Here it is — not for attribution, but open to commentary (even you, Curious Observer) — the first draft of the introduction to my planning thesis on student housing in Ann Arbor. I know some people advocate diving into the chapters and writing the the intro last, but I want to set out my argument and narrative and make sure that I am at least reckoning with it if I deviate from it. If I stray in the writing, as usually happens, I’ll be able to go back and rewrite the intro. Without further ado (longish):
(NOTE: This does not yet contain my literature review and methods.)
Working Title
The housing of university students in Ann Arbor has been a controversial issue for most of the twentieth century. Perhaps no evidence illustrated the situation so clearly as the resignation of University of Michigan president C. C. Little after his proposal to build a women’s dormitory caused an uproar within the city that made the pages of Time magazine.
The reasons for this ongoing controversy are manifold. Shelter is a basic human need necessary for physical and mental health, while housing is also a means of consumption, lending status to individuals, neighborhoods, or communities. Economic value results from demand for this good. In Ann Arbor in the twentieth century, the combined growth of the university (particularly in terms of student enrollment) and a relatively limited private building market have combined to keep demand for housing consistently higher than supply.
The housing issue is also spatial in nature – students have been bound by a need and a desire for residential proximity to the University of Michigan campus. Because of this, throughout the twentieth century, housing issues have largely been focused on the downtown and downtown-adjacent areas, the neighborhoods nearest to the university’s Central Campus.
Despite the growth of the University of Michigan throughout the twentieth century into the multiversity of knowledge production, students are still the largest single stakeholder group within the university. Because of their concentrated location within the city of Ann Arbor, students are the chief intermediaries between the city and the university.
Students’ numbers, approximately thirty-nine thousand between undergraduates and graduate students, and concentrated economic impact should mean that they are important political stakeholders in the development of university and city housing policy and planning. However, that has not been the case. Early twentieth-century educational philosophy and social mores meant that the university functioned in loco parentis and controlled students’ living environments. This control continued and intensified through the 1960s until students began to demand independence from university oversight in their private lives and institutions like the University of Michigan began to relinquish the responsibility. In large part because of this paternalistic restraint upon students, as well as state voting laws, they have not been able to exert the political power one might expect from a majority-aged cohort that constitutes a significant minority – up to one-third – of the city population.
While the subject of student housing has been consistently at the forefront of local city-university disputes, the nature of the issue has seen considerable change throughout the twentieth century. First, Ann Arbor has seen marked shifts in the provision of student housing. In the early part of the century, the vast majority of students – men and women alike – resided in private, off-campus rooming houses inspected and approved by the university. During the 1920s and 1930s the University began providing on-campus housing for women students in order to provide a moral, uplifting environment for learning. In this period, the community protested the economic loss that dormitories represented to city landlords. In the World War II era, the university developed a radically different housing policy that featured large-scale, on-campus dormitories at the expense of off-campus rooming houses. The resulting building program only became economical with intervention from the federal government – Works Progress Administration grants in the late 1930s, Lanham Act funding during the war, and financing from the College Housing Loan Program. The university made protests in this case, arguing to the federal government that the private market was unable to respond to the needs of wartime mobilization and post-war accommodations for veterans and the Baby Boom. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the university abandoned its building program and students in larger numbers returned to housing in the community where they found greater privacy and independence. Community property-owners and a re-emergent landlord class realized these economic gains, but, in contrast to pre-war protests, a different political issue surfaced – backlash against the loss of integrity of family neighborhoods and the ascendance of the ideal of the single-family residence and neighborhood in Ann Arbor.
Throughout this economic and political turmoil, students as a body were largely left to navigate for themselves through the choppy waters of the pre-war, war-era, and post-war housing markets; to assert and defend their rights to decent, affordable housing and a modicum of independence as young adults and majority-aged citizens; and to participate in the process of planning for and regulating student housing in Ann Arbor. In this thesis, I argue that students individually and collectively were agents of change in this period of major alterations in the educational project of the university, in local and university housing policy, and in federal housing policy, making significant contributions to urban development even while they worked within a structural framework of national economic depression and world war, changing federal housing policy, suburbanization, the emergence of the research university, and urban crisis and revitalization. This consideration of student housing, then, is an effective means of examining the changing relationship between the city and the university in twentieth century American urban history.
As someone who never backs away from a good scrap, I can’t turn down your invite.
So this is your opus? Is this what you aspired to as a child – not really an architect, not really an urban planner, but rather someone with an inexplicable sense of self-importance who spends his time critiquing and talking about what others have done when he doesn’t seem to do anything himself? Well done. Just what the world needs – another useless thesis to line the bookshelves.
I could go on and on, but the lads are waiting at the Yale club.
Best of luck with your lifetime of obscurity and poverty.
ta ta,
Curious Observer
However few people ever read my scholarship, at least I know my words will live on in your RSS feed, to be read promptly and responded to with your trademark wit and curiosity at my slightest provocation. And that is enough for me.
Atta poster! Go Curious observer! Yoohoo! No more teachers, no more books! Let’s get rid of history, literature, and all them bookish subjects. Burn the libraries! (didn’t they try that somewhere once? … never mind, that’s old history — forget about it — who cares) Stupid books. More ACTION! Down with thinkers and writers! let’s DO STUFF.
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Hmm. Not sure how earth shattering this all was. It’s also about how the role of the federal government changed vis-a-vis other institutions in sociey, as a resultant of the Roosevelt Administration and the New Deal. That might be the more important question, and the response to public universities and the development of assistance programs to build dormitories but one piece of this kind of change. (You know, Vannevar Bush and the development of the federal role in the support of science research. This clearly impacted how the federal government interacted with universities, and public universities in particular.)
