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How is it that the number of units built is far greater than the number of units permitted? Don't you need a permit to (legally) build a new unit?
A permit is by BUILDING, and a unit is irregardless of the number of permits....I believe. You can have 1 permit to build a 500-unit building. This is why it doesn't really look like Minneapolis or St. Paul are gaining much in the way of new construction compared to Woodbury or Maple Grove, even though each permit has between 50 and 100 units attached, on avg. (very rough estimate....don't quote me on that).
I have no idea about Burnsville, but it's a big leap of logic to suggest (A) Burnsville has apartments (B) Burnsville has gone downhill, therefore (C) apartments have caused Burnsville to go downhill. Or, even if the apartments/townhouses HAVE caused Burnsville to decline, it's still illogical to suggest that because apartments in Burnsville caused Burnsville to go downhill, therefore apartments in any community will cause that community to take a turn for the worse.
Just like ice cream sales and crime in the summer: both go up, yet ice cream does not (usually) cause crime. There is no correlation between the two. I know there's a word for this phenomenon in statistic sampling but it's escaping me right now!
Schools with good but declining test scores simply have a lower percentage of students with parents who are actively involved in their education. Nothing more, nothing less. Whether it's grade school, middle school, high school, or even college beyond that, the bulk of the learning is not done in the classroom- it's done at home or in the library or in the dorm room after class. Declining test scores mean nothing more than declining after-class environments for learning. And those are a function of the parents in those environments and whether they do or don't promote excellence, whether they can or can't provide tutoring support themselves or access to it for the child to be enriched from where the bulk of learning is done.
I reject the notion that just because a school's test scores have decreased that the neighorhood in which it resides has gone downhill. Plenty of nice, safe, clean neighborhoods have average (ie. not top) test scores. And often different rankings within a list are only separated by decimal places. But compare the two schools and the uninformed will conclude that the higher ranked school is always automatically far better than the lower ranked school when really in a lot of instances the difference is measley decimals which can often be statistically insignificant. Scores are only really good for segmenting out the bottom of the barrel. Once you get into the average and above average scores, the scores data is generally more useless. Exceptions are if your child has a talent for math and science and a parent is looking to get that child into a magnet school to focus on that talent. But that child is by far not every child, again he/she is the exception.
You can reject this all you want but the fact of the matter is, in schools where most kids do not meet minimum standards teachers have to spend more and more of their time disciplining kids and then getting those kids up to grade level. When you have a class of 5 kids that want to learn and 25 that don't, the 5 that want to learn are suffering because they are not being exposed to the material they should be to do well on the tests. When the numbers are reversed, the 5 kids that don't want to learn are not as disruptive and the other kids in the class help keep them in check. The 25 kids that do want to learn can move along at a pace that will help them excel. Ask any high school student or teacher and they will confirm this information. It really isn't a difficult concept. Also, until a child reaches college, most of the learning DOES take place in the classroom and the homework done reinforces what was covered in class. Again, ask any high school student and they will tell you how it works.
As for Burnsville--sure, you can still get an ok education there but move 10 blocks over and you are in one of the top districts in the country--so the point is, why would you pick a school with major discipline problems and a large portion of the school that doesn't care about doing well when you can live in basically the same area and your kids can attend schools where 99% of the kids go on to 4 year colleges.
Perhaps ok is good enough in South Carolina but in MN, most people want better than ok.
I have no idea about Burnsville, but it's a big leap of logic to suggest (A) Burnsville has apartments (B) Burnsville has gone downhill, therefore (C) apartments have caused Burnsville to go downhill. Or, even if the apartments/townhouses HAVE caused Burnsville to decline, it's still illogical to suggest that because apartments in Burnsville caused Burnsville to go downhill, therefore apartments in any community will cause that community to take a turn for the worse.
I will come out and say it since everyone is tap dancing around the issue, the problem is that more and more low income families are moving into Burnsville and as a result, the quality of the kids in the school is going down. Plain and simple. In areas where there are high concentration of rental properties you will find lower income people and less emphasis on the importance of getting a good education. I really don't think you are that clueless that you don't get this concept. You can be as politically correct as you want but facts are facts and all you have to do is look at the schools in low income areas of the metro and see the test scores to confirm.
A permit is by BUILDING, and a unit is irregardless of the number of permits....I believe. You can have 1 permit to build a 500-unit building. This is why it doesn't really look like Minneapolis or St. Paul are gaining much in the way of new construction compared to Woodbury or Maple Grove, even though each permit has between 50 and 100 units attached, on avg. (very rough estimate....don't quote me on that).
Honestly, I think you are counting a bunch of things that have been proposed but never actually got built (36 Park for example seems to fit that, Tower Lights got changed to an assisted living place with a different number of units, etc.). I also think your dates are wrong (Ellispe I seems to have been built in 2009 or 2010 depending on who you believe, might be the difference between groundbreaking and completion).
I will come out and say it since everyone is tap dancing around the issue, the problem is that more and more low income families are moving into Burnsville and as a result, the quality of the kids in the school is going down. Plain and simple. In areas where there are high concentration of rental properties you will find lower income people and less emphasis on the importance of getting a good education. I really don't think you are that clueless that you don't get this concept. You can be as politically correct as you want but facts are facts and all you have to do is look at the schools in low income areas of the metro and see the test scores to confirm.
