On Monday, January 16th, a citizen’s forum organized by the grass roots organization “Keep Auburn Lovely” brought crowds to the Auburn University Hotel and Dixon Conference Center. It was an informative, but seemingly stagnate presentation by Bill Wright, the head of a student housing task force in Tuscaloosa. It was beneficial to be educated on the “citizen lead task forces” that the city of Tuscaloosa opted for as a research outlet to better decision making in the city, in regards to future growth.
The task forces look to be good options for Auburn to consider moving forward. However, the presentation grew vague, and unhelpful for Auburn, as its differences with the flagship university city Tuscaloosa, whose student and residential populations exceeded Auburns greatly, began to show more and more as an impediment to solutions.
A busting downtown Tuscaloosa is near a mile and a half from the center of the University of Alabama Campus and its large scale student housing debacle has risen from the convenience of tornado damaged properties that, in most cases, lie outside an urban fabric and are not walking distance to campus nor ones daily needs. Auburn is ahead of the game in this aspect.
The speaker instinctively said that the traffic problem in Tuscaloosa is “the students”, which generated many head nods from the audience. While some traffic issues in Auburn and Tuscaloosa are indeed student related, most of it is because of the way each of the cities are designed and their sheer dependance on the automobile.
The new mixed use student housing developments under construction in Auburn are in the heart of a walkable and diverse fabric, giving residences less insistences in which the automobile is required. It is the exact opposite of the developments found in Tuscaloosa. Many in Auburn plea for new development to be outside the core, but that would only put us in Tuscaloosa’s shoes. Residences would have no choice but to to travel to campus, and downtown, by car. This would cause unprecedented traffic.
The speaker also highlighted the failing retail uses in many of these developments. It seemed to have made many in the audience agree that retail should not be considered in some future developments in Auburn, that it may “fail” or be turned into an “undesired use.”
In all, the forum was a success, and the venue well served the community as a place to voice concerns. I hope to see future forums take place as Auburn moves forward in 2016. Remember, Auburn must grow in an urban fashion in order to succeed in the 21st century. We have no choice. This is not to say that “purpose built student housing" is our future, but urban housing in general. Quite frankly, students do not know the difference in a private dormitory or a market rate unit, but residences do. Students can live in both. Moving forward, we must recruit market rate construction, and maybe not look a Tuscaloosa for solutions, but rather learn from their mistakes. Those are my final thoughts, feel free to disagree.
