Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up on Monday, March 7th at 7:00 pm. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including American Rescue Plan Act funds, infrastructure, and a couple of important rezonings.
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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!
00:04
Molly: Today we’re talking about the next City Council meeting coming up on Monday March 7 at 7pm. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items, including American Rescue Plan Act funds or ARPA funds, infrastructure, and a couple of important rezonings and offer some ways for you to get involved. A quick process note, as always 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, what did you think of this week’s agenda?
00:31
Jess: Man, I like this agenda. This is some real Council shit. What I mean is, it feels like a minimum of nonsense: it’s not micromanaging staff, it’s not weird language, this is actual policy direction at a high level that’s appropriate for Council at various stages of work – very beginning of work, middle of work, end of work – and it just this feels like right seat on the bus. I feel like Council is sitting on the right seat on the bus. Good job.
01:03
Molly: Cool so to start with, we actually have some pre-agenda things. There are a couple of really cool memos in this one, starting with the ARPA fund disbursement report.
01:14
Jess: Yep. This is a city administrator memo to Council summarizing the results of community engagement and staff recommendations regarding the American Rescue Plan funds that Ann Arbor is slated to get, approximately $24 million, so we wanted to talk a little bit about this report.
One of the things that I appreciate is the level of detail that they report back on community feedback. They let you know how they heard from folks, what they heard from folks; there was a survey out there for a while, you know, “tell us what you want us to spend money on” with a finite list of options, but then inviting further feedback. This report actually is really clear about every single piece of feedback that they heard, which is unusual and great.
Another thing that I appreciate about this report – I mean we we already know how I feel about reports, like it’s a report, so I love it.
02:10
Molly: [sing song voice] Why don’t you marry it?
02:13
Jess: I can’t wait to meet the report that I marry! A2Zero was so amazing and I said I wouldn’t marry it, but I would date it very hard…what’s going to beat A2Zero?? I can’t wait to see!
Another thing that I appreciate about this memo: for me, any document that makes recommendations, if it’s doing a good job, it is a mix of science and art. The science is the quantifiable documentation: this many people said these things, and here’s how they said it. That’s relatively straightforward, but it still doesn’t show up all the time, so I appreciate when it does. The art is how you manage to get together both lived experience and community feedback with the professional expertise of staff. And I think that this report does an extremely and unusually good job of marrying community and professional voices. I just really, really like that.
03:08
Molly: Awesome, yeah it’s definitely worth reading, it’s not that long and I thought it was really interesting to see some of the details of what people were asking for. I just wanted to call out a couple of the specific pieces in this memo. So you may recall that there was a big effort to get people to give dots for unarmed response, to say “we want to fund unarmed response,” and CROS really turned people out, there was a ton of community support for this and it’s reflected in the memo, and that to me feels like one of the big wins of this process and of this document is the really clear, widespread support for a community crisis response program that’s not the police, that’s not bringing guns into situations where guns are going to make things worse, so that was a highlight for me of the report. A sort of low light for me in the results, although I think not actually in the memo itself, is around Vision Zero. Vision Zero and improving transportation safety scored really, really low, I think surprisingly low, although I have a couple of guesses as to why. One of them is that there really was not any advocacy for Vision Zero in this. We saw huge efforts to turn people out around unarmed response. The arts community was like super duper yelly about money for the arts, to the extent that it made a difference in the recommendations, even though it was not a large number of people just, I think, a very small loud group of people. But Vision Zero did not have anyone leading that advocacy and you know as chair of the transportation Commission part of me is feeling like “well crap” that like, “Maybe there’s something more, the Commission could have done.” I don’t actually think that’s true, I just think there’s a real vacuum, right now, when it comes to transportation advocacy in the city. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and these results, really drove home for me that we need some real coordinated effort around a lot of these issues that I care a lot about, that I know a lot of people care about. One of my theories about why people didn’t vote for this is that we’ve had some really amazing visible projects in the downtown, the new protected bike lanes. And I think most people don’t know that those are DDA projects, those are not city projects, those are funded by the Downtown Development Authority and…
05:42
Jess: Staff, right, different staff. Different leadership, a little bit, yeah.
