Village Spillage

Great column.  I'm also concerned in general with the direction of the village.  I've been here 12+ years. Homeowner for most of that time.  Perhaps it's just perception and "old guy" disease, however I don't believe the village is as well run as it was when I arrived.  When I first moved in, I generally felt like a customer when dealing with the village on questions, issues, etc.  Other than being forced to do a survey for a replacement fence, on a lot that already had fences for years, because there "was not one on file", it was a great experience being a resident of WFB.

Now I see a village obsessed will small, mostly meaningless details (per this column), not resident friendly when I interact with the village hall employees, can't seem to finish simple road and sewer projects inside 18 months, and one with no plan for 3/4 of a mile of Silver Spring, that already has solid businesses to build on (Sendiks, Winkies, Fox Bay Cinema, Starbucks).  If you go to the Shorewood website, they have a 20 year plan for both Oakland and Capital.  Now some or much of that won't happen as now designed, however how much more confident are you as a business person to see a 20 year plan for the area you are investigating for expansion, as compared to one with no overall plan that will force you to put in windows on a building that never needed windows for 60 years.

I don't want to overdue the complaints, (for example, the 4th of July is a wonderful day in Bay) however I am very concerned with the direction of the village.  We are solely reliant on great schools maintaining our life styles and property values.  If the schools ever slip even a bit, the draw of the city will be significantly reduced.

I agree and great column!

I actually want to take back that I agree with this article, because I agree with everything but one thing and that is the front office staff.  I have found them to be nothing but kind, helpful and funny.  I feel, that they are not treated kindly and respectfully by the residents of Whitefish Bay.  To get respect, you have to give respect and if people would stop acting like they are entitled to everything OR will not take NO for an answer and start yelling at the front desk people that are just trying to do their job, then maybe you would get a smile.  Maybe you aren't like that, or your neighbor, but maybe the person before them was.  Think about it.

I was just up at my parents house and called the administrative offices for the police department to find out when they could put their chairs out for the parade because last year, the police tried to take my dad's chairs.  The chairs that he has been putting out for 25 years on the same street corner.

The answer I got was - it depends on how people act.  If people start putting their chairs out and fighting over spots - they are going to take them.  If people are going to move other peoples chairs and shove them into business entrances - they are going to take them.

Maybe you next blog should be on how we can all live in a community and treat each other respectfully.

Since there was no commentary about the office staff in the article, and I agree with you, I think your comment is aimed at the commenter WILLB.  

I've also found the village staff to be pleasant and professional.

Yes, Kevin, you are correct.  My apologies, it was the comment.  SEE it has been bothering me and on my mind....  I thought about this for awhile before I responded... because it really bothered me.  Sorry for mixing up the article/response.

This comment follows up on my comment on Kevin's next post and responds to an email from Kevin asking me to explain my disagreement with this post.

I think there are two very different issues in play here: First, is this or that ARC decision justifiable?  Second, how do we justify the ARC's mission?  I'm happy to concede that the ARC may make this or that mistake.  (Perhaps the new restaurant shouldn't have been required to put in those windows.  I don't know the details, but maybe that was overreaching.)  But I'm not inclined to a skeptical attitude toward the mission of the ARC.  It seems to me that WFB needs these reviews.

I moved to WFB only two years ago, so I don't know how people argued for the creation of the ARC.  But I suspect that Kevin's "Don't want no ugly houses on my block, right?" doesn't quite capture the strongest argument on that side.  The argument that I'd make is not aesthetic but political: the residents of WFB have both a legitimate interest in ensuring and a right to take reasonable steps to ensure that the demographics of the village do not change substantially through a substantial change in the housing stock.  That's the genuinely political argument against overbuilt lots.  Overbuilt lots aren't a political issue because they're ugly.  They're a political issue because they tend to change the nature of the village in ways that have nothing to do with aesthetics.

Maybe others wouldn't put it this way, but my frame of reference here is the Chicago North Shore where I grew up in the 1960s and 70s.  Each time I return to my old neighborhoods in Wilmette and Winnetka I note that a few more houses have been torn down and replaced with McMansions.  Not all of them are ugly, but all of them are much larger and much more expensive than what they replaced.  The upshot is not only that I could never afford to live in my old neighborhoods but that my parents -- imagining them young again and adjusting for inflation, etc. -- couldn't either.  Those are simply no longer even remotely middle class communities.

Whitefish Bay still is a middle class community.  There are houses on my block that sell for well under $200K.  My block looks very similar to the block where we lived in Wilmette forty years ago -- that is, to how it looked *then*.  Nearly all the houses on my old block have been torn down and their replacements built right out to the property line.  The whole neighborhood is unrecognizable to me.  And neither I nor my again-young parents could afford to live there.

