In a recently surfaced letter from Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn to vice chancellor for student affairs Michael Laliberte, Flynn refers to the university students as “guests.”
His reasoning wasn’t that all the students aren’t from Milwaukee, that they are here on a temporary basis or even that they might not live in the city year round. Nope. His reason to call them guests was based on their lack of property ownership. “I view your students as ‘guests,’ since most do not own property in Milwaukee and they do not directly contribute to the tax base,” he wrote.
Here’s an interesting tidbit from 2010’s U.S. Census that might interest Flynn: More than half of the occupied housing units in the city are occupied by renters – or should I say guests. Of the more than 230,000 occupied housing units in the city, 53.6 percent were occupied by renters and 46.4 percent were occupied by owners.