05:46
Molly: Different leadership, different pots of money. And they will never extend beyond the downtown without city spending and city effort that’s currently not there. So I think that’s maybe one reason it’s like, “oh we’re already doing such a good job on this I don’t have to vote for it because we’re clearly already prioritizing it.” And so that’s, I think the other reason why maybe people didn’t think to vote for it. However, and this is what Jess was getting at with this sort of art and science thing. I think this memo makes a really compelling argument that we should be funding Vision Zero anyway, and I think it’s right. We’ve made very clear at a policy level, we have set City policy that we care about improving transportation safety, specifically for pedestrians and people on bikes. And so, even though this particular community engagement did not show a huge amount of support for that, this is already set policy, we have elections that showed support for that. Therefore, we need to invest in it anyway, so I’m hopeful that if this gets adopted we’re going to see, I think, some good money going towards Vision Zero. It’s like $2 million, so it’s not going to cover everything, but it’s way more than nothing, it’s way more than zero. So those are my highlight and low light of what’s in this report.
07:07
Jess: Speaking of Vision Zero, let’s talk about another administrator memo.
This is one of the later additions and I was super excited to see it, this is AC 3 on the agenda it’s called the infrastructure memo. We are talking about it because I mean come on “infrastructure memo!” Hello, that’s just flirty right there. But I was curious to see what it was going to be about; I love multi-year, multi-stakeholder reports, and this is more like a strategic. adoption, maybe, or application let’s say, of a lot of the big policy and direction documents that we already have. So it’s not just “all the work everywhere, all the time,” but the extended coordination and cooperation that effective infrastructure work requires.
I gotta say, on this report, I am particularly fond of the narrative.
07:59
Molly: So Jess, tell us what this particular memo is doing.
08:03
Jess: This memo is talking about needing to be ready for when the infrastructure funds of ARPA are released. Not just our municipality funds of $24 million, but additional funds intended to – what is the platform, “build back better”? and really get at the heart of the infrastructure of a community, a country, whatever. So our interim city administrator Milton Dohoney is making the case that we need to be ready. Not only with plans, but with coordinated commitments for when those infrastructure funds are released; and then he, in this memo, proceeds to make the case for which projects to prioritize, approximately what funds they require to complete, and talks a little bit about that.
08:54
Molly: Right, and so I think it’s, I don’t think it’s the Build Back Better Act because that one didn’t pass, but there’s some amount of infrastructure spending that’s been approved, or we anticipate will come out.
09:05
Jess: That’s true; that’s the Act,but I was actually referring to Biden, I think that was his platform. Right? Yes! We’re both right, which is my favorite way to be.
09:17
Molly: Right, so lots of infrastructure money coming, and this argument that we need to, the city needs to be prepared to fight for that money and spend that money.
09:29
Jess: Yep. I’ll talk about my bit if that’s okay.
What I like is that the infrastructure plan very clearly draws on existing policy: very well documented, very well supported policy directions of the city, including Vision Zero, which we were just talking about with ARPA fund disbursement. So I love that.
What I am missing is the fact that certain documents aren’t specifically cited. A2Zero, our carbon neutrality plan, isn’t named in there, even though specific initiatives in A2Zero are in this infrastructure memo; they’re there but not specifically called out. I also don’t see the Moving Together plan, even though there are road infrastructure investments, specifically, as Molly said, geared towards Vision Zero and towards getting us there.
The other thing that I’m missing, and this is a little bit of an unfair criticism but I’m going to do it anyway, is that there is no placeholder or mention of the strategic work that’s going to be coming out of an office that we don’t have yet, but we’re going to soon: the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion office, DEI, that’s already been approved by Council, already been funded by Council. They’re working on that hire right now, we know it’s going to come.
Anytime I don’t see equity specifically named and prioritized on a report I get super itchy. This is not exactly a criticism, because this memo is the distillation of a lot of existing work that does talk specifically about equity and how to prioritize justice-centered transformative changes and directions for the city; so I get that this doesn’t necessarily need to retread that ground. But if there are decisions, if we need to make some cuts based on priority or timing, what is the framework for making those decisions? That’s what I’m missing.
This is just a communication. This is the city administrator talking to City Council. This is not specific actions yet, so we’re really early on in this process. But that’s what I’m not seeing, and I wish I was.
11:43
Molly: Yeah yeah and he makes it clear that it’s an itemized list. But it’s not in order of priority, it’s just a bunch of possibilities for what could be in there. So what I really liked about this memo was right at the top, because city administrator Dohoney is making a very strong argument that Ann Arbor should behave like a fucking city. None of this college town bullshit. We need lobbyists, we need coordination, we need to be paying attention to all of these funding opportunities, and then we need to be making a concerted effort to get as many of them as we can. And I don’t think that that is necessarily how the city has oriented itself towards these kinds of pots of money before. We definitely apply for grants, I know we do, and we get them and we use them, but he’s seeing a really big opportunity out there, and he wants to make sure we are strategic about how we go after it so that we can do more things and behave like a city, like a big city.
