne Adrain, an author, insurance broker and father of three who lives on Arnold Street in the Fox Point section of Providence, wants to start a national outbreak of goodwill with his invention, National Neighborhood Day, on the second Sunday of every September -- today. His goal is simple: to inspire thousands of neighborhoods to cook out or hang out today and make the "little connections" that Adrain believes will strengthen communities. "Before you know it, people start exchanging keys," he says. The day is a grass-roots, Internet-based movement dreamed up by Adrain and pals from Harvard Business School after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when relationships never seemed more important... National Neighborhood Day Web site, www.neighborhoodday.org ... In 1999, he and his wife, Ann Hood, a best-selling author, moved into a red clapboard colonial built when George Washington was president. Their neighborhood is a friendly mix of Brown University professors, students and professionals. But it's also a typical modern-day cluster, which means it's not so easy to actually know people unless there's an organized way to do so. It's transient. About 10 percent of the neighborhood moves out each year; new people move in. Maybe you know the people next door, but not the family six doors down. '"We wanted people in our neighborhood to know our kids and for them to know our neighbors, just so it felt secure and comfortable and all those good things I think we all want," Adrain says... |
Miscellaneous
College Town Info Jane Jacobs on Mixed Use Neighborhoods Jane Jacobs, in The Life and Death of Great American Cities (Random House, NY, 1961) writes: * Age of buildings, in relation to usefulness or desirability, is an extremely relative thing. Nothing in a vital city district seems too old to be chosen for use by those who have choice -- or to have its' place taken, finally, by something new. And this usefulness of the old is not simply a matter of architectural distinction or charm . . . In successful districts, old buildings "filter up." . . . Some people, for instance, prefer more space for the money (or equal space for less money). P. 193 * The self-destruction of diversity can happen in groupings, in streets, or in whole districts. The last case is the most serious. Whichever form the self-destruction takes, this, in broad strokes, is what happens: A diversified mixture of uses at some places in the city becomes outstandingly popular and successful as a whole. Because of the location's success, which is invariably based on flourishing and magnetic diversity, ardent competition for space in this locality develops. It is taken up in what amounts to the economic equivalent of a fad. The winners in the competition for space will represent only a narrow segment of the many uses that together created success. Whichever one or few uses have emerged as the most profitable in the locality will be repeated and repeated, crowding out and overwhelming less profitable forms of use. . . Thus, from this process, one or few dominating uses finally emerge triumphant. But the triumph is hollow. The most intricate and successful economic mutual support and social mutual support has been destroyed in the process. Pp. 242-3 In
newest city trend, students own their own turf Though nearly impossible to track statistically, many city leaders said a growing number of families are purchasing homes in Madison neighborhoods for their relatives attending UW... In-Depth:
Where da ‘hood at? On one end is the influx of high-rise apartments popping up downtown, drawing students closer to campus. On the other are the free bus passes — courtesy of the Associated Students of Madison — giving students access to different housing options further away from campus on the outskirts of town. As these two forces pull away from each other, what’s left in the middle are a lot of empty houses in neighborhoods that have been predominantly occupied by UW students for more than a half-century — such as the Greenbush, Vilas, East Johnson and even Mifflin Street neighborhoods... Off
the Beaten Path The following colleges, compiled with help from a dozen higher education experts and counselors, stress undergraduate teaching, have established or rising scholarship, even if they come up short on standardized test scores, and are alternatives to the usual suspects. They’re not a good fit for everyone, and represent just a small sample of America’s riches. There are only so many miles a family can cover on campus visits. But from Ann Arbor, it’s an hour and a half to Kalamazoo; from Berkeley to Oakland, 15 minutes...
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College
Town Issues ™ - web news collection
est. 1997: online 2001 | R. Karrow, editor Included in WorldCat database, OCLC FirstSearch (2001) as Families and students living in a college town. |
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