Were institutions like Howard U and Gallaudet (and Rochester Institute of Tech. institute for the deaf) somehow harbingers of this change you see, since those institutions enjoyed federal support long before other institutions? What about the Morrill Act? Etc.
This was co-incident with growth of the population nationally and the need for local institutions to respond differently, perhaps on a scale difference, given the variety of changes in society.
(Another example is public transit. It’s hard for us to imagine today that public transit was at one time a private business. For various reasons, not relevant to your entry, this changed.)
You probably know that UM was the largest public university in the country, even during the depression, until the 1950s.
I’m sure you’ve looked at North Campus plans, plans to move the undergraduates there, plans to move the fraternities and sororities, etc. I remember looking at back issues of the Daily from the 1950s, maybe a little more than 20 years ago, about some of this. However, the faculty of LSA revolted, and plans for the university to keep growing were halted. Eventually schools like OSU and U of Minnesota eclipsed UM.
Anyway, I think that changes in student housing were merely changes comparable to other changes in society and the way that the various levels of government interacted.
Booya!!! Say it like it ain’t no thang, Richard!!! That’s just what I said in my post… albeit with the touch of class my missive was lacking.
Don’t fret Mr. Urbanoasis. My firm is always looking for “thinkers” and “intellectuals” to mop the floor. We can scatter your thesis over the tiles and it will prevent me from tracking dirt into my BMW. You will have plenty of time to think about how tall building “relate to the street” as your are sorting post in the mail room!
As always, thank you for giving me an outlet and someone to look down to.
-Curious Observer
No, thank YOU, for reading and commenting every day.
Thanks for your comment, Richard. Your skepticism illustrates how important the (currently missing) literature review is. I’ll briefly outline it here, and will provide it in the next draft.
The relationship between the city and the university in urban history and urban studies is one that is beginning to get more interest from scholars. Arnold Hirsch’s chapter on the University of Chicago in Making the Second Ghetto is one of the first instances of this, demonstrating how the activities of a university’s administration can have a major impact on a community (Hyde Park).
Julian LeviLawrence Kimpton, the university president, even arranged for a local planning authority he masterminded to be delegated powers of eminent domain. Margaret O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge addressed city-university partnerships in developing research parks and asserted that such projects have a profound effect on urban decentralization. John Gilderbloom, in Promise and Betrayal, illustrates the potential for revitalization that locally-engaged universities like Louisville have for their surrounding communities. My contribution to this literature is to examine the chief intermediaries between cities and universities, the students. Even at mighty Michigan, perhaps the largest multiversity in the country, students outnumber all non-student employees combined. (Check out the Michigan Daily salary supplement.) Investigations aimed elsewhere miss a main point, in my opinion. Blake Gumprecht, you might recall, has also touched on this with his recent article in the Journal of Urban History.The university has, of course, seen its history written as an institution that is largely segregated from community and urban concerns. Paul Turner’s Campus: An American Planning Tradition displays the rhetoric of university founders about cities upon a hill and inward-looking architecture that endures almost to this day (but is little more than rhetoric, from what I see). Roger Geiger’s To Advance Knowledge on the growth of the research university interprets the provision of student housing as being driven by educational philosophy, rather than including consideration of community concerns. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’ Alma Mater also takes this angle, showing how the founders of women’s colleges designed buildings embodying their educational philosophy, but only begins to address the connections between the colleges and their communities.
Finally, we must note that the important actors in the periods I am addressing found student housing important. As noted, CC Little resigned in large part because of the outcry over Mosher-Jordan. John Hannah, president of MSU, testified before Congress on behalf of land grant colleges about the desperate need for the federal government to intervene (this was Commerce and Banking, not an education committee) and cause a structural shift in university community housing markets. Congress created a special housing program in the National Housing Act of 1950 to finance college housing that lasted for 30 years and provided more than 4 billion dollars of construction.
This is just a start, but it’s at least as important a story as Eero Saarinen’s design for North Campus.
Interesting.
A couple other examples come to mind, Columbia U and its whole relationship with Morningside Heights. And I had an interesting conversation with David Cohen, a BID-Main Street guy in Philly last year about how intrigued I am with Penn’s University City Initiative and the University City District BID, which is funded by assessments, not TIFs. He said that at one point in the 1970s, Penn was considering leaving the city for the suburbs, because of the “neighborhood.” Of course there is the classic example of Yale and New Haven too.
Re: John Gilderbloom, I actually toured the Russell neighborhood and some of the SUN projects with him in 2004, and I co-authored a journal article with him and one of his students (we’ll see if it gets published).
If you’re going to look at modern revitalization efforts, the Mercer U initiative with Historic Macon Foundation (it’s one of the Preservation Development Initiatives with the National Trust, the paper is online, but I also saw an excellent presentation by them in 1/2005), the Hartford Consortium project described in the Arch. Foundation video “Block by Block”, and the Campus Partnership initiative at Ohio State are particularly good examples (along with Penn). I saw a presentation by Tom Foegler (sp?) of the OSU project and was quite impressed. We talked afterwards and he said that the Lincoln Land Institute has brought together the most forward-thinking universities together to work through these issues together on town-gown revitalization.
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Just a content correction: It is not “Tom Foegler” of OSU’s Campus Partners. It’s “Terry Foegler”.
I’m a UM graduate (history w/ high honors, 1967). Interesting stuff. The abandonment of on-campus student housing develolpment may have come a bit later than you suggest: wasn’t Bursley Hall (a very large dorm on North Campus) opened in the very late 1960s or early ’70s? Isn’t the University continuing to develop the Northwood Apartments? (Please email your response.)