We have very good reason to do what it takes -- within reason -- to ensure that that doesn't happen here.  And the ARC is one reasonable component of that endeavor.  It doesn't follow, of course, that the ARC can't abuse its mandate in a given case.  But then we're back to the first issue...

I have nothing against rich people, but I don't want my town overrun by them!  I don't know first-hand, but I imagine I wouldn't want to live in Wilmette or Winnetka now even if I could afford to.  The point, in any case, isn't to keep rich people out but to ensure that middle class folks can also afford to live here.

Well, I love to have rich people live here.  Because those that a truly "rich" are some of the nicest people I have ever met.  What we don't need (more of) are those that THINK they are rich.  Those that do, act like they are and aren't and don't treat people respectfully.

As far as limiting the size of the houses, that came from people "complaining" about large homes built on their block.  So the three I remember, had neighbors crying at board meetings and posting protest signs on their yards.   Then a person on Beaumont bought a house and wanted to knock it down and they were denied, so now it has become a rental with a "gravel" driveway, no garage and a little overgrown greenary.

In hindsight I wish I'd omitted that final paragraph in my comment, which is really just a glib aside.  The issue is *not at all* whether "rich people" are "nice"!

The issue (in my mind, at least) is whether current residents have an interest in ensuring and a right to ensure that the village not lose its current demographic mix (at least as regards income level).

First, I’ll comment on the “WFB needs these reviews” line.  We do?  The ARC has been around for 3-4 years.  Can you point to more than a handful of egregious remodeling projects?  Didn’t we do a pretty good job of altering our housing stock for the years prior, when homeowners made decisions on their own?

I can think of one “odd” home.  It’s on Bay Ridge, like 6000 or so.  IIRC, the house was mold infested and bulldozed.  The new house is .. in my humble opinion (and many others) .. odd.  Some would say ugly.  But you know what?  The homeowners paid an architect and builders hundreds of thousands of dollars to build that sucker.  I’ll bet they love it, there’s nothing like it in WFB.  They have a unique home.   I think variety like that .. isn’t a terrible thing.   There’s no way it gets built today, under ARC rules, as it doesn’t “fit the character of the neighborhood.”

Since you weren’t around until two years ago, you really don’t know how it began.  As I wrote, the ARC idea came to fruition when a tiny handful of homes (like 1 per year) were purchased by developers who wanted to demolish and build better homes for profit.  Oh, to further undercut your argument .. those homes were in very expensive neighborhoods, and those wealthy neighbors raised Cain.

I tend to agree that any village has the “right to take reasonable steps to ensure .. demographics .. don’t change substantially” .. but the operative word is “substantially” .   In the end, perhaps 8 houses have been demolished.   In a community of 14,000, that’s peanuts.    I don’t doubt your Wilmette/Winnetka story .. but that scenario just isn’t in the cards for WFB.    The avg. home price over the past few years hovers around $330k.    The $200k houses you speak of are a very small percentage of WFB’s housing stock, I’ll bet no more than 10%.    $300k on a postage stamp lot makes it pretty tough for a builder to make much dough.

Since the number of actual demolitions was and is infinitesimal, I think your “demographic” argument falls flat.  

“Whitefish Bay still is a middle class community.”    Not sure how you define Middle Class, but it sure isn’t in accordance with the Census.  WFB’s median income ($99,970) is twice the nation’s ($51k) .. $100k income puts you in the top 15% of all wage earners in the US.  A whopping one fourth of WFB is in the top 2.6% of all earners.  WFB is way above middle class.   In Milwaukee County, it’s about the 3rd wealthiest city/village.  And we’re surrounded by wealth.  53217 is the wealthiest zip code in the state.  

So .. was the ARC designed for demographic reasons?  To keep rich people out?    No.

Kevin,

Thanks for replying, but the argument you're trying to undercut is not the argument I made.  I explicitly said that I did not know how the ARC was created and that I was presenting what *I* regard as a strong argument for it.  I wasn't presuming to speak for others or to address the actual history of these debates.  The question -- at least, my question -- is not how the ARC was justified but how it can be justified.  It's a question, that is, of its legitimacy.