12:46
Jess: Like a big girl city!
12:48
Molly: Yes. So that’s what I really loved about this memo was just that my strategic brain and my leadership brain was like, “yes!” that we have been missing this, this is yes! I hope they listen to him.
13:04
Jess: Yep! This is fun. I really liked, in the narrative, the kinds of relationships that he was detailing that we needed: lobbyists at the federal level, in addition to the state, I believe we have a consultant working for us in Lansing. He also says that the city needs to develop a relationship with an economist. That’s the literal phrase. I love it so much. I’m so confused – I don’t know what that means! But I’m very excited by the possibilities. We do need a relationship with an economist. Can the City go out with one? Can we do that?
13:38
Molly: As long as *I* don’t have to have a relationship with an economist I’m all good.
13:44
Jess: That’s fair!
Thanks, Milton, interim city administrator Dohoney, this was a fun memo to read.
All right. What else do we got?
13:56
Molly: Now we’re getting into the actual agenda, starting with an item on the consent agenda. Which is CA 9, this is to assign money to design a path under the East medical Center Dr bridge.
14:06
Jess: Also, known as…
14:07
Molly: That damn bridge. I thought we were done with it for a little while, but… So what this is, we have this contract for design. All of this wrangling that has happened so far was about a contract with a consultant to design the bridge. And it turns out that that contract does not include design of a path under the bridge, which was a frequent topic of conversation, because there were a lot of folks, especially the Washtenaw Biking and Walking Coalition were pushing really heavily that we have to include this [path], it will provide a connection to the border to border trail and give people an off-grade way to get through an intersection that’s only going to get worse. So it turns out design for that path, it was sort of like sketches were included in the proposal, but it wasn’t an actual design, and so we need to pay more to get that design included in the contract, and because of the vagaries of different funds and where money is coming from, they have to pull it from the general fund, and so it needs eight votes that needs to be approved by Council to spend this money. There was a question in the agenda response memo and just a reminder of what that is so Council members can ask questions of staff about agenda items before the meeting and then staff will answer them. And so Council Member Briggs asked, “did the U of M offer to cost share for the design of this path.” I thought it was interesting that she asked if the university offered, not whether we asked them to, but the university did not offer to cost share for the design, big surprise. And so we’re gonna, this is, for us, the city to pay for this design. Once there’s a design in place, they probably will talk to the university about cost share on actually building this path, under the bridge, so it sounds like. we’re going to move forward with the path under the bridge. That was an open question. We’re a little behind now, and what means we’re going to have to pay… spend more money and spend city money to do it, but at least we’re doing it, honestly. I don’t have that much more to say about it. But I guess, for those of you who really care about this path, there’s going to be a design, so keep your eye out and I’m sure you’re going to have opinions about it, and get ready to share them when that design comes out. Because originally, the very early sketches, there was this wild, many, many switchbacks just to show that there’d be a path, and people flipped out, they were like “you can’t do that, you’re adding so much distance, and what about people using mobility aids?” and it was… [sigh]. But yeah, so it’s not going to be a million switchbacks, I think it’s probably going to be pretty straightforward. But that’s all this is. I will be interested to see if this gets pulled. I think there’s a good chance that it will, but if it doesn’t pass I would be surprised.
17:16
Jess: It’ll probably pass.
I would actually be okay with it coming out from under the consent agenda; you and I saw this on the agenda, and you and I – who’ve been paying fairly close attention and having a lot of opinions – were confused by this item. So I think it’s legit if Council wanted to have a conversation about it. Or don’t and just pass it! But if you are getting questions from constituents, or you have questions of your own, go for it. But I imagine this will get approved.
17:44
Molly: Yeah yeah, so yay, there will be a path under the bridge we think, someday. And now we move on to the rezoning portion of the agenda.
17:57
Jess: That’s right! Rezoning part one.
All right. C-1 on your agenda if you’re following along, is a rezoning of the Y Lot, known to most people as 350 South Fifth from D1 to – Molly, I’m very sorry to inform you that this is P-U-D and not pud.
So, Molly, what do you know about this?
18:24
Molly: Okay. So the Y lot is not near the Y, it’s a parking lot near the downtown library, near the Blake Transit Center I think, yes?
18:36
Jess: Spot on so far!
