A Strong-YIMBY's Guide to Ann Arbor Proposals A & B
They're extremely silly, but much better than nothing
This one’s pretty Ann Arbor-centric. But even so! You shouldn’t skip it, because it’s very fun, and we all know that local drama is super cool and interesting to faraway people. So enjoy!
0. Let’s Get One Thing Straight.
Housing is very good. Houses are the places where people live, and if there aren’t enough houses, then very many people don’t have a place to live. Which is bad, both because of lost economic opportunity, and because of homelessness.
When you build more houses, you create more places for people to live.
Sometimes it costs a lot to live in one of the new houses—it’s hard and expensive to build them, so developers will charge a lot of money, as much as the market will bear, to recoup their investment. This is called “market-rate housing,” and sometimes people get scared of it, because they see new houses, they see high prices, and they think, “Wow, no one who doesn’t have a place to live right now could possibly afford to live there! The rich just get richer, I guess.”
But this is very silly. In America, houses are sold on the free market—if you increase the number of houses available, without increasing demand for houses, then the average price of a house will fall. In practice, this looks like some wealthy person who already lives in a house who sees the new market-rate houses, says, “Ooh, cool, I want to live there instead,” and sells their old house to someone new. That old house probably costs less than the new houses—so someone slightly less wealthy can move in, and sell away their older, cheaper house, and so on, until the marginal single mother living out of her car can move in somewhere affordable.
In Ann Arbor, and in most places in the real world, this picture is somewhat complicated by migration: when fancy new houses get built, rich people from other places sometimes buy them, and they don’t leave any cheap vacancies for poorer locals.
However! This doesn’t happen 100% of the time. There will always be some new houses that get bought up by Ann Arborites, and so some older houses left vacant—if you want more older houses left vacant, you can iterate this process, and build more housing! External demand is not endless, even in a very-full-of-itself midwestern college town.
Alternatively, if you insist on good stuff visibly happening right away because you’re a child who would fail the most basic of marshmallow experiments, you might advocate for building something called “affordable housing.”
“Affordable housing” is either a special way of discouraging developers, who tend to develop only when they can make money doing so, or it’s a special way of stealing wealthy people’s money and using it to pay for poorer people’s housing.
I think this is bad, but obviously much better than not building housing at all, so am generally supportive when people want to build affordable housing.
To recap:
Housing is good.
New housing is often market-rate—this is good.
Sometimes people insist on building below-market-rate affordable housing—this is also fine.
1. There Are Those Who Dislike Good Things.
In Ann Arbor, we have a really nice library system. They have lots of books, and DVDs, and also lots of other stuff, and each summer they run a whole big city-wide library game, where if you read enough and visit all the libraries, you can win a bunch of stuffed animals and t-shirts. It’s wonderful, I love our libraries.
In fact, many people do! Some would even like to live right up next to the big main library branch downtown. Luckily, there’s been quite a bit of unused space there for a while—library parking moved underground in 2012, but the old surface lot is still there. So sometime around 2018, the city put together a plan to sell all the unused land to a Chicago-based developer called Core Spaces.
Core Spaces would pay the city $10 million, and they’d build a big 17-story tower full of apartments and hotel rooms and retail space—hell, they’d even throw in a little privately-funded plaza for everyone to enjoy.
This was great and awesome, so, of course, “Ann Arbor resident Alan Haber, a longtime community activist,” had to ruin it.
Haber wrote a ballot proposal, stirred up a political action group, and won 53% of the vote, enough to lock up the Library Lot and force it “to be developed as an urban park and civic center commons.”
Never mind that Ann Arbor already has 162 parks in a city of 120,000, and never mind that the University of Michigan’s sprawling green campus is only about a five minute walk away. We needed that new urban park!
When city officials warned that Haber’s “Center of the City” plan was costly and unworkable, he replied, money schmoney, it’s all about “a love economy”:
I'm looking for the gathering of the community to do something that could be beneficial for everyone and we put our hearts into it … This is a proposal of heart and of love, and the money is to the side, because this is a rich town and there is money and there is talent and there is commitment here to do something beautiful.
In fact, there was no such money, talent, and commitment to do something beautiful. Today, the Library Lot Center of the City urban park and civic center commons looks like this:
Pretty nice! Ann Arbor’s a nice place… but it’s definitely still just a parking lot.
2. Maybe We Can Do Better…
A week from today, on August 5, Ann Arborites will vote on two ballot measures: one is called Proposal A, the other is called Proposal B, and they’ll either pass together, or not at all. You can read them here if you like, but what’s important is that they repeal the results of the moronic 2018 vote (that’s prop B) and they
authorize the City to sell its interests in … the Library Lane Parking Structure, only to the Ann Arbor District Library for the purpose of building a mixed-use development that includes additional library services, housing, retail, and programmable open public space. (that’s prop A)
You may be wondering: is the library gonna be the one “building a mixed-use development”? That seems weird! Libraries tend to build library things, not housing and retail.
