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News, Spin

Rent: Closer than the show

Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock

Monday, July 18, 2005. Some Rogers officials are getting nervous about the growth of apartments in their fair city. They are candid enough to worry aloud about any resulting increase in crime, not to mention increase in poorer people and lower surrounding property values.

If I were just to discuss apartments without these guys as motivation, I’d just worry about traffic. Here in mid-Fayetteville near campus so many apartment complexes are going up along already choked two-lane arteries I dread driving once they get finished.

I am not worried about crime being a direct result of increasing apartment tenants.

It wasn’t so long ago my wife and I rented. It may be in our future, too. You never know.

Everybody rents at some point in their lives, Rogers big shots. Not just the low lifes you want to live elsewhere.

If crime is rising, the cause isn’t renting versus owning, it’s simply growth.

Growth, remember, you’re all for it. You call it progress, right? Apartments for the people who work in the Wal-Mart where you stop for milk on your way home from the $150 evening charity fundraiser.

Apartments also are for students and young people in their first jobs — your children? Apartments are for single parents — like that cousin of yours? Apartments are for retirees and widows ready to toss the hassle of a largely empty house — the one you grew up in? Yet neither you or your spouse, nor Mom or Dad, want to live under one roof at this point, your roof.

Apartments are for people whose custom mini-mansions near the club aren’t finished yet.

Single-family and multi-family housing need planning and also zoning. There are issues of traffic obviously, but also utility use.

Owners and managers of apartments need to take responsibility for all aspects of their properties, and laws and regulations help remind them of that. You city officials should be working on that. Small-town ordinances no longer apply for the metropolis you deliberately set in motion decades ago.

Fortunately, you guys who have been quoted in recent news reports likely are in the minority. Too, you may just be addressing the recent accounts of crime statistics and guessing at their causes without adequate reflection, not to mention kicks in the pants.

For a year I edited a paper serving three tiny towns north of Dallas, north of Plano, actually. One small apartment complex among them, where nearly all houses sat on no less than 1 acre. Residents liked to keep a horse or two on the property, yet be just 45 minutes from downtown Dallas. I stayed in my north-Dallas efficiency and commuted a half-hour, in light traffic since I was going the wrong way at the right times.

That complex was dumpy. I adopted my beloved late kitty B.C. from a guy who lived there in 1984. I was glad I didn’t live there. Some jobs require to live in your community, you know.

With an appropriate ratio of multi-family to single-family in any given community, some will be nicer and some scuzzier. Either. In the morning paper there’s a fatal stabbing. The photo shows it occurred outside a standalone house. -30-

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