Transcript
Jess: Hi, and welcome to this episode of Ann Arbor AF, a podcast for folks trying to figure out what’s going on in Ann Arbor. We discuss current events in local politics and policy, governance, and other civic good times. I’m Jess Letaw, and I’m here with my cohost Molly Kleinman. We both use she/her pronouns. We’re your cohosts to help you get informed, and get involved. It’s your city! Let’s jump in!
00:34
Molly: Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting coming up on Tuesday February 22nd, not Monday night, that’s Presidents Day.
Jess: That’s right.
Molly: February 22nd. We’ll be touching on one not particularly interesting agenda item and one thrilling top 10 list. A quick process note we record this a few days before the Council meeting, which means there will likely be some changes to the agenda between now and then. So Jess, this is possibly the shortest going to be the shortest Council agenda piece we’ve ever done right.
Jess: It’s so lean. We talked more in getting ready for this episode about a million other things than we did about the actual agenda, which is interesting because the consent agenda is actually very healthy this week; there’s a lot on there and it’s not just construction contracts. They’re doing so much in the consent agenda, there’s almost nothing anywhere else. And I will remind ourselves and everybody else that it’s budget season. And so there’s a lot going on in the working sessions.
Molly: yeah that’s a very good point but yeah the actual actions for Council this week there was almost nothing. And even you know we sometimes drill down on consent agenda items, because we think they’re going to get pulled for discussion, but there was nothing that jumped out at either one of us. That doesn’t mean that nothing will get pulled but, yeah there’s just really not much going on, so what we’re going to do is talk briefly about something on the agenda, and then, as we have been doing with increasing frequency, talk about something that’s not on the agenda.
Jess: Right! Just civic stuff that we love.
02:08
Molly: Yes, so to get through the agenda real quick we’re going to touch on DC-4 which is a resolution urging the Michigan legislature to amend the Michigan no fault auto insurance reform act.
Jess: Of 2019.
Molly: So this is one of those things where it’s Council voting on a symbolic resolution asking the State to do something. And it is true that the most recent quote unquote reforms to our auto insurance program in Michigan were bad and they have resulted in a lot of bad things, especially related to cutting care for people with catastrophic injuries from car crashes. We’re not going to go into it more deeply, because it would just be yet another chance for me to bitch about how the auto industry writes all of our fucking laws in Michigan and how it makes it really hard to do the kinds of things we keep talking about that would make our streets safer for everyone. So that’s worth noting, I don’t think there’s going to be much to talk about at the Council table and my guess is that this will go forward and we’ll ask the state to fix it. Lots of people are currently asking the state to fix this. So that’s it for the agenda portion of the episode.
Jess: That’s it, y’all.
03:30
Molly: So now we’re going to move on to a section that we are calling Jess’ top three favorite municipal reports. So, as we were texting about this episode and how there really didn’t seem to be anything on the agenda, Jess said, and this is a quote, “We could share our list of top three public reports slash documents that we love or hate-love.” And quietly in my head, I thought to myself “we’re supposed to have a top three list of favorite public report slash documents?” And then later I kind of said that out loud, because I was like “Jess, I don’t have a list.”
Jess: And that’s when I learned some things about myself. I genuinely didn’t know that people weren’t walking around with favorite municipal reports in their heads. Like I felt embarrassed that my list was the length that it is; like, god, I bet everybody else’s list is longer.
Turns out, I have miscalibrated on that. By a lot.
Molly: Oh, my God yeah no, I have no such list but I’m excited to learn about your list and so we’re going to talk it through today and talk about some reports, so that when you feel like you want to read up on something you have some things to start with, you the readers, I mean listeners.
Jess: Yes, listeners: If you guys have top reports, please let us know at the #a2council hashtag on Twitter or in the Ann Arbor Humans Who Wonk igroup, what is your favorite municipal report? I may be unusual but I don’t think I’m alone. …or maybe I am? I don’t know, but if somebody else up there has favorite reports, please let me know. It would make my heart happy!