And you’d be right to wonder: the proposal is really truly bizarre. In fact, it’s bizarre enough that its opponents can almost-credibly claim that it’s “void and of no force and effect,” as they’ve asked a judge to declare it.
These opponents have lots of nasty things to say about Props A & B—they think it’s a “handout.” That the city selling its $10 million land to the library for just $1 is borderline criminal.
Of course, this talking point is insane: the library, in many ways, is the city! Every year, Ann Arbor “hands out” around $20 million in library funding—that’s what a public service is!
More charitably, the opponents of the Proposals are concerned that the library might be able to do whatever the hell it wants with the land. And this is a pretty reasonable concern! The land is going to the library not only to build housing, but also to build “additional library services”—by which the authors of the Proposal naturally mean, “a massive and very expensive renovation of the downtown library.”
How do we know they mean this? Because that’s the whole point of this proposal—to build a fancy new library. The housing on top is just a method of financing that construction.
See, back in 2012, the library noticed that their downtown branch was sort of falling apart—apparently it’s a waterlogged, barely-ADA-compliant kludging-together of three different buildings—and asked for a $65 million millage to make renovations. The voters shot them down.
So the district has decided instead to take advantage of Ann Arbor’s crippling housing shortage, and to build their new branch with the profits from some new market-rate apartments.
Of course, given that Ann Arbor is primarily populated by Omnicause-obsessed thirty-somethings and way-too-politically-involved octogenarians, the new development isn’t allowed to be that profitable. And so the library’s promised to build “senior housing, affordable housing, artist housing and … a public plaza” too.
3. This Is Fine and I Hope It Passes.
Recall from above:
Housing is good.
Sometimes people insist on building below-market-rate affordable housing—this is also fine.
We can even add:
Sometimes people insist on building below-market-rate affordable housing alongside market-rate housing so they can please the voter base and raise funds to renovate an old library—this, too, is fine.
Of course, there can be no doubt that it’s extremely weird!
That the Core Spaces proposal from 2018—seventeen stories of housing, hotel, and retail—was better. That Core Spaces’ new proposal, a 15-story apartment building on the other side of downtown, is way more exciting. That we should encourage more developers to take on projects like it, perhaps by not charging them “a $6.6 million payment to the city’s affordable housing fund” and “a $250,000 payment to the city for improvements to adjacent Forsythe Park, including refinishing the basketball court, new lighting and benches.”
But I digress.
Because my point is this: the library lot ought to be developed. We ought to pass Props A & B and allow it to be developed. Even if a bunch of artists move in (🤮), it will be worth it. Even if a ton of beautiful, versatile, house-buildable investment is vacuumed up by an extravagant library renovation—“a landmark worthy of this city,” or whatever—it will be worth it.
If you live here, vote Yes & Yes next Tuesday. If you don’t, make a stink on Twitter or Reddit or something; I’m asking you please to stand in solidarity with us good YIMBYs of the upper midwest.
4. If This Doesn’t Pass, I Will Unleash My Fury Like the Crashing of a Thousand Waves upon… Someone, I Dunno.
More than anything else, the vote on Props A & B is symbolic.
Like everywhere else, Ann Arbor is at a sort of inflection point when it comes to rezoning and new development. Progressive factions are complaining about gentrification, Leftists are upset that they haven’t been allowed to eat their marshmallow yet, old assholes are mad that city golf courses might be repurposed, and now pro-growth moderates are starting to make serious concessions.
The other day, a semi-rumpled flyer arrived in the mail.
To be clear, this is an attack ad. The idea is that turning these vast expanses of empty grass into gleaming new developments would be evil and terrifying and absolutely must not happen.
Here’s the back of the flyer:
Many things are wrong with this: most glaringly, the library lot isn’t a park, and there are no Million Dollar Condos! But even all this talk about preserving Leslie Park and Huron Hills is pretty disingenuous—these aren’t really even parks, they’re golf courses! And you can decide for yourself whether Buttonbush, Hickory, and Willow Nature Areas are any more worth preserving than our dozens of other, larger patches of tree-dense land.
Of course the worst and most egregious problem with this flyer is that it assumes my answer is “no.” It thinks I would rather have 162 parks and eight passed-out homeless men to step over between my car and the barber shop, than 161 parks and none. It thinks I care so much about golfing on city land that I’d condemn hundreds, even thousands, of east-coast schmucks to continue living among their east-coast schmuck neighbors, rather than moving in next to me.
Do I want to sell our Neighborhood Parks & Park Land to develop Million Dollar Condos?
‘Nuff said.
This is a pretty great illustration of what politics is actually like.
Theoretical YIMBYism sounds like "let's builds everything up as much as we can."
Actual YIMBYism sounds like "if this extremely convoluted deal will lead to more houses, then let's do it."
Had no idea you lived here. Howdy, neighbor :)