The Michigan Dailv - Monrday un I13 _' 205 - 5 VIEWPOINT Keep Ann Arbor weird 1 I Ic IVII1.1116a11 Lially - IVI VI fuay, Jul i f IC , G Take your free ride and shove it ALEXANDRA JONES CEC\ NaST P u PE )RE-4 By RICHARD MURPHY I've been shopping at The Under- world on South University Avenue for over a decade. It's closing this month, claiming rising rents and stag- nant sales. No doubt it will be replaced by downtown's third Aveda salon. Harry's Army Surplus, another place I've been shopping at since high school, closed this spring for the same reasons. These are not lone data points. How much of the Daily's current readership r even remembers lining up for midnight releases at Wherehouse Records? Or before Schoolkids was In Exile? I don't necessarily think Ann Arbor is over- rated, yet, but when my friends with the "Keep Austin Weird" t-shirts wistfully remember their hometown when it real- ly was weird, or Boulderites talk about how their town used to be, I can't help but see similarities. Of course, the decline of good, diverse, useful downtown retail isn't the only thing this college town shares with Boulder. There's also the cost of housing. In order to live within walk- ing distance of downtown and campus, I live in a room of a house shared with eight other people. A former office- mate who recently moved to Chicago has an apartment - hardwood floors and all - two blocks from an "U' stop for what my room costs. If my access to fun and useful amenities is decreasing annually, why isn't my rent doing the same? What am I paying for in Ann Arbor? Others have asked the same question: The artists of 555 Studio, for example, moved from Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti (and recently on to Detroit) because no affordable studio space could be found in Ann Arbor. Fleeing artists are always a hallmark of "Cool Cities," right? Tonight, the Ann Arbor City Coun- cil will have a public hearing on two visions of just what ought to be done for Ann Arbor. On the one hand, the Downtown Development Authority's "Three Site Plan" considers the eco- nomics of development in Ann Arbor and attempts to address some of the factors that are pushing up rents, driving out small local stores and allowing developers to call $350,000 lofts "affordable." The DDA's plan would consolidate three downtown parking lots into a structure on half of one of the sites, allowing the city to sell the other two lots to develop- ers - on terms guaranteeing that these lots would become commercial space that independent businesses could afford, and housing within the reach of the average graduate. The other half of the site with the parking structure, at First Street and William Street, would become a park and part of a greenway, a pathway dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists running along the edge of town, connecting housing, businesses and small parks on another and to the larger parks along the river. Additionally, the plan would clean up soil contamination from old industry on the site, improve a rail crossing that meets no stan- dards of safety and shore up an aging underground creek to reduce flooding - with all of these goodies included in the parking structure's price. On the other side are the Friends of the Ann Arbor Greenway, a slo- gan-toting band of nearby homeown- ers who have decided that this looks like an excellent opportunity to score themselves some pork. Sorry, "park." The Friends are demanding that no parking structure be built and that the site be devoted entire- ly to parkland. They've dismissed the DDA's park as a "token park," demanding a "full-scale" greenway instead - a difference of perhaps an acre. They've silenced down- town business owners who support the DDA's plan, mocking or threat- ening those who openly support it. They seem to have some issues with money: Anybody who supports the DDA's plan is "in the pockets of the big developers" (my kickbacks must have been lost in the mail), and they studiously avoid talking about where the money is going to come from for their version of the park, let alone all of the other sitework needed. They're deceptive - simplifying the issues to "parks, not parking structures!" - and they're just plain mean, openly booing a student who said at a city council meeting that the DDA's plan would benefit the whole city, while the Friends vision would only benefit their neighborhood. The council is leaning toward the DDA's plan, but politicians are weak creatures, and the Friends will be out tonight in force. The council needs to hear a variety of opinions, and students live in this city too. Google the Friends and the Three- Site Plan to find out more, catch up on the discussions at ArborUpdate. com and AnnArborlsOverrated. com and let the council know what you think. No decision will be made tonight, so you can e-mail thoughts to council if you don't read this in time: council@ci.ann-arbor.mi.us. Murphy is a College of Architecture and Urban Planning graduate student and a contributor to arhorupdate.com. few months ago, my boyfriend lost his job. While the prospect of searching for employment in Ann Arbor during the summer is so bleak as to make one question one's innate value as a human being, we tried to stay calm. But after more than a month, the B.F. hadn't any luck. Trust me, this guy gets more ironic enjoyment from daytime TV than any- one else I know, but sitting around alone feeling useless all day really sucks. With no job, Boyfriend can't save up cash to start chipping away at that dou- ble arts education/history degree in the fall. Judgment from his family as well as my frustration with our lack of financial stability made him feel like a freeloader, and although I don't mind supporting him in tough times and know that he'd do the same for me, the pressure was really getting to both of us. Then, dur- ing one tearful, late-night conversation, he said, "I'm joining the Army." To me, this was true desperation; this was rock bottom. "Deal-breaker" doesn't really begin to describe it. My grandfather peeled potatoes in the Canadian Army during World War II, but besides that, no one in my family has served for any nation in any war. I've always been taught that violence is wrong, that military life is a miserable existence - and for the pacifist liberals that make up my family, I don't doubt that that's true. War is bad, governments that lead their countries to war are worse and people who support or participate in such are ignorant and misguided or sim- ply mean. Although he agrees with me on most issues, Boyfriend's background is dif- ferent. In high school, he was hard- core into Army ROTC. He won prizes in drill competitions and delighted in behavior typical of the armed forces: learning how to use firearms, boss- ing