This is an opinion piece.
Let’s first start with the UW’s desire to build more dorms using hundreds of millions of taxpayer
dollars while they scream about a lack of funding from the legislature. With the UW-Madison adding 10,000 new students last year and another 1,400 more a month ago, it’s no wonder that they are short on dorm rooms. Surprise! (It never fails to amaze me at their arrogance, but wait, maybe it wasn’t arrogance, rather, I think they deliberately wanted to add thousands of more students so they can sign them up to vote in our elections.)
They forget, however, that the private sector has been adding thousands of new dorm beds in Madison over the last ten years, but hey, why let the private sector build dorms when the UW wants to use your money to build taxpayer funded dorms instead?
I certainly hope the state legislature does not fall for the UW’s phony arguments for more dorm rooms. There’s no reason for the UW to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build dorms when there are private developers (like Core Spaces and others) are willing to take that risk – using their own capital. The problem is that if the UW proceeds with development of new dorms, it’s like pulling the rug out from under the private developers.
How can a private developer take the risk and spend millions of dollars and years of working to secure entitlements for new dorms if the UW then comes along using tax exempt taxpayer money and tax exempt land to compete with the private sector developers. Who would want to take on that risk under those circumstances? The private sector needs to be able to count on knowing that the government won’t compete with them using their own dollars, because, think about it, if the UW spends years saying it’s going to develop new dorms, then no private developer will do so. The result will then be exactly the opposite of what is desired = fewer new dorms because the private developers won’t take the risk! This totally wrong.
And by the way, if the UW was going to build new dorms, they should have done so before they allowed in 11,400 new students ! But nope, instead, they let all these foreigners and out-of- state students in (so they could capture hundreds of millions of dollars in out of state tuition) and then in a perversion of the facts, they use the dorm shortage that they created to justify using taxpayer money to build more dorms! It’s arse backwards!
Prediction – I don’t like to do predictions, but in this case, if all of you get out and vote, Trump will win an electoral college victory and Republicans will win control of the House and Senate. I
would not have said this in 2020, but the signs on the street all indicate a decisive victory on the right.
Fun Facts About T. Wall – T. Wall started in real estate when he purchased a 48 unit apartment complex
that had 500 police calls to it, from the lender using a 100% loan. He fixed it up, painting, cleaning, etc.
and re-tenanting it with non-criminals. He received numerous death threats from criminals he kicked out.
Wisconsin Right Now is a news organization focused on covering the news from a conservative point of view, in
particular on politics and policy issues through analysis and opinions, and is protected by the first amendment of the United States constitution. WRN does not make endorsements of candidates or direct readers to vote for or against any candidate or issue. On October 18 and November 23, 2023 Donald Trump tweeted out on Trump’s Truth Social account T. Wall’s October 6th column on Trump’s property valuations. T. Wall has appeared on Fox News, Jesse Waters Show on Fox, Newsmax, CBS, NBC, Spectrum News 1, USA Today, X.com, YouTube, and numerous
Madison and Milwaukee news programs and local newspapers (Wisconsin State Journal, Capital Times, Middleton
Review, Middleton Times Tribune, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a dozen other Wisconsin papers) and
previously wrote a column for InBusiness magazine and the Middleton Times Tribune for five years each. T. Wall
holds a degree from the UW in economics and an M.S. in real estate analysis and valuation and his full time career is as a real estate developer. Disclaimer: The opinions of the writer are not necessarily those of this publication or the left.