All right. I cheated a little bit because I could not get it down to three.
losing it over there.
Molly: [laughing]
Jess: For each spot I’ve got a runner up.
Molly: So technically this is the top six list of your favorite reports?
Jess: I mean, technically if you wanted to count everything. I’m still gonna call it a top three.
Molly: Okay. But there are six reports.
05:40
Jess: That’s right.: So! In runner up to spot number three is the Reimagine Washtenaw area plan. We don’t have a ton of these; definitely not up to date. Oh wait – that’s the runner up! I’m not talking about it. Okay – so just go read the Reimagine Washtenaw plan.
The actual number three is the Nonmotorized Transportation Plan. This is one that they were doing community and public engagement on right before the panorama hit and brought to finality in this Zoom era. It’s an exciting document! It codified a lot of 21st-century best practices, I think it is a good reflection of our community values, and does a really nice job of forefronting equity, and nonmotorized transportation. and its role in equity.
Molly: yeah i’m jumping in because if you’re talking about the moving together towards Vision Zero plan, which I think you are. The latest one, it is not a non motorized plan it is our first comprehensive plan.
Jess: Comprehensive! Right. With a very healthy nonmotorized component.
Molly: Right super healthy, but I, to me it felt meaningful that for the first time, we were, including we’re treating non motorized transportation as just transportation, but yes…
Jess: Yes, because for a long time nonmotorized was independent; like, the number 17 appendix on the Land Use Plan for the City. And now it is a part of our transportation plan! Yes, which is part of why it reached the list, number three.
Molly: Yes. You know if I had a top three slash six list, it would be on mine, too, so yeah it’s a good that’s a good choice.
Jess: All right, so that was spot number three.
7:35
Spot number two, the runner up is the report out towards the end of last year on the feasibility of an SEU, or sustainable energy utility. It is a good report, you guys – go read it!
What actually made it into spot number two is the A2Zero carbon neutrality plan. I’m not sure that I would marry this document if it asked me, but I would totally date it very hard. It is good.
Molly: Okay, tell us what you love about it.
Jess: What I love about it: I love that it is both specific and general. It is general enough to say, in terms of carbon shifts and climate shifts, these are the shifts that we need to make; and it’s tactical in that it says, These are the ways that we can get there or, these are the ways that we will get there. So it’s both strategic and tactical, and I like that very much.
They originally started authoring this report in 2018, I think, 2019, and it was finally issued around then, for – we’re supposed to bring all of these goals to conclusion by 2030. In municipality years, that’s nothing! 11 years is nothing! And, by the way, it’s already three years later, it’s 2022.
I also very much appreciate its urgency around global issues and its effectiveness in understanding truly, without greenwashing, how our municipality can help alleviate the concerns of the global emergency. It’s actionable, it’s urgent, but not the kind of thing that induces paralysis. It’s strategic and tactical and, in general, I like things that speak to and about the planet and that’s actually true of both the comprehensive transportation plan and A2Zero, is that it brings us into a better relationship with the environment.
Awesome! Yeah. That’s two.
10:10
All right. Runner up for first place is the 2017 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing survey, run by the Housing Commission and funded at least in part by HUD. Oh – it’s not technically on the list! So I’m not going to tell you about it, just go read it, you guys. It’s 400 pages…probably don’t read all 400 pages. But take a look at the historical neighborhood maps; they’re cool, they’re interesting, and you don’t even have to read all the words to get some good stuff. So that’s the runner up to number one
10:30
The real long-time love of my life, winner of this list, is the Washtenaw County Housing Affordability and Economic Accessibility report. I love it. I love it so much.
Molly: So tell us more on this.
Jess: First of all I love that it’s county level. When you’re talking about housing and you’re talking about the economic environment of an area, in my opinion, talking about one municipality is too small; housing is too regional, honestly transportation is regional, water’s regional, infrastructure is regional. I’m less keenly in tune with economic development and those kinds of areas, but understanding that housing and economics go hand in hand together (thank you, capitalism), I get it. So first of all, I love that it’s county issued.