18:38
Molly: And there used to be an old Y there, before my time, and this land was owned by the city and then the city sold it, I think, to have someone do something with it, and then they never did, and the city bought it back. I think there was a lot of like, drama around that, but again I don’t know beyond “drama,” and it’s still a parking lot and I think it’s on the list of sites in this affordable housing plan, that we’re going to build all this affordable housing with our new millage. That’s one of the places we’re going to do it, and we have reached the end of what I know.
19:18
Jess: Well, the cool thing is, you were right about 100% of everything. Good job! Right about the location, right about the drama, and you’re right about this is a site for affordable housing
So. This specific decision is a rezoning. This is not a site plan approval, this is not a development plan, this is being submitted with what’s called a concept plan, which I’ll talk a little bit more about in a minute. We got to this point, I will skip the drama portion of the site’s history and go both to the way-back and the very-recent.
On the very recent: four years ago in 2018 City Council directed the Housing Commission to evaluate a number of city-owned properties for their potential of getting developed as affordable housing communities. The Commission considered factors like proximity to transit and services, likelihood of scoring high on competitive finance applications, and income-diverse areas in assessing the different sites. In the downtown, a few sites were scored pretty highly; fairly attractive for affordable housing development. The first two being the surface parking lot at fourth and Catherine, which is across the street from the mural depicting prominent Black Ann Arbor residents and catty corner from the food co-op. So that was the first one, and the second one, there were others, but the top two scores were that one and 350 South Fifth, also known as the Y Lot. It has that name because that’s where Ann Arbor’s previous YMCA stood before it was demolished in early 2000s.
To clarify, I am from Georgia and there’s a truism there that we give directions based on where the Walmart used to be. This is a little bit what feels like.
21:01
Molly: Right like we will continue to call it the Y Lot after there’s like a big apartment building there.
21:06
Jess: That’s right! We’ll have thousands of new neighbors and we’ll call it the Y Lot. And maybe that’s OK!
So. The reason that we’re talking about it in this particular context is that the Housing Commission, as kind of an extension of that directive to explore affordable housing opportunities, is working to get all their ducks in a row in order to be able to put out a request for proposals, or an rfp, to partner with developers to create a substantial number of affordable housing units on this site. And what it’s looking like is there will be two towers, one dedicated to affordable housing and one either all market-rate or mixed-income. One of the things the Housing Commission is doing is creating a concept plan that a developer can use as a basis for a site plan and as a reminder for our process-oriented planning friends: a site plan is really the trigger for approval of a specific development.
22:07
Molly: So, usually the developer would come with a plan.
22:10
Jess: Right. A site plan specifically. A site plan. Right.
22:14
Molly: And so we’re sort of giving them a leg up?
22:18
Jess: Kind of. What the Housing Commission is doing is fine-tuning the zoning so that isn’t a part of the process that an outside developer would have to manage. Because so much of the site is going to be so deeply affordable, they are having to do things that are a little bit more ambitious than our current zoning requirements allow. And so, in order to be more ambitious, we can’t use the current zoning which right now is designated as D1 there, rezoning it to PUD. I’ll talk about that more in a second. But specifically why the Housing Commission is doing that is, rezoning is a process that can be risky: it’s tough to predict how long it’s going to take, it is inherently uncertain, and therefore expensive. The Housing Commission shouldering this part of the process: A, it’s a lot less expensive for a city partner to go through this; and B, it makes it much more likely that both affordable and the market-rate components of this concept plan will eventually get built.
I’m just pausing in case you have…?
23:23
Molly: I think I think I’ve got it now.
23:24
Jess: Awesome. Awesome. Good.
Okay. We are seeing this because rezoning is a City Council decision. Basically, if a person wants to use land in a particular way, they have to ask permission of Council if they want to use it in a way that may be inconsistent with the city’s Land Use Plan.
There is a risk of PUDs.
Part of it is that planning by exception invalidates the process of comprehensive land use planning to begin with. We do that for a reason! We’re trying to manage a host of really complicated factors, like affordability, housing, transportation, schools, opportunity access. And so, if we start to chip away at that by saying, I know that we have this plan for all of these tens of thousands of parcels but we’re going to create a brand new plan every time a parcel comes up – it’s just not a very effective use of resources.
