by INFORUM
Kennedy Elementary looks at boundary changes: District seeks to remedy southside overcrowding
January 20, 2011 at 6:00 pm in INFORUM
The possibility of boundary changes was parents’ main concern at the Thursday night meeting held to address overcrowding at Kennedy Elementary. Continue Reading
Wow, just built and its overcrowded…. can we say bad planning?
How about Urban Sprawl. They are talking about closing McKinley and Horace Mann when they have this problem? There is a reason on district is overcrowded, and the inner cities are having problems. They are selling houses with easy to get into predatory loans; drawing the people away from the older established neighborhoods.
Stop the insanity, stop the Urban Sprawl! If we had a qualified City Planner who knew what the *&$(& he was doing, this wouldn’t be an issue.
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I don’t live in that neighborhood, but when we moved here 11 years ago we looked in central and north Fargo. Older, smaller homes were not the vision that we had for our family. We wanted something larger and newer; we got better value for our money in the south. Not all people want to live in the older areas of town and those who live in the newer areas should not be punished and forced to support the choices made by those who choose to live on the north side.
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I am not saying you should have to buy in any neighborhood you want to. I am saying the CITY PLANNER should design the city so it doesn’t sprawl, bringing with it the problems we are already seeing.
There is no reason why there should be the complaint about the school being too small. If its so, it means that neighborhood was marketed to all newly started families with subprime mortgages they can easily get into. You know the kind I am talking about, those mortgages that almost caused the collapse of our economy last year.
Most new parents don’t have a huge cash surplus to buy McMansions. Perhaps YOU FTP, can afford that kind of housing, but the statistics are 20% of houses are being forclosed upon right now. Yes, thats 1 in 5 houses is being lost… left empty. When the tax exemptions for those houses in the Kennedy Neighborhood expire after 5 years… what do you think is going to happen to that overpopulated school?
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@ Vertigo Bad planning? Maybe but the school was built as a 4 section school with the infrastructure to become a 5 section school. You really don’t want the elementary schools any bigger than that. Because of the growing population in the South end, boundary changes are absolutely necessary. To your comment of closing Mckinley and Horace Mann, those are options that need to be looked at. Closing a school in the North to open another school in the South to even out the average classroom sizes may be necessary. The average classroom size in the North schools is around 15 compared to 20+ at the elementary schools on the south side. The bottom line is it will be impossible to please everyone so emotions need to be put aside and do what is best for the elementary students. We need to ensure they are all getting a quality education and it is equal among the different parts of the city. Right now that is not happening.
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Well, Sioux, the flaw to that argument, and FTP above, is that good urban design isn’t about pleasing everybody. We can’t SHOULDN’T all be mmoving to the most expensive, ritziest part of town leaving the poorer parts of town to flounder and turn into slums. This is essential to good urban planning.
We need to design the community so all neighborhoods have a reasonable turnover, and a low percentage of empty houses at any one time. In this manner, there are fresh residents who care about the community, and always new children to repopulate the schools.
5 years later, when the tax exemptions expire, and their variable rate loans come up….. some with balloon payments… Suddenly we have giant schools in neighborhoods where people are leaving.
We build large, cheaply constructed houses to sell with predatory loans designed to fail. We build a LOT of them, and then wonder what to do when all the young families, those who don’t have much reserve of cash, move into those neighborhoods and we cannot build schools fast enough.
5 years later, when the tax exemptions expire, and their variable rate loans come up….. some with balloon payments… Suddenly we have giant schools in neighborhoods where people are leaving.
Eventually they move, and these houses…. the ones that were just the kind FTP likes, cheap McMansions with new carpeting and vaulted ceilings… are old. They can’t be sold for what they bought them for.
I realize everybody wants to live in a mansion, and if you can simply sign a credit contract and get into one… wow, fantastic! BUT, thats not how one maintains a sustainable community. The city needs to maintain fewer houses for sale than demand.. to keep property values high. They need older houses… houses traditionally starter houses for young families… selling at a brisk pace, no matter which neighborhood.
Yes, I would love to live in a McMansion like FPT wants, but I would love even more to have a community where we have young people supporting existing schools and keeping the neighborhood clean and drug free. We can’t do it if we encourage everybody to move to that newest sprawling neighborhood.
Every neighborhood that becomes a slum makes all the others less safe, and this should be an important priority too.
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You talk as if were some huge city that has had the same problems like the rest of the nation. You do know we have the lowest unemployment rate in the nation and have not seen foreclosures anywhere the rate seen in most other cities. I know were not foreclosing one out of every five houses like you said in your comment earlier. I just bough a house in an older neighborhood by the Clara Barton elementary school and love the location but can guarantee you that banks are just not handing out money like they used to. I tried five different banks before one would pre-approve me and the way I got this one was to put 30% down. All said if I came to them in 2005 that there would have been no problem giving me a loan.
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Yes, Jesse, we don’t have those problems YET. We are a small quickly growing city. Thats the point. We are just starting to make those mistakes the larger cities made when they were our size.
You are right Jesse, it is harder to get financial support now. The banks have had their hands slapped and are more afraid of putting them back into the cookie jar. Nothing has been changed to stop them from giving out those predatory loans though.
They are still building into urban sprawl like there is no tomorrow though. Thats WHY we are talking about this topic here.
You bought into an older neighborhood, one that also has the threat of schools closing; Hawthorne. Your property values are lower, and the commission a realtor and lendor makes is much lower in that neighborhood. The people who live in that neighborhood are older empty nesters who cannot sell for enough to pay for a new house. The neighborhood needs new families with kids to populate the schools… guess where they are at?
You didn’t have the incentives the CITY gives to encourage people to buy into the sprawling neighborhoods. There is a huge tax exemption for those neighborhoods, and a creative lendor will do ANYTHING to get the commission from a McMansion, even give a loan thats guaranteed to fail.
This draws people like you to sell your houses and move to those sprawling neighborhoods. I commend you for buying there, thats a wonderful historical neighborhood. Keep your community alive, its a great area to live!
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I would like to add, Jesse, that the lendors not willing to finance your house in urban sprawl motivated you to buy into a neighborhood that someone like you can keep from turning into a slumm which devalues the entire city.
Work with your neighborhood watch people, thats the best move you can make to keep your neighborhood safe because then you get to know all of hour neighbors… the honest ones at least.
The greatest highlight of living in an older well established neighborhood is the block party. The police will even block off an entire stretch of road for you to bring in a band or something!
Its this sense of community that makes living in an older neighborhood so much better than in McMansionville. You get to know your neighbors, and you look out for each other.
When all the young people move out though…. that goes away.
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