Second of all: we know that things are expensive. I don’t think there’s hardly anybody in Washtenaw County that you would talk to who would say, “It’s fine, it’s not painful at all to make my mortgage or my rent payment every single month.” Almost all of us would say, “No, it’s really painful here.” Those stories are important, but they’re not data; what this report does is give us more granular data about the specific housing challenges and opportunities of specific municipalities within Washtenaw County. It’s Ypsi city and township in there, Pittsfield Township and Ann Arbor City; I can’t remember if there are other ones listed in there, those are the ones that I tend to focus on.
So, like I said it focuses on the individual challenges of each community. For example, Pittsfield Township doesn’t need to address renter housing so much as it needs to address senior housing. The recommendations for Ypsi are interesting and contested. But one of the things that I appreciate about its recommendations for Ann Arbor is that it really focuses, both on the need to provide more rental housing and the need to provide more affordable units. It gave very specific numbers over a very specific time period; it was 20 years as of 2015 so we’re now down to 13 and we have produced very, very little against those goals. We’re on track to produce much more, but so far we are not on track to hit those goals.
Because I care about housing, because housing is the thing that I feel like I work on in Ann Arbor, quite often it’s my North Star in terms of understanding the landscape of what I think I’m up to when it comes to Ann Arbor in particular. It lists the challenges, but it also lists approaches to work on those challenges, calling five low impact and five high impact. I take those as my marching orders; like, if we’re going to move the needle on housing, those 10 things are the things we need to do.
So that’s why I love it.
Molly: Awesome.
Jess: And it’s also pretty readable! It’s no 438 page report, like the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing survey; again, worth it for the mappy maps, but I get that that’s a lot of pages. The housing report is a much more manageable, I think 55, and a lot more of it is graphics and header pages. Like “Pittsfield Township!” is a page. It’s much more readable, I think.
14:07
Molly: Cool, so just I have some questions about not any one specific document but sort of this, the whole idea of having a list of favorite municipal reports. So what are you looking for in these things?
Jess: I am trying to be as cool as my hero, Ada Louise Huxtable.
I don’t even want to ask this as a question, but I will just say that my favorite architecture critic is Ada Louise Huxtable. (I won’t ask you who yours is, I’m not gonna put you on the spot like that.)
For a little bit of context, Ada Louise Huxtable has been writing architecture criticism from the 1960s right up until a couple of weeks before her death in 2013. She was a prolific writer who lived in New York City; she wrote first for a bunch of smaller publications, and then the New York Times and finished her career with Wall Street Journal. She wrote books titled things like Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger and Have You Kicked A Building Lately?.
She had a way of writing about buildings that made Ada Louise’s work – it really deeply informs how I feel about communicating about buildings and the built environment. She made it so accessible and I admire that so much! I’ve thought a lot about what made Ada Louise so effective. If you’re going to read a piece of hers: in terms of things that you can find online, I highly recommend “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered.” It’s specifically about skyscrapers – again, she’s an architecture critic writing and working in New York so very relevant. But she offers the reader a number of different ways of thinking about buildings that a lot of times we don’t really consider; so I offer that article. If you’re going to read a book, I would say, Have You Kicked A Building Lately?, right up there, honestly. Her life’s work, On Architecture, which is a compendium of over 50 years of her essays published in 2011, I want to say – that’s the one you want to read! But again, acknowledging that not everybody is into 400-page, densely packed, very technical books, if you want to give that one a pass, Kicking A Building is a great place to start
In thinking about what made Ada Louise great – I’ve thought a lot about the mechanics of how she wrote. One of the things was – you’ve already sworn, so I’m going to wade into that breach as well – she knew her shit. She knew her shit up and down. She went to public meetings, she read the most boring and dry reports – I’ve actually tried to follow in her footsteps and read the reports she read. They’re eye-crossing. Sediment erosion reports, and oh my god, “this penny went to that tunnel” kind of thing. It’s tough. But I learned that her reading and understanding and deeply synthesizing those reports allowed her to translate what she knew from a technical perspective into really brilliant cultural criticism – to the point where she not only won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, she literally established the genre! She was the first one! To win an award, to win a Pulitzer for criticism!