The other risk of PUDs is that they are project-specific: when you rezone to a PUD, you are also essentially committing to that specific project plan. If it ends up not going through – see also, the LowerTown cluster-tangle of the last 14, 15 years, where that development was rezoned to PUD then the recession hit and they weren’t able to build, but because that site was rezoned into PUD, it was impossible for another team to come behind them and put together that exact project until they had it resolved to something more consistent with the city’s land use plan – so that’s why PUDs aren’t great. Bespoke zoning is not a best practice.
One thing that PUDs can be used for is – if folks have heard about Community Benefits Ordinances in other cities, that is one thing that we can use PUDs for. We get a developer, and the community can use a PUD rezoning – and PUD, I’m sorry, is planned unit development – can use a rezoning like that to ask more of the developers. There are certain things within our land use plan – a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes), transportation, there was one project recently that was then entailed into giving over to the city a pot of money for the Parks department – PUDs are a way for a city to get more value out of a project than just the project itself.
That’s what’s happening here. As I mentioned, the affordable component of this project is unusually high; it’ll be in the neighborhood of 20 or 25%. Typically, a private developer’s high high high end percent would be 12%; much more likely, 3, 4, 5 maybe 6% of the units in the development would be able to be deemed as very affordable. 20 to 25% is radical and awesome that we’re able to get that here, but we need the zoning to be a little bit more flexible with specific elements relating to the percentage of storefront; the height of the streetwall, which is how high a building is adjacent to the sidewalk; or on-site parking in order to make the finances pencil out. Basically, this is rezoning because it’s going to be so affordable.
27:02
Molly: Wait. I have a question.
27:03
Jess: Yeah! Go for it.
27:05
Molly: This is maybe too big of a question but, it’s currently zoned D1 right?
Jess: Yep.
Molly: And my understanding is that D1, that’s downtown one, that is, of the blanket zoning things that we have, D1 is the one that allows the biggest buildings with the most floors, most housing, is that right?
27:27
Jess: That is correct.
27:28
Molly: So what we’re saying here is that D1 is not flexible enough for this location, because we’re trying to fit more affordable housing into it.
Jess: Yep.
Molly: So why wouldn’t we make D1 more like what we’re doing for this pud so that more developers can build bigger, more, do you see what I’m getting at?
27:52
Jess: I totally see what you’re getting at, and I also hear you you sneaky Kleinman, I heard you and your pud. [laughing]
27:58
Molly: [laughing] Oh, did I do it? I didn’t even do it on purpose! For those who don’t know, I learned, all of this stuff mostly from like Facebook, and I have no planning background and P U D, I just heard it as pud in my head for a really long time. Googling it never I could never figure out what it meant, what it stood for. Finally once I got to know Jess there was a day, where I was like “I have this confession to make I don’t know what a pud is” and she laughed because she’s like, “Well, first of all it’s P U D.” So anyway yeah. That was my question.
28:32
Jess: I think that’s a great question, and honestly not too big; I feel like that is one of the questions of this.
So.
I think we should take a look at D1/D2 and our zoning. I think that we really need to take a look at what we’re asking our land use planning to do, because I don’t think we’re asking it to do enough. But when you’re talking about retooling zoning, which we’ll talk about in the next agenda item, that’s when you’re talking about something that really does require a lot of community engagement, feedback, conversations, because we have to do two things. We have to communicate to the community, A, what is land use planning, because it’s confusing and weird and very specialized; and B, if we’re going to change it, we need to hear from the community what are our values. Right now we’re talking about justice in a way that we never have before. And I’ll specifically say as a majority white community – not exclusively, but majority white community – we as a whole are talking about justice and transformative change that would have been unthinkable five or 10 or 20 years ago, the last time that we went through substantial revisions to our land use plan. So we need great feedback from our stakeholders: from people who live here, from people who work here, in addition to our professional staff, before we change zoning. In some ways it’s just a paperwork thing right? We edit the UDC, the Unified Development Code, and that’s it; but those edits are laden very, very full of community conversation – appropriately! – so before we to retool D1, which we should, we need to talk a little bit first.
30:12
Molly: Okay, so. Right, so we will get there, but in the meantime we’ve got this one site and we need to make things more flexible, so we can do this really cool thing.
30:21
Jess: That’s right, and it will continue to be publicly owned, this will continue to be a city-owned site. But in preparation for the Housing Commission inviting in a developer partner, both for the affordable housing component and for the market rate component, they’re taking care of the rezoning, which is a real administrative pain in the butt. It’s nice that they’re taking care of it.
