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Show $ w si We who are about to die... You're comfortable, most of you. You live with Mom and Dad work part-time and go out with your friends or lovers on the weekends Or if you're married, you're probably doing okavjhe .two of you live in a tidy basement apartment somewhere or PhaP?J" or VillageThe wife works, the husband goes to school where he may may not be a graduate student and T.A. w.th a fellowship. So it could be worse. There's enough money to get by, maybe some extra, and you can always live on love or whatever. Maybe, in all this disciplined contentment, we're n'v hf aware of that minority of students who are not n"' situations. Those are the students, usually ""dergraduates w ho are making it through by the skin of their teeth. They get by on loans grants an on-and-off job washing d.shes mewhere. The checks from home stopped a long time ago, the hair ,s too '"8 anJ th is too active for a good steady job and tuition keeps going up. There s alienation, discontentment and no escape. These people go to school up here, such as they "" They live with others like them in a house near the University maybe they drive a beat-up Volkswagen back and forth. They used to use food stamp before they were shut off. Now another rule is going to start squeezing them even harder, perhaps even out of existence. The Salt Lake City Commission said the other day they plan to change the avenues zoning rules such that all of a "family's" cars must have off-street parking spaces (Tribune 21072). This is in an effort to reverse an obviously bad and dangerous parking problem on the avenues. As it is now, most avenues houses have off-street parking for one or two cars, if they have it at all. What the commission is trying to do is force landlords to either rent to a related-type family (which will own one or maybe two cars) or provide four or five parking spaces for an unrelated-type family (which will own four or five cars). The latter category is the one many students will fall into. And it's perfectly obvious what most landlords are going to do. They won't rent to groups of students because they don't have the parking for them. It will cost money to provide parking, but it's a lot easier to sit by and let the property deteriorate and take the tax write-offs and charge the same old rent. That's how slums are made; that's how slumlords get rich. As things stand now, the lower avenues are destined for slumhood just as surely as Central City was 20 years ago. So there we have it. The food stamps are gone, the group living soon will be gone. All the new apartment and housing starts are aimed at young, middle-income and perhaps married people. There's nothing going up for poor students or for the poor, period. When the community rejects or ignores the University economically, as seems to be happening here, we are going to find ourselves economically elite. There will be resentment and growing class distinction. We hate to rely on the old Karl Marx cliche, but we don't want to see anyone else forced to. |