subordinates around and making life harder for others in a way that was sometimes physical. Happily, he dis- covered guitar and stopped giving a shit about school or ROTC. Army recruiters must love our sort of desperation: An Associated Press story last Saturday reports that the Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserve fell 18 to 29 percent short of recruitment goals this month, exempli- fying a trend that's plagued recruiting since February. The Army, along with the Marines, has suffered the most casu- alties in Iraq. Recruitment may also be down because parents are "increasingly wary" of their kids joining up. Military service hasn't been seen as an admi- rable, or even viable, career move for young men for about 40 years - now, it seems, those who enlist are either fol- lowing in ancestors' footsteps or too damn poor, stupid or unlucky to make it in the real world. Then Boyfriend went so far as to research the Michigan National Guard. He'd recite the whole "one weekend a month, two weeks a year" line of bullshit. You know, maybe some time stationed in Germany. Oh, and he might have to do a month of service in Iraq. Yeah, um, fuck that. The violation of our shared principles isn't what bothered me most about the possibility of the B.F. getting shipped off to die or go nuts in the desert (I didn't even want to contemplate that last part - incidentally, he's dropped the idea since). What got to me was the sick power that the promise of three squares a day and money for college has over people, even when that comes along with sheer dehu- manization. How can the job market - we're talking part-time, minimum-wage food service positions - be so desolate as to make an experience during which your chances of survival, let alone happi- ness, are drastically diminished look like a career opportunity? For some, military service offers a decent living and a source of pride - good for them. Young people are entering a society that demands we jump through more and more hoops to earn a living and achieve a respectable status; we face inflated tuition bills that just keep growing. But even those of us who have fallen on hard times won't sacrifice our safety, our principles or our dignity to serve in an Armed Forces whose orders are unjust, whose actions we and many others oppose. Keep your free ride - we'll make our way on our own terms. Jones is a Dailyfall/winter associate arts editor. She can be reached at almajo@umich.edu. The American way: Anyone can be president KARL STAMPFL ONE-; lD ,NVESAI)S'l f you're bored in statistics class and wondering ,. whether the kid sit- ting next to you is likely to become a future president of the United States, ask yourselves these questions about him (or yourself, if you want to become the commander in chief one day). Has he won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England, like Bill Clinton? Has he ever told his father that the let- ter grade "D" stood for distinction, as last year's Democratic candidate John Kerry did while at Yale University? Is he a member of Michigamua, the underground society at the University of Michigan that counts Gerald Ford as an alum, or Yale's Skull and Bones, which boasts both members of the Bush father- son tandem? Is he still an only child, unlike every president in this country's history? Is he the editor of his campus news- paper, as Franklin Roosevelt was at Harvard? Has he ever been arrested for stealing a wreath from a fraternity house, like our current leader?' Is he planning on going to attend law school to become the 25th president with a law degree? Or do people strongly sus- pect he will enter the clergy after gradua- tion, as Woodrow Wilson's classmates did at Davidson College in North Carolina? Is he a prominent varsity athlete, like Clinton (rugby), Ford (football), George H.W. Bush (baseball) and Ronald Rea- gan (football)? Did he turn down contract offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers to go to law school (Ford)? Is he an actor, like Reagan? Did he have to refuse an acceptance to Harvard because his family couldn't afford its steep price tag, like Richard Nixon? Does he play violin for the school orchestra, as Nixon also did? Is he on pace to complete college in three years with a degree in economics, like George H.W. Bush did? Is his main concern in college swim- ming, as John F. Kennedy's was? The point is that it's futile to judge presidential candidates by their college careers - a recent fad in last year's presidential election that has been con- tinued with last week's release of Ker- ry's transcript. Presidents' careers have been too diverse to do that. Maybe you don't agree with Kerry's or Bush's poli- tics, but it's not fair to blame it on their grades. As future candidates roam the halls of our finest (or not so fine) institu- tions, it's a crapshoot - to use a term rarely associated with the presidential selection process - as to who among them will rise to this country's highest office. So what if Bush's efforts topped out at an 88-percent grade or if Kerry's best was a 79 in political science? We all know that grades aren't the only important part of college by a long shot. Maybe Bush could have done better but chose not to, electing to spend his time at the fraternity instead of the library. Either way, I haven't found any evidence correlating a person's performance in Modern European Poetry in Translation to his ability to lead a nation of 295 mil- lion people. Bush may not have under- stood, for example, the finer points of the sonnet. That doesn't mean he's not a responsible executive. Remember voting for the person most likely to become president in high school? Turns out your predic- tion couldn't have been very accurate, because even during college, future commanders in chief are often hidden beneath the disguise of -poor grade- point averages and All-American foot- ball honors. That's assuming they're even in school, unlike nine presidents, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who never even set foot in a college classroom. Stampfl is a Daily fall/winter administra- tion beat reporter. He can be reached at kstampfl@umich.edu. i LETTER TO THDE EDITOR Congratulations to Michigan softball TO THE DAILY: Michigan wins NCAA Women's World Softball title! Congratulations to the women's softball team. I didn't get to see the exciting nail-biter of a second game, but, boy, the third game had it all. Ten innings of hard-fought base- ball by two ace teams, but Michi- gan proved that it earned its stripes with its phenomenal season, its poise and its exceptional athletes. And the first team east of the Mis- sissippi to win the title! Again, congratulations, Michigan. What a proud moment for your school. Brian Symonanis Oak Park, Ill.