Lawrence Holds Community Conversation Regarding Planned Demolition Of Union Street House – Lawrence President Does Not Explain Why Property Was Not Maintained But Says “I Have No Intention Of Turning That Land Into A Parking Lot.”

Lawrence University held a community conversation on 06/01/2023 regarding the house at 128 Union Street. The Lawrence owned house has fallen into such disrepair that it has been deemed a fire and safety hazard and the university is planning to demolish it. Currently, that process is slated to start July 17.

Here is a recording of the meeting as well as a transcript. The quality of the audio was not as good as what is typically available for Common Council and School Board meetings so I bracketed words that I was not positive about and just put brackets and dots […] at any point where the words were completely indecipherable.

Alderperson Kristin Alfheim, who represents District 11 which encompasses the Lawrence campus, helped facilitate the meeting.  Lawrence President Laurie Carter also spoke and fielded questions, and she was joined by some other Lawrence representatives. Alderperson Israel Del Toro, a Lawrence professor and the alderperson for District 4 which includes the neighborhood around Lawrence also attended the meeting and voiced some of the concerns and feedback he had received from his constituents.

A number of questions and concerns were raised at the meeting, the main ones being:

• What were Lawrence’s plans for the property? Specifically, would Lawrence construct a parking lot or a dormitory on it?
• What were Lawrence’s plans for the other houses it owned in the neighborhood, a number of which are run down.
• How/why was this particular house allowed to degrade to the point it needed to be demolished?

The answers to these questions were somewhat vague. President Carter reiterated several times throughout the meeting that she had only been at Lawrence for 2 years. She told the attendees, “I have no intention of turning that land into a parking lot. That is not our thinking.” However. She couldn’t speak as to what might happen 10 or 20 years in the future under a different board, and she did not make any guarantees.

She acknowledged that some Lawrence-owned properties were not well maintained and said the University would be investing in improvements for a couple of the houses on North Park Street. She also said that the university was working on creating a facilities master plan.

President Carter would not comment on what had led to the house on Union Street being so unmaintained that it reached a point that it needed to be razed. She reminded the meeting attendees that she only joined Lawrence 2 years ago, and that she joined during a pandemic and “I have had a lot to do on this campus, to make sure that my students and my faculty and my staff have the care that they need coming out of a pandemic.”

Some of the neighborhood members who attended the meeting expressed frustration with how Lawrence had managed the properties it owned in the City Park district. Their position was that Lawrence had a history of tearing down and not maintaining historic houses. From that standpoint, they would have appreciated an explanation of why the house on Union Street had been allowed to fall into disrepair and what the university was doing to make sure that sort of situation would not happen again in the future with any of their other properties.

One of the attendees asked if Lawrence had policies about its properties. When she was told they did, she asked if they public but was told they were not. Alderperson Alfheim noted that Lawrence is a private institution, and as such does not need to get public approval for what they do with their property and need only adhere to the normal code requirements and processes that any private property owner in the city would need to adhere to.

One attendee did not like the lack of input the neighborhood had in Lawrence’s plans, saying, “I feel like it’s a little disingenuous to have a community meeting to talk about this particular house and then say, ‘I do not have any sort of constraint whatsoever to invite you into the future planning of what happens with these properties.’”

He also felt that the City of Appleton was disingenuous in its hands off way of dealing with Lawrence. He said that his experience while living in Washington DC was that all the universities had to submit a 10-year plan and get approved by the City Council in order to do any development. Another attendee pointed out that many of these properties were within the City Park Historic District. He wondered what that meant and whether there were penalties to do something contrary to the objectives of the historical neighborhood.

In general, the residents of the neighborhood seemed to be frustrated with the way Lawrence has taken care of/not taken care of the properties it owns near City Park. That frustration dated back to before President Carter took over, and she did not address those ongoing historical complaints/concerns other than to reiterate that she had only come to Lawrence two years ago. She said that since her arrival they had done a lot of work on assessing all of the university’s facilities both on campus and within the community and “the work that we are undertaking right now, is really trying to lift them up in appropriate ways.”

The meeting ran about 38 minutes long, but at the beginning Alderperson Alfheim noted that it had a hard 30-minute stop time. They did not talk much about the financial aspect until near the end. Although some of the neighborhood residents questioned whether the house really needed to be demolished but President Carter said that it would cost significantly more to repair the house than to demolish it.

Alderperson Del Toro said that one of his constituents had questions why Lawrence was spending a lot of money in other parts of the community but was not spending money to repair this house or maintain some of the other historical houses it owned. President Carter said that they were always fundraising and that if somebody wanted to donate money to fix those houses, she would be more than happy to accept that.

One final note. During the meeting one of the attendees asked what the houses Lawrence owned were zoned as. It sounded like she was told they were zoned residential, but that is not true. The majority of the houses Lawrence owns near City Park are actually zoned Public Institutional, a fact that is easily confirmed by checking the city’s property viewer. Lawrence University owns the entire block between Franklin Street, Washington Street, Park Avenue, and Union (the east side of N Park Avenue) and half of the block on the west side of N Park Avenue. All of those properties except the one at 410 E Washington Street are zoned Public Institutional, not Residential.