18 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 Many university-based community design centers emerged in response to town-gown tensions and to engage with local challenges. The Yale Urban Design Workshop, Minnesota Design Center, and University of Michigan’s Collective for Equitable Housing were represented at the Co-Lab. The cultural and social division between institutions and communities are exacerbated by housing shortages, creating a negative feedback loop. There is often a political aversion to multifamily housing for fear that new stock will become student housing. It’s true that developers may prioritize higher density to serve students, but there are also demands from other populations. This perception leads residents – who might otherwise support more housing – to resist the prospect of density they associate with students and institutional expansion. The town-gown dynamic creates a political environment in which multi-family housing struggles to gain traction, even when the need for it is clear. Governance Actors Town-gown tensions appear especially pronounced among educational institutions. Eds frequently have more strained relationships with their neighbors and the city community, often marked by uneven or inconsistent engagement. These qualitative insights are reinforced by the Co-Lab Small City Portrait Exercises, where educational institutions received some of the most polarized scores. In particular, tensions surfaced when high “change” scores, reflecting institutional growth and expansion, were paired with lower “quality” scores, indicating dissatisfaction with their role as community actors. This divergence suggests that growth without meaningful integration can exacerbate existing divides, intensifying perceptions that institutions are expanding in ways that are disconnected from, or even detrimental to, the communities around them. On the other hand, “meds” have a higher quality score, clustered around 4 to 5. The data suggests hospitals are evolving faster while remaining or becomong more responsible community actors. They’re growing while maintaining quality relationships with their surroundings. At the same time, academics are looking to improve their role in their city’s governance.
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