So she was able to bring that knowing into translation for other people who weren’t sitting down and having favorite reports and reading favorite reports.
So – that’s why, really. It’s because Ada Louise did it and because I consider her work so vitally important. So funny! So interesting! So necessary!
In 21st century journalism, the industry has decided that we don’t need architecture critics, and so there are essentially three. Maybe four employed by major media outlets in the United States, and a variety of lesser outlets as well, but it’s not something that we’ve decided to carry forward into 21st century media. I think we’re the poorer for it, and Ada Louise is why.
18:28
Molly: that’s really cool. So then, I know why you read these reports, so now, my question is how do you get through the dry dry desert of the language of these reports. When I started Grad school, someone assigned us a reading about sort of how to read an academic book, with various tips and tricks and i’m wondering if you have any advice for how to get through these things because i’ve mostly failed to. i’ll be like, “Oh Jess said I should read this!” and then I don’t get past the table of contents.
19:04
Jess: A strong sense of humor and a vivid imagination helps! A lot of these reports start in really contested space; we didn’t author a housing affordability report because everything was going fine, we issued that because we knew a problem was coming and we needed to know, is it going to be a crisis?
I love reading the memos that accompany these that essentially explain why the report exists. Molly, the language is dry, these are professionals who are writing in a politically neutral way and it’s unilaterally hilarious to me because I think about the 10,000 words that they redacted; the swear words, and whatever that they wanted to put in there that they didn’t get to use, that left us with some dry stuff. So I find them super funny, not for what is in there, but for what I know isn’t. That’s part of it.
Molly: mm hmm.
Jess: Part of it is because I’m a linguist; I love telling and hearing stories. I believe deeply that a community that is literate about itself is better at both its history and its future. You will notice that none of that is job and none of that is expertise. And so I feel urgently compelled to do my homework! I’m not an expert. I’m not an architect. I’m not an engineer. I’m not a planner. I’m not a sustainability person – I’m sorry, you guys, I don’t know what your careers are called, but you’re saving the planet, so thank you – I’m not any of those things. So I read the reports, because I feel like that’s how I can get informed.
Then, the reports always have action items attached to them. When we read the report on the municipal sidewalk maintenance, Molly, you and I were fairly critical of that; it was partly about how they painted the landscape, but it was mostly about how they talked about future action, because we felt like they hadn’t taken enough into account, especially in terms of equity. So, I don’t read them as gospel; “The report said X, so we have to do X.” I apply my best judgment. Reading the reports is how I know how to get involved, so to me, they feel like the playbook; not necessarily to do what they say, but to take the guidance that they offer as a very informed starting place.
Molly: yeah so what i’m hearing you say is that much like in academia, where we often will skip to the results, that one thing we might do is skip to the end, and see the recommendations. i’m not saying we don’t read the whole report eventually.
Jess: No, no, no, totally finally where we’re going.
Molly: Look, for those recommendations and then that can be a way to sort of help us understand the bigger report that we’re reading is that it?
Jess: I think that’s a great idea, and I say this as somebody who abhors spoilers, to the point where it’s a relationship point. But I actually don’t feel that way about reports, I think that understanding the approaches that they’re advocating – if that’s the only thing you read, that’s a great place to start.
Molly: Yeah because I think, you know, I’m trying to be more informed, but I also know that I am not going to get through these whole reports. Even the ones I spent more time with I don’t read every word. I spent a lot of time on the pictures, I skipped to the recommendations, I look for the chunks that feel like they’re going to boil stuff down, so executive summary at the start and recommendations at the…
Jess: – end, yep. When I forward people the housing report, for folks that are operating in Ann Arbor, that’s what they’re trying to learn about (like I said I think it’s a 55-page report) I point them to the Ann Arbor pages, and there are only two! I think it’s page 41 and 42 or 42 or 43, or something like that, and that’s what I call out. All I want you to read are those two pages and half of one is a table! So it’s as accessible, I think, as anything is possible to be.