When you concede that "any village has the right to take reasonable steps to ensure demographics don’t change substantially," you concede the main principle for which I was arguing.  As you note, the operative word is indeed “substantially."  Whether or not the residents who have complained about overbuilt lots in certain (perhaps somewhat upscale) neighborhoods were actually thinking in those terms, they *could* have argued by appeal to that principle.  They could have argued that the proposed new houses were not in accord with the rest of the neighborhood precisely because the houses would be substantially bigger than what they replaced and thus could figure in a trend that would substantially change demographics (making a somewhat upscale neighborhood very upscale).  Obviously, a single house, or two or three, cannot change demographics.  But just as obviously, the only way to address a possible trend is one house at a time.  So again, though I don't know these residents, this is an argument they could have made, to which the best reply would have been that the new houses did not in fact augur such a trend... and then a useful debate would have begun.

I suspect that my story captures at least an aspect of the debate that did transpire, but again I don't know.  It would be nice if one or two of these residents could tell us here!  My point is simply that this would have been a debate worth having.

I also suspect that you and I agree on one point that I've not yet mentioned.  If some of these residents, or others who support the ARC, presume to justify these interventions solely by appeal to aesthetic considerations, I think they're in the wrong.  I don't think people have a right to legislate pure aesthetics.  That's why I'm making a political argument for the ARC, based in considerations that more broadly address the quality of life in WFB.  An ugly house on your block may be something you just have to get used to.  (I'm not talking about neglect, which isn't merely aesthetic.)  But the possibility that developers will transform the social fabric of your community is something wholly different.  Again, maybe the threat in the present case was overblown.  (I suspect the housing slump has defused it in any case.)  My only claim is that one can make a legitimate argument -- that is, an argument that deserves a serious reply.

(I'm not overlooking that part of what you're doing is making that reply.  I'm addressing just the part of your argument where you appear to think no one has a right to raise these issues.)

Now to the interesting question of whether WFB is middle class.  Here's the census data that someone has plugged into the WFB Wikipedia entry, and that I've just verified as accurate at the census.gov website for the 2000 census (the most recent with this data):

"The median income for a household in the village was $80,755, and the median income for a family was $95,744. Males had a median income of $63,011 versus $43,893 for females. The per capita income for the village was $39,609."

Where did you get your figure of $99,970 for median income?  That's roughly right for a family....  But does a family income of $100K put you in the top 15% of families?  (Where are you getting that figure?)

Anyway, my point is that a family income of $100K (in 1999 dollars) puts you solidly within just about anyone's conception of the middle class.  Here, for example, is a quote from the Wikipedia entry for "middle class": "Sociologist Leonard Beeghley [writing in 2004] identifies a male making $57,000 and a female making $40,000 with a combined households income of $97,000 as a typical middle class family."  You could distinguish the "professional middle class" from the plain-old middle class, if you want, and say that WFB has a prof-mc demographic.  Or you could just say that WFB is "upper middle class" -- though I think that's misleading: since no one wants to be called "upper class" in our culture, the "upper middle class" tends to get used of much much wealthier communities.

(By the way, there are lots and lots of houses in WFB that sell for under $300K.  Those are clearly "middle class" prices on anybody's definition.)

But however we put it, here's the main point I was making.  Forty years ago, Wilmette and maybe even Winnetka had a similar demographic to WFB's, and now they don't.  It would be insane to call Winnetka "middle class" -- it's apparently now the fourth wealthiest community in the country -- and pretty clearly wrong in the case of at least most of Wilmette, including the part where I lived as a child.  And a big part of the change involves a change in the housing stock.  That's not the whole story, of course.  But it's not crazy to want to avoid such an outcome here.

Maybe you're right that there's no real prospect of that.  But the debate seems worth having.

And one more time: it's not about "keeping rich people out"!  As I said, I was being flippant when I threw in that crack about rich people.  "Preserving the demographic" means keeping less-than-rich-people here, not keeping anybody out.

I think Ted H has a point.  I remember seeing yard signs at the time saying "keep small houses in the Bay".  That's pretty good evidence that at least some people (regardless of their own income) were concerned not primarily with aesthetics but with preserving diversity of housing stock and preventing the community from becoming absolutely unaffordable for any but the very wealthy.   That seems like a legitimate concern to me.  Whether there is already a large-scale trend in that direction seems beside the point.  Why wait until there is already an overwhelming trend, and diversity is already significantly lost, to take precautions against it?  Maybe the ARC is in reality fixated on the wrong things.  What it should be doing, I think, is not policing aesthetics but trying to preserve a reasonable degree of diversity and demographic mix.  

Kevin,

We disagree about too much to pursue here, but I think its been useful to air some of those disagreements.

One quick note on 'middle class,' though: that term has never meant 'right in the middle of the income spectrum.'  See here for some standard breakdowns:

en.wikipedia.org/.../Social_class_in_the_United_States

There's no contradiction at all in the thought that someone in the top 20% of home owners is middle class.