Holloway and the Housing Code

The media have given ample attention to housing code violations in properties owned by Lee Holloway, Chairman of the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors.  According to one account, city inspectors have identified over 200 housing code violations in Holloway’s small, north-side apartment buildings.  The violations include roach and rodent infestations, faulty locks, missing smoke detectors, crumbling plaster, and malfunctioning plumbing.

Because Holloway is an announced candidate for the office of County Executive recently vacated by Governor Scott Walker, Holloway’s violations of the housing code are indeed newsworthy.  What’s more, aspects of Holloway’s dilemma are suggestive of the problems related to municipal housing codes, the most serious of which is lack of enforcement.

Why are the codes in Milwaukee and most urban areas so ineffectively enforced?

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WEAC and MTEA: This Is War (I Expect)

The decision by the state’s largest teachers organization, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), to alter its stands on teacher evaluation and advocate breaking from the traditional method of paying teachers was not such a huge surprise for those who had been following statements from union leaders in recent months. The educational and political landscapes have changed, and the union wants to play a role in big decisions coming soon.

But the WEAC stand in favor of breaking up Milwaukee Public Schools into “smaller, more manageable districts” caught people (count me in) off guard. It’s just not something to which the union had shown previous inclination. And the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, WEAC’s largest affiliate, strongly opposes such ideas.

There were clear indications in the way things happened this week that the gap between leaders of WEAC and the MTEA is now wide and sharp, and communication among them is not friendly. 

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The Highs (and Lows) in Life Don’t Last as Long as You Think

Hey, Packers fans, have you started to come down from your cloud yet?  I was about as euphoric as anyone when the final seconds of the Super Bowl ticked down last night, but then my kids — up way past their bedtime (thank you for the late start time, NFL) — began to fall apart from fatigue and over-stimulation, and I was vividly reminded of some fascinating reading I’ve done in the past year on “affective forecasting.”

In essence, the lesson derived from many years of psychological research is this: people have a pronounced tendency to overestimate how long both happy and sad emotional states will last, even in response to major life events.  For instance, research shows that lottery winners come back to earth much more quickly than you would think, while accident victims who suffer permanently disabling injuries also tend to return to their prior emotional state after a readjustment period.  An excellent introduction to this research is Jeremy A. Blumenthal, Law and Emotions: The Problems of Affective Forecasting, 80 Ind. L.J. 155 (2005).

As Blumenthal observes, the research has some interesting implications for law.  Here are some thoughts, for instance, on implications for criminal punishment.

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