One of the things that I want to point out that I really love is that no onsite parking is being proposed for the affordable component of this project! We can celebrate that, but also this is the least that we could do, given that it shares a site line with our Transit Center and is immediately bordered on the north and south by almost 2000 parking spaces in the Fourth and William parking lot and the Library Lot surface and subsurface parking lot. So, like, let’s maybe not build parking here? It’s really expensive and super redundant and probably won’t be needed. Definitely won’t be needed for the affordable component and a lot less, if any, will be needed for the market-rate component as well.
31:32
Molly: And I can hear people saying, “But what about all of these people who need cars to drive to their jobs? Why shouldn’t we let poor people have cars?” and my answer to that is that owning a car is extraordinarily expensive. And we’re setting this up, so that people won’t need a car, the way they would have if they had to live on the outskirts of town or out in the townships and so, if they want to have a car as Jess said there’s a lot of spaces right there, but we’re enabling a more affordable life by making it so they don’t need that car.
32:06
Jess: Absolutely, and if you talk to folks who work in affordable housing, another thing that they say is, not everyone is a monolith. A family with a whole bunch of kids may need a car, to be able to get around to activities, schools, multiple jobs, you know, things like that. But not every family configuration is the same, and so enabling smaller units, smaller unit sizes, which this downtown site will probably do, means that people are going to self-select to live here who don’t need a car for their everyday lives.
It should be both. We should be providing housing that does permit access to cars as the existing affordable housing sites like Miller Manor, like Baker Commons, like Lurie Terrace, those do have parking spaces, this one won’t, and that’s okay. That’s appropriate.
33:00
Molly: But there is another kind of parking at this proposed building…
33:01
Jess: So much bike parking! Over 110 spaces, at least. At least! So that’s fun, awesome, yeah.
33:12
Molly: Alright zoning part two.
33:14
Jess: Zoning Part Two! Let’s do it.
33:16
Molly: Alright, so this one is C2, which is about doing a rezone to an area around the intersection of South State and Eisenhower, to a new zoning designation TC1, which is what we’re calling transit oriented zoning. So Jess, what is transit oriented zoning?
33:40
Jess: This is zoning that isn’t innate – intended – I’m so excited I can’t even! it’s intended to enable transit-focused communities and neighborhoods.
Right now, traditional North American and specifically American zoning enables a division of uses: you can only live here, you can only work here, you can only buy here. Mixed use, where you can basically live on top of your job, is really not prioritized in most land use planning zoning designations; it’s just not. Transit-oriented zoning is one of the ways that we can get at that.
We’re saying, along transit-rich corridors, areas that the AAATA the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority already serves, how can we enable a density and a multiplicity of uses that allows that transit to be even easier? We’re specifically talking about transit, but that often means folks out of single-occupancy vehicles; like walking, like bikes; so transit-oriented zoning accomplishes a multitude of goals.
34:50
Molly: Awesome, and so where did this thing come from? What’s the story with TC1?
34:56
Jess: That I don’t remember the specific genesis of this, but I will say that this is one of the very first community engagement efforts that I have been in Ann Arbor from start to finish for, so I was paying attention to it since the beginning, when it was born! And have been listening and paying attention as it goes, and we’re really close to the finish line which is this being implemented into the UDC, the Unified Development Code, finally. It’s interesting because when we’re talking about transit oriented zoning we should be talking about types of parcels, which parcels abut corridors that have a high amount of traffic going through it. This does that, but in the community engagement process, there was a lot of hesitation that staff heard on behalf of the community about what change this was going to mean; and so, instead of implementing this as a parcel type, this is specific to one area of the city, as you mentioned, State and Eisenhower. Basically this is test-case zoning; we’re going to rezone that area over there as TC-1 and we’re gonna see how it goes.
36:05
Molly: Cool, you sort of get a little bit at it, with this specific rezoning, but so this is going to be the first time we’re applying TC1 to an area. We’re starting with this particular area. What is it about this particular area that has it going first in this process?
36:25
Jess: I imagine – this is a little bit of speculation on my part – but I’m imagining that this is over where the mall is, 777 –
36:36
Molly: Yeah.
36:38
Jess: – 777 building. Which is a tall office building over there. This is really restaurant, commercial, office, and parking lot space.
36:52
Molly: So much parking lot.
36:54
Jess: So much parking lot concrete lagoons over there, what it is not retune is adjacent or contiguous neighborhoods until you get a little bit further away. And so I think that people are a little bit fine with doing this area because it is at a physical remove. From where most folks live, I mean there, there are condos back there, there are neighborhoods nearby but, in general, I think, because it is so like the car juicy over there it’s actually there there’s fewer humans literally on the ground to care about the changes over here.
