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march 21, 2022 high 51°, low 29°
t h e i n de p e n de n t s t u de n t n e w s pa p e r of s y r a c u s e , n e w yor k |
N • Columbus debate
dailyorange.com
S • On the rise
C • Brooklyn’s band
Residents came together to protest the presence of the statue in Columbus Circle, a year and a half after Mayor Ben Walsh announced plans to remove it. Page 3
Charles Guthrie, an SU grad and Akron’s athletic director, has moved quickly through the NCAA ranks and is seen as a “rising star” within collegiate athletics. Page 12
Sour Sitrus Society member Meghan Hendricks recalled her breathtaking experience traveling to Brooklyn for the ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament. Page 5
Aspen Syracuse residents frustrated about conditions Aspen Syracuse residents complained about crime, violence and maintenance issues for months, but are now starting to take action By Francis Tang asst. news editor
J
iaxuan Tang swiped into the stairwell of Aspen Syracuse’s Building 1 garage on the night of March 7. He had to climb the stairs to his apartment on the third floor due to an elevator malfunction, he said. As Tang was about to step onto the stairs, he felt someone touching him from behind. Tang turned around and saw a man holding what appeared to be a handgun pointed at him. “Give me the money,” Tang recalled the man saying to him. Tang, a Chinese international student studying economics at Syracuse University, was the victim of an armed robbery at Aspen Syracuse apartments that evening. The suspect, who fled the scene on foot, was described as a man in his 20s, wearing all black and a black mask, according to a campus-wide email from SU’s Department of Public Safety on the same day. Tang lives in Aspen Building 1, one of the three apartment buildings of Aspen
Residents have voiced concerns about issues at the apartment complex that range from car break-ins by trespassers to pre-move-in cleanliness. francis tang asst. news editor
Syracuse, a student housing apartment complex located at 4101 Brighton Place. For months, residents of the apartments — many of whom are Chinese international students — suffered from a string of crimes and violence happening on the property, including car damage, trespassing, larceny and robbery. Residents also shared their unpleasant living experiences with The Daily Orange, such as poor maintenance response, infrastructure damage and unreasonable security deposit charges. Such complaints have often gone unresolved, residents said. Aspen Heights Partners and Asset Living, Aspen Syracuse’s owner and
property manager, respectively, declined multiple requests for comment on residents’ allegations. In a statement issued through Antenna Group, Aspen Heights Partners’ public relations partner, Asset Living said it does not publicly comment on resident matters. “As policy, we do not publicly comment on resident matters. At Asset Living, we are diligent to address all resident concerns in a timely manner and will continue our correspondence directly with residents at Aspen Syracuse to ensure that any and all concerns are resolved,” the statement reads.
Property relations
Built in 2017, Aspen Syracuse is owned by Aspen Heights Partners, a property management company founded in 2006 in Texas. The company owns student housing communities in over 33 locations throughout the country. To the east of Aspen Syracuse’s Building 3 lie the red-brick buildings of Vincent Apartments, a property owned by Green National. There were 149 past-deadline housing code violations reported at Vincent Apartments as of June 1, 2021, according to a press release from the state attorney general’s office. see aspen page 4
on campus
SU alum develops new website construction platform By Biying Wang
contributing writer
Clarke McKinnon came into Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management wanting to go into corporate entrepreneurship, but he soon realized he could have a greater impact and leadership position if he started his own business. In 2019, McKinnon, who graduated from SU in 2014, launched The.com
alongside his brother, Jeff McKinnon, with a goal of making the web more composable and collaborative. The two had $4.4 million in seed funding. The McKinnons’ business breaks down templates, a standard way to build websites, into customizable “blocks.” A block is a “reusable website building unit,” such as a header or a banner, according to The.com. Users can press a “create sites” button on The.com, which makes blocks
appear as editable cells where a user can directly adjust website features such as font size. This “low-code” construction makes website building more accessible to the population outside of engineers, McKinnon said. The website can be traced to McKinnon’s first website agency, AFJ Venture Strategy, which he created at the end of his sophomore year, also working alongside his brother. During his freshman year at SU,
McKinnon met Ray Wimer, a professor at Whitman. McKinnon said Wimer noticed his entrepreneurial spirit while he was a student, and Wimer was critical in McKinnon’s journey to realizing his potential. “I thought the unique characteristic about Clarke is his inquisitiveness and curiosity,” Wimer said. “It wasn’t always in the class. It was usually after the class — he would come up and ask a question or make
a comment that showed he was thinking a step or two ahead.” At AFJ, McKinnon helped build thousands of websites, but he said he was frustrated by the traditional website construction technology that utilizes templates. He added that a template makes websites look identical even though everyone is telling a different story. From his frustration grew the
see websites page 4