It’s not important to know everything. It’s fun to try, but also we have lives, so if the Ann Arbor pages of the housing report are the only things that you read and the mappy maps are the only things that you skim from the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing survey – that would be amazing.
Molly: cool yeah, it helps to have entry points to some of these things like, Why am I looking at this document, what do I want to get out of it.
Jess: So those are the reports that I like. But I understand, as we were preparing for this episode, that you discovered that you actually do like a report?
24:06
Molly: there’s a report, there is, and it’s not one of these sort of like big standalone things, it’s an annual thing that comes out and it’s the crash report, the Ann Arbor crash report. I like it so much and I get asked for it so much that I have it in my bookmarks bar like I want to be able to just click and get right to it. And it’s almost all pictures and it’s also just descriptive statistics, it’s just counts of things, but it’s very useful counts of things because it’s telling us where crashes are happening. Who is in these crashes and what are some characteristics that we’re seeing. we’re not getting into odds ratios, we’re not predicting how like, you’re more at risk of this or that thing it’s just like no this intersection has a lot of crashes, and this intersection has a lot of crashes, and there are these heat maps that are such helpful visualizations for understanding, where crashes are happening in the city and its really helped me fine tune my understanding of what the real risk areas are in the city in terms of our streets and what we can do that’s going to have the most impact by dealing with the smallest number of intersections or streets because, like in most cities and ours actually has a handful of really risky roads and intersections relative to the whole city. yep so we can really make a big difference, by focusing on just a few key places and so yeah that’s it.
Jess: You ended up having a favorite! Which makes me really happy.
Molly: I wasn’t thinking of it, because you were talking about these kinds of like big…
Jess: – more strategic documents –
Molly: lots of people involved. For this, The city’s transportation department takes their crash data and they put together a variety of visualizations of this data. And I really like it and I tell people all the time to look at it when we’re talking about a specific intersection, like oh, for example, that damn bridge, one of the first things I do is I go find it on the crash map. So I can see what are we talking about here, and indeed that particular intersection, no surprise, is nice and glowing red, because there are a lot of crashes there. but yeah so it’s less big picture, which I feel like it’s one of those differences between us in general and it’s a more narrowly focused thing, but I do find it really helpful.
Jess: As we were talking through, you said Oh well, actually, the comprehensive transportation plan might be mine as well. For you, I feel like that’s perfect to have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, you know? The crash map and the transportation plan. I don’t think it gets any better than that: what are we responding to, what are we moving towards. To me, that’s the civic ideal – the general ideal, the creative ideal, the professional ideal. Anything that I can think of.
So, yeah. Good job on your favorite.
Molly: Thanks Jess! good job on yours!
Jess: Thank you!
27:14
Molly: And that’s our episode today friends, we have, I think a little bit of pod keeping Jess that you wanted to mention.
27:21
Jess: I wanted to give a shout out to one of our listeners. She is a teacher at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. She, first of all, won our hearts forever by assigning our podcast to her students as listening for how to understand local policy issues. (So thank you for that!) What I’m shouting out right now are her students. A bunch of them chose to do podcasts as a part of their semester project and the ones – let’s just go ahead and give the gold medal to the team, who did a podcast episode and called it Renters Commission AF. Good job, guys. Amazing. We love it.
28:06
Molly: that’s awesome alright that’s it. For real that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF, come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website Annarboraf.com keep the conversation going with fellow listeners on Twitter at the #A2Council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann arbor humans who Wonk group. And if you would like to send us a few dollars at K oh dash F I sit com slash Ann arbor af to help us with hosting fees, we always appreciate it. we’re your co hosts Molly Kleinman and Jess Letaw thanks to producer Scott Trudeau, our theme music is I dunno by grapes, you can reach us by email at Ann arbor af pod at gmail dot com. get informed then get involved it’s your city.