Provide Stable Housing for All Residents

Colleen Dublinski Clinic Director

Jan. 24, 2008

midnight

I read with great interest Lisa Kaiser’s article “A Field of Dreams: Competing Visions for Housing and River Restoration” (Jan. 10). I have firsthand experience placing individuals with chronic mental illness in housing, which is not an easy task. Often, landlords end up providing the much-needed supervision and acting as emergency contacts. However, with Empowerment Village, a partnership between Our Space and Cardinal Capital Management, turning an unusable parcel of land into a housing development for individuals with mental illness can only be applauded. It appears Cardinal Capital Management is addressing the environmental groups and taking into account how to use the riverfront land in a friendly manner (i.e. extending the bike path) and, at the same time, providing safe, affordable, supervised housing for a population that is truly in need of good housing.

Certainly, Empowerment Village and the city can progressively show how individuals with mental illness can be good members of a neighborhood and utilize the amenities the neighborhood provides. I have personally seen how once stable and affordable housing is gained for these individuals, subsequently other aspects of their lives become more stable. Empowerment Village will enhance the lives of this population and, hopefully, reduce the stigma of mental illness.

Colleen Dublinski

Clinic Director

Wisconsin Community Services,

Outpatient Mental Health Clinic

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Caveat: this has little, if anything, to bear on y...

Caveat: this has little, if anything, to bear on your post, above.

As it goes, I read your pre-Oscar diatribe in the Crazy Shep about a week ago, & I have to say, however acquiescent you might have come across in discussing the Academy's (moreso the "mainstream" culture at large's) tilt toward "outre" film fare, below that patina of friendliness lay a jaundice, spiteful heart. I knew it when I saw the films, particularly those nominated for best picture, described as the type that, even ten years ago, one would have only been able to find at Milwaukee's art-house theatres (Oriental &/or Downer) & see reviewed in the Crazy Shep. That seemingly tossed off line was a shot across the bow of the "bourgeois mediocrity" of those who have the gall to live someplace where on-street parking is not myth & rents are not subject to how cool is the owner of the boutique adjacent an apt building. How dare people in New Berlin, Tosa... Stallis -- yay, verily, even Stallis, that hamfisting blue collar squalor -- know about "Moartea domnului Lazarescu", let alone see it. That... That was the Crazy Shep's place, ts giantist's shoulder from which to peer down at the peons in their Toyota Corollas & Plymouth Voyagers, as they drink their mass-produced Star*ucks grande mocha double chip "lattes" & listen to Avril. Now, though... Now, you, King Luhr, & your assorted fellow travellers at the only choice newspaper in Milwaukee, emanating from the posh East-side, have passed into obsolescence. Your niche -- (put-on) cosmopolitanism -- is not yours alone. You are done.

I drink your milkshake,

monty

Anonymous more than 16 years ago