Gee, but if those lower-income people just owned houses then all would be just dandy? Something about home ownership magically transforms them? It's not even as though owning a house means that people have money -- clearly a LOT of people out there bought houses that they could not, in fact, afford. Even low-income people often own houses. But if that same family looks at their finances, doesn't have 10 to 20% to put down, and wants to live within their means, we're going to sneer at them for choosing to rent instead? No wonder people feel pressure into buying even when it doesn't make financial sense. Who wants to be made out into the pariahs of society? Because "renter" means "low-income" which too often in the Twin Cities is understand to mean "uneducated criminal who destroys society."
Buying does not make sense for everyone. Just because someone rents does not make them low-income. And as you often point out, in many cases it's cheaper to buy than to rent (assuming one is going to stay in one place for a long time, and assuming that one can truly afford it), so wouldn't that mean that the homeowner with a lower monthly mortgage payment is a bigger drag on the neighborhood than the renter with the higher monthly payment, just because the renter writes a bigger monthly check?
And your statement that "in areas where there are high concentration of rental properties you will find lower income people" is not true across the board; that may well be true in Burnsville, but it's not an absolute. About two-thirds of the residents of the East Isles neighborhood in Uptown are renters, but no one could argue that that's a low-income neighborhood.
I have a real problem with the all-too-common Twin Cities stereotype that renters are second-class citizens.
The same trend can be sceen in their elementary and middle schools. But this does not even begin to tell the whole story. If you speak to someone who has lived in Burnsville the last 10 years, they will be able to tell you about the how the city has changed for the worse.
Okay, being serious now.
Not only is correlation not causation, as others have pointed out, there's other issues to consider too regarding this thesis. First, most of the apartment and townhome stock in ISD 191 is older than ten years. My condo is nearly twenty years old, for example, and there are apartment buildings and townhomes dating back to the 70's. There was plenty of multifamily housing in the district long, long before it started having issues. If anything, I think the main issue facing 191 going forward is declining enrollment, since there has already been a lot of discussion about closing schools (elementary schools for now, but one of the junior highs will likely be on the block too at some point).
Secondly, other school districts in the south suburbs have less expensive housing as well, and are doing just fine. ISD 196 has tons of it -- the apartment complex I used to live in had 144 units and was in that district, and most of the condos/townhouses I looked at were in ISD 196. Even ISD 194 has less expensive homes within its borders; not only does Lakeville have a fair number of condos now, but it has three trailer parks in it, not to mention some older and cheaper single family housing stock in the old downtown area and in some of the more rural parts of the district. It's not all 5-6BR houses there.
Third, building single family homes and expensive condos, as you suggest doing, certainly does not guarantee a lack of problems. How many of those are sitting empty right now due to the housing market collapse? And what's to stop them from becoming rentals themselves (which many of them have)? Burnsville tried the expensive condo and apartment route with the Heart of the City redevelopment, and it languished for years because nobody wanted to pay $300K for a condo in Burnsville. Even now, while the (pricey) apartments at least have filled up, they had to bring in Section 8 renters to do that, because nobody wanted to rent those apartments at the overpriced market rates. The point here is that cities can't just build expensive housing and expect it to fill up with only the owners/tenants they want to attract -- markets don't work that way, and if they try to build something for which there is no demand, it will fail.
Hence why there is so much apartment construction going on nowadays, because that is where the demand is. Not just from lower-income people, but also from young people not ready to buy a house yet, professional working singles (aka me; I own my home but really shouldn't), retirees or empty nesters looking to downsize, and all of the people who can't get a mortgage for one reason or another due to much tighter lending standards and down payment requirements.
Not everybody can or should own a home, and if we as a society had realized this 10-15 years ago, we could have avoided a lot of pain.
Gee, but if those lower-income people just owned houses then all would be just dandy? Something about home ownership magically transforms them? It's not even as though owning a house means that people have money -- clearly a LOT of people out there bought houses that they could not, in fact, afford. Even low-income people often own houses. But if that same family looks at their finances, doesn't have 10 to 20% to put down, and wants to live within their means, we're going to sneer at them for choosing to rent instead? No wonder people feel pressure into buying even when it doesn't make financial sense. Who wants to be made out into the pariahs of society? Because "renter" means "low-income" which too often in the Twin Cities is understand to mean "uneducated criminal who destroys society."
Buying does not make sense for everyone. Just because someone rents does not make them low-income. And as you often point out, in many cases it's cheaper to buy than to rent (assuming one is going to stay in one place for a long time, and assuming that one can truly afford it), so wouldn't that mean that the homeowner with a lower monthly mortgage payment is a bigger drag on the neighborhood than the renter with the higher monthly payment, just because the renter writes a bigger monthly check?
And your statement that "in areas where there are high concentration of rental properties you will find lower income people" is not true across the board; that may well be true in Burnsville, but it's not an absolute. About two-thirds of the residents of the East Isles neighborhood in Uptown are renters, but no one could argue that that's a low-income neighborhood.
I have a real problem with the all-too-common Twin Cities stereotype that renters are second-class citizens.
You are the only one jumping to that conclusion, no one else.
Honestly, I think you are counting a bunch of things that have been proposed but never actually got built (36 Park for example seems to fit that, Tower Lights got changed to an assisted living place with a different number of units, etc.). I also think your dates are wrong (Ellispe I seems to have been built in 2009 or 2010 depending on who you believe, might be the difference between groundbreaking and completion).
36 Park is almost topped out! Everything else I listed is under construction except Ellipse II, and I told you already that I didn't list even close to everything. I know what I wrote isn't wrong, but I don't know what your sources are telling you. Go look for yourself if you don't believe me...http://www.36park.com/
You are the only one jumping to that conclusion, no one else.
Renter = lower income = lower priority on education = lower "quality" kids?
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