37:33
Molly: So we rezone this area TC1. Does this mean we’re going to start seeing like major transformations in this area right away? How does this play out after the rezone happens?
37:47
Jess: It’s a great question! I think that that question gets at the heart of both community fears and community hopes. There’s a fear that rezoning – any rezoning, at all; TC-1 right now – is going to result in immediate drastic change. We’re worried that if we change the number of stories permitted in a particular zone, what we’re going to see is buildings razed and new buildings installed and it will suddenly no longer feel like our city. The reality on the ground is that buildings are sticky, and buildings are expensive! What I mean by sticky is that when you’ve got one, they’re hard to shift. Physically, they’re hard to change; leases are hard to change; mortgages are hard to change; ownership is hard to change. And so, actually physically changing what’s over there is pretty unlikely.
What’s more likely that we’re going to see is the first-time development of parking lots. and not the redevelopment of buildings. Which is kind of great! That’s part of the aspiration of transit-oriented zoning, is to reduce the car saturation of that area, and so giving them fewer places to go or not go – my God, the area around Briarwood is so so so empty! I would love to see the percentage usage of the parking lots over there, because I know folks even here in Ann Arbor have gone around on Black Friday. It’s the day after Thanksgiving; theoretically, the most intensive shopping time of the year; and there are still substantial vacancies in this parking lot so even planning for maximum usage, those areas are vastly, vastly underutilized.
39:26
Molly: Although, Briarwood Mall, there’s like this circle in the map that’s not encompassed by this rezoning, and that includes the mall and the parking right? And so it’s around Briarwood Mall but this rezoning is not touching the mall.
39:45
Jess: That’s fine, but there’s still a ton of parking over there.
So, probably what we’re going to see is a developer or two developers who have a piece of land that with the new zoning could be more profitable to use it in a different way. Outside of the downtown district, in Ann Arbor, you’re not allowed to charge for parking; so anybody who’s parking over there is doing it for free; anybody who’s managing a parking lot over there is absolutely doing it at a deficit. So it may be incumbent upon them to turn it into an office building or an office/apartment building instead of managing a parking lot. That’s the kind of thing we may see.
We may also possibly see the conversion of some smaller buildings like the typical fast food franchises that you see; McDonald’s, Red Robin, and things like that. –Red Robin is not going anywhere! Those bottomless French fry baskets – you’re cool. But we may see plots like that that have one-use single-story buildings get redeveloped. There was an example of that along Stadium recently, where there was a Burger King that was recently developed to a very modest two story building. It has I think a Verizon, or something like that, on the first floor, and then a handful of offices on the second one; that’s the kind of change that we’re likely to see.
Even still, it’s going to go pretty slow for a bunch of different reasons. One, again, the stickiness, too expensive; and, two, we’re emerging from a pandemic, where everything is even more expensive than they were before; the supply chain hangups are no joke and the Labor challenges are worse. So we are very unlikely to see drastic change along this corridor in a short amount of time. We are likely to see an evolution of more people-centered, transit-rich, full-use neighborhoods in the longer term. And I mean, half a generation or more.
41:42
Molly: Wow. Okay. The timeline pieces are really helpful for me to understand. And I think a piece, you may have said this already, but I just want to hammer it home a little bit more. The transit orientation piece is the idea that again people can live here without a car or car light because there’s a bus right there. And increasing the number of people who live on a transit line allows you to run that line with more frequency and so it’s this really wonderful positive feedback loop, if we can get more people living on these corridors, we can get more buses running on these corridors, and then it’s even more attractive to live near those buses and it will all be a wonderful evolution, as you said, of that area.
42:25
Jess: I love your phrase, “positive feedback loop.” That’s such a much better name for it than the way I think of it, which is an itsy-bitsy spider thing; we get a little bit of transit, we get a little bit of apartments, and we just keep going up one finger at a time.
42:38
Molly: Yeah, yeah. So that’s TC1. So we like this, we want this to happen. It’s a long time coming. Maybe someday soon we’ll get it in more than just this one spot.
42:48
Jess: My only reservation about this is that only doing transit-oriented zoning in – transit, which is inherently network thinking – right only doing it in one spot, I think the community fear and hope was that doing it one spot would allow us to get information about how it’s working from one specific area before rolling it out to the whole city. In actual fact that’s actually probably handicapping us from learning as quickly as we could. Do we have a diversity of price points and owners over there? Do we actually have the ability for multiple people to come in and redevelop over there? It’s hard to say. But if we had visibility along Jackson and along Washtenaw and maybe even along Plymouth, to be able to look at it over there as well, I think we’d get the information that we wanted a lot faster, I think that limiting this to one area of town has actually handicapped us on the learning and so implementing is going to go even slower. That’s my only complaint.
