Thursday, February 28, 2013

Safe & Healthy Controversy


Crowd of 35 at Feb 24 Safe & Healthy Neighborhoods Working Group meeting

You can tell by the growing spectator attendence that the SHNWG is getting close to their final draft which will be passed along to Town Manager John Musante, the Amherst Select Board in time for a bylaw proposal to come before Town Meeting, which will only require a majority vote.

And no, that should not take long at all.

But you have to consider this has been in the making since the 1970s when UMass went on a growth spurt and our rental housing stock has never caught up.


 Safe & Healthy Neighborhoods Working Group ... at work

Unlike the packed meeting earlier in the day over at Echo Village concerning the eviction of low income tenants, a negative offshoot of Amherst's tight rental housing market, this more formal meeting also brought together concerned players: town officials, neighbors, activists, landlords, developers ... but no tenants, student or otherwise. 

8 comments:

  1. Is that Daniel Day Lewis in the back, still in his Lincoln costume? Congrats on the Oscar, Danny Boy!

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  2. How many minorities can you spot in these pictures? It doesn't take long to count to zero.

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  3. I say again: Anyone seen the Moody's report?

    I say again, student enrollment, particularly in the NorthEast, is going to collapse.

    And in such a market, with Amherst being a community so hospitable and friendly to UM students, as is the institution itself, it's going to collapse even more at UMass....

    Been to Ware recently? That's what Amherst is going to look like soon....

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  4. Ed, blow things out of proportion much?

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  5. Bout time the retirees retiredFebruary 28, 2013 at 12:15 PM

    No wonder the town's so screwed up.

    Senility screws everything up.


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  6. Ed, as usual you prove to completely delusional. UMass is not going to collapse. It's the state university. All that happens if there are fewer students attending college is that they will allow in more students that previously got turned down and went instead to the small state colleges. Sorry Chicken Little.

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  7. All that happens if there are fewer students attending college is that they will allow in more students that previously got turned down and went instead to the small state colleges.

    First off, there aren't any state colleges anymore -- they are all now state UNIVERSITIES and have been for a couple years now. I don't see them shrinking, nor do I really believe that the students attending them would have preferred to have gone to UMA but didn't get in.

    That definitely was true a century ago when they were Normal Schools, it likely was true 20-30 years ago, but I'm not so sure it is anymore -- everybody has large numbers of remedial students.

    Furthermore, student satisfaction at the state universities is far higher than it is at UMass Amherst -- and it has been for nearly 20 years now, so as we get into the cadre of parents who graduated from UMass in the more recent years, leaving the place with a very bitter taste in their mouths, we won't be seeing their children coming back as we have in the past.

    Remember, the state universities were still state colleges when the current cadre of parents were themselves students. But now you can get the same "University" degree you can from UMass so we have no way of knowing how many of the parents who went to UMass wouldn't have today.

    I really don't care what people say about me -- I have a fairly good education that I obtained in spite of UMass, and I am not stupid. I know people who are highly regarded in the profession and they are of the same opinion as I, UMass is on borrowed time.

    I will smile when the whole thing comes crashing down.

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  8. Ed, what kind of a degree do i need to sell you to leave this blog?

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