Ann Arbor’s “Secret” City Council Election

Scott Trudeau
Aug 8, 2017 · 6 min read

Tomorrow (Tuesday, August 8th 2017) a dispiritingly few Ann Arborites will vote in our August City Council primary. These voters will determine the likely winner this fall in 4 of our 5 wards. Unlike most Michigan cities, our city elections are partisan and the Democrat almost always wins (I’ll save my non-partisan election advocacy for another post).

I heartily endorse the following candidates:

As a set, I admire their dedication and hard work for the city and the people in it. I think each of these candidates has a deep appreciation for the complexity of the many intertwined issues our city faces and are honest about the trade offs we need to make to reach responsible and sustainable outcomes.

As many on social media have observed (from sports blog mgoblog to long time townie commentator Local in Ann Arbor), the primary issue dividing candidates in these races is development, with the Core Spaces proposal for development on the Library Lot as the most salient case. The faction (Eaton, Bannister, Silkworth, Kunselman) challenging the group perceived as the Mayor’s allies (Ackerman, Frenzel, Smith) has leaned hard on this single issue more than any other. I’ve seen more paid-for “Suggested Posts” by this side on this issue than any other locally targeted Facebook ad (I’m curious what their Facebook spend budget is!)

While some of the people supporting the anti-development faction have been disingenuous (to put it kindly) with their arguments and have played loose with the facts, I believe most of their supporters embrace the same goals as their opposition. Ann Arborites value an inclusive, economically and racially diverse city; want to see more broadly affordable housing; and put a high value on environmental sustainability & the fight against climate change. The divide is about beliefs in how to achieve those goals, and how policies around development work for or against them.

I had a long talk with Anne Bannister (running against my preferred candidate Jason Frenzel in Ward 1) on my front porch about this topic. Her view is that, by allowing large developments full of expensive units to be constructed in our city, we are “inviting” wealthier people to move here and causing housing prices to go up. She believes that if we did not permit expensive housing to be constructed, built fewer units at a smaller scale, that wealthier people would stay out of the city & region entirely and we would preserve affordability. Economists refer to this concept as “induced demand” (i.e., only by creating a supply of something does the demand materialize). I think many Ann Arborites skeptical of these new developments share this belief.

The “induced demand” concern doesn’t hold up under scrutiny from a regional perspective; and our affordable housing challenge is a regional one. People rarely move to a city-region because there are nice, new condos to buy. People move to cities to be near their jobs; to go to school; to be near family; to enjoy the things that make thriving cities like Ann Arbor great places to live. If they have the means to buy an $800,000 condo, and there is no condo to buy, they will join a bidding war to buy one of the rare single family houses on the market. We can’t wave our hands and make these people go away. No American city with growth pressure like ours has maintained broadly affordable housing while limiting development.

Anti-development proponents like Local In Ann Arbor call the belief that adding more homes when there aren’t enough homes helps keep pricing down is a “matter of faith.” However, the evidence is clear that cities with sustained growth that restrict development see far more rapid price growth than those that are more permissive. Faith requires belief in absence of evidence. The fact that we’ve been more permissive for building in recent years while still facing increasing prices isn’t proof that building more causes price increases. The counter-factual is what the impact would be of not having built these units at all. Imagine if we tore down all the recently built student towers. What would happen to housing prices when 5,000 university students entered the housing market for fall housing tomorrow?

The reality is our city is growing. The University has been adding hundreds of students a year to its enrollment and added jobs to go along with that growth. We have an emerging tech sector and a growing services sector supporting all of this growth. We’ve also largely built out most of our available greenfield and have taken active steps to reduce suburban sprawl in surrounding townships through our greenbelt program. If we’re going to accommodate this growth, we need to recognize we’re transitioning from a phase of development of the city to one of redevelopment, and we need realistic strategies to manage this growth. This means more homes in the same amount of space.

Obviously, most of the new construction is expensive. It is not intuitive that this helps make housing more affordable. But every new unit we add to the mix keeps someone with more money to spend on a home out of the rest of the market. This helps keep pressure off the older housing stock by limiting the number of competing buyers. And new stuff eventually becomes old stuff, and old stuff (in a responsive housing market) becomes comparatively cheaper.

What happens if we try to limit or slow down new building? The people in the market don’t disappear. They look for the next best thing. As we’ve already seen in much of Kerrytown and starting to see more of in Water Hill, they’ll buy expensive old houses and tear them down to build big new houses. Replacing a house with a more expensive house does indeed drive up housing costs. If they can’t afford a seven figure tear-down project, and there’s nothing left to buy, they’ll go to the townships and buy a McMansion; speeding up the development of regional sprawl, making traffic & parking far worse and making our greenbelt expansion harder & more expensive to achieve.

Accepting this reality doesn’t dictate that we must permit many enormous, “ugly” buildings across the city. But we do need to get past the denial of the fact that we need to add a lot more housing; and, in order to do that, we need to increase the housing density in the city. There isn’t a single way to solve that problem, but until we are having the conversation with that premise, we will be unable to design policies that have any hope of creating the diverse, affordable, sustainable city we all want to see. The anti-development faction is not prepared to have this conversation and their policies would work against our shared goals of making the city more affordable, diverse and sustainable. Their positions work against creating a city more capable of not only addressing basic needs of all its citizens, but allowing us all to continue to thrive, and giving more people access to the opportunities we are so fortunate to have.

Specifically, on the Core Spaces proposal, I don’t need to add much to TreeDownTown’s summary analysis. Do note that while the sale of the lot has been approved by Council, the building still must go through the site plan review process. The renderings we see are not the final, approved design, and there will be many opportunities to engage with the developer to transform the look, massing & ultimate form of the building.

Could the city have sold this lot with a requirement that something smaller be constructed? Yes. This would have necessitated a lower sale price and restricted the new building beyond what our current D1 zoning permits (a zoning that emerged after a years-long community-wide process). The lower sale price would have likely eliminated the affordable housing units included in the development as well as millions of dollars earmarked for the sale for the city’s affordable housing trust fund (an amount which is more than the fund has ever held in sum!). A smaller project would have fewer units overall, which would send more wealthy people into neighborhoods or sprawl to bid on houses absent the opportunity to buy downtown. Trading all of that away for a slightly shorter building is a very high cost.

I am happy to endorse Frenzel, Ackerman, Smith & Magiera because I have seen them wrestle with these tension in these realities. They are most inclined to lead us toward policies that recognize that the the true character of the city is made up of the people in it, and not only the idealized built form.

Scott Trudeau

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