43:50
Molly: Got it. So if, for example, you wanted to call in and support this rezoning you might, at the same time, say “I love it so much, I want to see it all over.”
43:59
Jess: That’s right. Go ahead and itsy-bitsy-spider shit on up.
44:03
Molly: Awesome. Alright I’ve got one more quick agenda item, which is DC-1, this is an item about streetlights that might be giving you deja vu, I know it gave Jess deja vu. She was like, “didn’t we do this already?” and I was like “yes, we did this twice already.” So originally there was a single sponsor resolution that was going to try and tell DTE to do a bunch of things because DTE is really bad at managing our streetlights, but we have no choice but to work with them. That did not end up going anywhere, this was a new one that came back with multiple sponsors that’s much more modest and it’s about mostly what city staff can be doing to monitor the status of streetlights and try and do what we can on our end to reduce the number of outages, and pressure DTE to do a better job of maintaining our street lights. It was postponed, the last time it came to the Council, I’m not sure why, but it remains pretty unobjectionable, also doesn’t do very much, and it’s back. If you see street lights and you go, “Again? More? With the streetlights?” that’s what that is.
45:10
Jess: I want somebody to give us an award for all of the “streetlight people” jokes we haven’t been making. We didn’t make a single one. I’m technically not even making one now. I’m just highlighting that.
45:20
Molly: Fair, yes, mmhmm. So that’s the streetlight thing. And now moving on to podkeeping.
45:27
Jess: We got a piece of listener feedback; I really appreciated it and I wanted to thank that listener, and also to let Molly know that she appreciated the bridge episode. Specifically what she cared about and really resonated with her was how we talked about emphasizing that multiple ways of knowing matter, that lived experience is a very valid way of knowing, as is professional experience, as is academic experience. It can be challenging to talk about those at the same level, and she said, the Flint metaphor really kind of brought it home for her and the parallel helped her understand: okay this wasn’t a failure of democracy, it was a failure of listening. Absolutely! Thanks, listener.
I can’t say – I actually did enjoy making that episode, I was sorry that we had to, yeah, but I liked the conversation. It was a little cleansing.
46:23
Molly: Very, yeah, it was definitely cathartic for me. So then there’s one other thing that we want you all to know about, which is that there’s currently an online survey that the city is running to gather feedback and experiences about the current pilot configuration of South Main Street, so you may recall, this was originally done as part of the Healthy Streets program. It took away one car lane in each direction, added a center turn lane, and added bike lanes. We talked a little bit about the data from this pilot on a previous episode, but it’s been incredibly effective at reducing speeding through here, which makes it a lot safer for all of the people have to cross and who are biking through here. So if you’ve had an experience with South Main since they’ve done the reconfiguration, please share your feedback. The survey will close on March 21st at 5pm, so you still have some time. It’s online at a2gov.org/Southmainpilot. We’ll also link to it in the show notes.
47:25
Jess: So in our episode sheet, we call this section podkeeping but, honestly, it’s just the area of the episode where we talk about stuff that we think is cool. My thing for this week is an Observer article that I absolutely love. It’s called “Making Room For Everyone: The Long, Complicated History of Affordable Housing in Ann Arbor.”
I think this is such a lovely article about dovetailing local efforts against the backdrop of things like federal civil rights legislation and trends. We get, through this article, a much better picture of the evolution of Ann Arbor’s attitude towards affordable housing. Heads up: wasn’t always so chill! And it is a lovely portrait of a bunch of folks who live in Housing Commission and Avalon neighborhoods around the city. So we get to meet some of our neighbors; we get to learn a little history; we get to know ourselves a little bit better. “Making Room For Everyone” in this month’s Ann Arbor Observer. Check it out; it’s a good one.
49:25
And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor AF.
Come check out past episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter at the a2council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor Housing for All Facebook group. And hey, if you want to send us a few dollars at ko-fi.com/annarboraf to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it.
We’re your cohosts Molly Kleinman and Jess Letaw; and thanks to producer Scott Trudeau. Theme music is “I dunno” by grapes. You can reach us by email at annarborafpod@gmail.com. Get informed, then get involved. It’s your city!