A proposal for a four-story building aimed at young professionals and families for Mifflin Street has created a growing student outcry asking a city commission to keep the tradition of student housing at Mifflin alive.
The proposal from McCaughey Properties’ owner Patrick McCaughey would create an apartment building aimed at young professionals on the historically student block.
Following McCaughey’s Jan. 24 presentation at a downtown neighborhood meeting, more than 2,700 students joined a Facebook event asking students to come to the Madison Planning Commission’s presentation on the proposal Feb. 7.
A group of four students from Edgewater College and the University of Wisconsin created the event to generate greater student interest in the problems they saw with McCaughey’s proposal.
At the original downtown meeting, only six students from the area showed up, including the four event planners.
Indy Stluka, Save Mifflin event co-planner and future Mifflin tenant, said it was disappointing to see such a small student turnout given Mifflin’s historical student tradition.
Stluka said the visual of a large four-story building in the middle of Mifflin seemed imposing on the area and incredibly out of proportion in the neighborhood.
Although Stluka said he knows other large properties are already in place on Mifflin, he said the students pushing against it are concerned that this is the beginning of a phase where the city bulldozes houses to build bigger and bigger properties.
Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4, said Stluka’s concerns are “very real” and speak to a larger issue than a single building – Verveer said the students are addressing his concerns with the city’s Downtown Neighborhood Plan.
“I think it is clearly an issue that goes beyond McCaughey’s development proposal – the city is undergoing a downtown planning process and the most controversial recommendations in the plan apply to the Mifflin neighborhood,” Verveer said.
Verveer said he was concerned McCaughey’s development would create a precedent that would allow other developers to bulldoze any part of Mifflin and create much denser housing.
The event planners met with Verveer yesterday to discuss the city process for a proposal to pass, and to gather more information about the actual proposal and the history of the area.
McCaughey said he has also reached out to the event’s creators to meet in a smaller environment to discuss their specific concerns. He said a public forum like the Facebook event or a community meeting creates misinformation and miscommunication.
“I would like to straighten a few things out with the students and find out what their real concerns are – I want to know the whole history of it versus just picking up bits and pieces from Facebook,” McCaughey said.
McCaughey said students have made comparisons between the proposed building and large, centralized apartment complexes such as Lucky or the Grand Central – comparisons he said were apples to oranges.
Although the building is aimed toward young professionals, McCaughey said the age group is directly out of college and want to continue living in that mode.
“When students say that the mix of people in the building would cause the entire street to come down, that’s just not true,” McCaughey said. “The sky isn’t falling down here.”
