Archive: Opinions

I drove down to Virginia for Parents' Weekend at my daughter's college last weekend.  It was a wonderful experience -- I got to see first hand what a great fit the college is for my daughter, and how she is thriving and learning and enjoying the experience.  As a dad I have mixed feelings -- I am thrilled for her as she becomes independent and begins to follow her dreams.  But I miss her and wish the school were a little -- OK, a lot! -- closer to Lansing.

And I selfishly hope she will want to move back here some day.  I moved back to the area near where I grew up after college.  Soon after that my parents moved to Florida to escape high state taxes.  I like to joke that when I didn't run away from home, they did.  But at this stage of life it is no joke that we live so far apart.  I don't want that to happen again -- it stinks for me and for them (and for my sister who moved there, too, and carries the brunt of caring for them when they need help).  I don't want it to stink again for me, or for my kids.

That wish will require some changes to our town.  I know I couldn't possibly afford to live today in the neighborhood where I grew up.  I am hoping that doesn't happen to my kids.  They are going to need an affordable place to live and a decent place to work.

That is going to mean that taxes have to go down, and at least some property values have to get reasonable.  New businesses in the Town Center will have to be diverse.  There is a lot of talk about senior housing coming to the new Town Center.  Lansing also needs affordable starter homes, and more local jobs.  Sure, aging baby boomers are looking for nice places to retire to.  Lansing is right to try to be that place.  But -- as a baby boomer myself this is hard to type -- in 20 or 30 years there won't be many baby boomers left, and then what?

A few years ago Village of Lansing Trustee Lynn Leopold showed me her forest near East Shore Drive where the deer had eaten all the new growth.  She worried that her forest would disappear within decades, and became something of an activist in favor of her local deer population control program.  With taxes out of control, house prices going up, and more residential property than business, Lansing is in the same danger of losing its old growth within decades without having new to replace it.  Just as an old forest needs new growth to sustain itself, Lansing needs to plan for young people to want to come here to live and raise their families.

Because of the recession and the rising cost of living things get expensive.  But that makes it important to figure out ways to make it possible and desirable for young people to live here.  If we don't do it now, when we are beginning to build our Town Center, when will we do it?  Once a forest dies, that's pretty much it.

The senior housing projects that will be the first to be built on the town center land will make it possible for the sewer to be affordable, which, in turn, will make it possible to encourage dense, mixed-use development in a center that will keep that kind of development away from farm land.  It will protect Lansing's past, but it must also ensure the town's future.

So while I absolutely favor the senior housing projects that will make it possible for a town center to exist, I hope that the rest of the residential part of it will be geared toward young people starting out in life, who want to stay in the town where they grew up, and others who want to move to a town that is both young and old, committed to its history and as invested in its future.

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