Today we are talking with Ben Connor Barrie about yet another blue-language civic engagement media project: Damn Arbor! We cover a lot of ground, including why it’s important to say nice things about where you live.
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ranscript
NOTE: This version of the transcript was generated by an automated transcription tool and will contain (sometimes hilarious) errors. When we have time for human editing to clean this up we will update it, but we hope this imperfect version is better than nothing.
Jess (00:00:06):
Welcome to today’s episode of Ann Arbor F I’m Jess Leeta here with co-host Molly Kleinman. We both use she her pronouns, Molly and I think a lot about how to make cities better through affordable and abundant housing, safer transportation outside of cars and community safety beyond law enforcement. We talk about these issues because we know that whatever we’re trying to accomplish, we can’t do it alone. So we’re right here with you learning how to get informed so we can get involved.
Molly (00:00:37):
Today we’re talking with Ben Connor Berry about yet another blue language civic engagement media project Dam Arbor. Ben was born and raised in Ann Arbor and now resides in Ypsilanti. He started blogging about Ann Arbor as a grad student and now works in Ann Arbor and still blogs about Ann Arbor. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today.
Ben (00:00:58):
Thank you two for having me.
Molly (00:01:00):
Yeah, so to start, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about Dam Arbor.
Ben (00:01:05):
Yes. So I started Dam Arbor with my housemates in grad school. I think it’s, we just passed the 12 year anniversary of our soft launch and our motivation, I guess my motivation as a townie who would come back to Ann Arbor was I felt like there was not a ton of coverage in the news. I think this is just after the Ann Arbor news had switched to ann arbor.com. So there you could see there was decreasing coverage and even in the news, the Ann Arbor News’s coverage, it felt like the news actively ignored or was almost hostile to this huge segment of the population, which was young adults. So undergrad students, grad students. And there was also, I had read this blog, Ann Arbor’s Overrated while I had been living in Chicago and I really wanted to be part of this world, it seemed like there were cool people watching city council, which seems ridiculous to say a little bit, but I wanted to be part of it.
(00:02:33):
And I also, I think there was a little bit of arrogance. I had very strong opinions about which bar was best at the time and sort of my housemates. I think it’s important to remember that when DAM ever started, there were five or six of us all contributing to it. And I’m looking back over our first month’s coverage that I was trying to figure out the first time we mentioned Danver City Council and it was definitely within the first month, but most of the coverage was like, this is a good C s A to choose or this is a fun bar to go to, or don’t forget to go to this dance party at the Blind Pig. So it was very much a very mixed bag that has shifted over the years to being primarily me writing and primarily previewing city council meetings. But there’s also, I think the best, I have three or four guest writers per year and those are really the articles that I think are the best. And yeah,
Jess (00:03:38):
I’ve enjoyed over the last year and a half as we have done city council previews to have both our kind of voice and yours in people’s heads. You would write up a preview of the meeting and it would be this really kind of anecdotal, very accessible way of describing what’s coming on while also having really strong opinions about it, but communicating them in not a browbeating way, but in a very clear thinking way. And I’ve just appreciated, I don’t know if you know this, but I have felt like a very congenial tennis ball back and forth. You preview pod we or you preview council? We preview. Preview council. It’s awesome.
Ben (00:04:16):
Oh, I agree a hundred percent. Jess, I think I really do miss your city council preview episodes because it made my job a lot easier because I would listen to it while I was writing and it made sure,
Jess (00:04:29):
Are you saying we helped you get informed?
Ben (00:04:32):
Yes, even though I’ve been writing about city council for over a decade, it was just helpful. It takes a lot of work to get into that head space or just to understand everything. And then I still struggle with why is something on the consent agenda versus why is something a resolution and it doesn’t, I know there’s some rule and someone’s explained it to me, but it’s after reading dozens or hundreds of meeting agendas, I still don’t a lot of work to figure everything out and to quickly read something and figure out what’s important.
Molly (00:05:11):
Yeah, and it’s so funny because you, you’ve been doing it so much longer than both of us. My approach to engaging in council meetings before and still was always not to watch the council meeting but just to watch the hashtag on Twitter for lots of different reasons. And I was always so impressed with the people who knew council meeting coming up, time to check the agenda, time to see what’s coming. I never knew when the next council meeting was. I had no sense of the rhythms and we just sort of decided I guess to do it. And it sounds like you at some point much earlier than us did the same thing of just this is how I want to do it. And I’m curious about how you’ve seen that engagement change over time. So you started doing this as a graduate student and for it sounds like an audience of other students mostly. And what we’ve seen, Ann Arbor’s overrated is a great example. A lot of the people who start engaging here as grad students eventually leave. And so you’ve stayed, and I’m still here, but I’m curious about how you’ve seen the shift both generally and also your experience of that change.
Jess (00:06:32):
And Ben, I’m wonder you, I’m looking forward to your answer to that question, but what I’m realizing is that part of the reason a small part of the reason I decided to stay in Ann Arbor is because there was cool shit here. One of the cool things was Ann Arbor is overrated and another one was Dan Arbor. I was like, if there could be this irreverence about a place that people actually care about that feels like a community I want to be a part of. So I just want you to know in a very small way you’re a part of why I’m still here in Ann Arbor instead of being one of those grad students.
Ben (00:07:01):
I’m so glad to hear that. I know this wasn’t the thrust of the question, but I want to touch on one thing first. So when we started Dan Arbor, there were a ton, not a ton, but the technology has changed a lot over in terms of how people are engaging online primarily. There were a lot of other blogs or there were a handful of other blogs like Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor update was still posting a little bit when we started and there were a handful of people that would make a WordPress blog and just talk about city council things. And I think over time a lot more has shifted onto Twitter, which is I think is not the worst thing. It is much more accessible and it’s somewhat static. The tweets are archived and you can find them. But in terms of where people are engaging online, a lot more has shifted to nextdoor on Facebook, which I think is not necessarily a positive thing because there are these walled gardens where it is intentionally impossible to or intentionally difficult to find resources If there was a really good conversation on Nextdoor and unless I saved that link intentionally, I don’t know how to find that again. Or same with Facebook. So that’s
Jess (00:08:33):
One listeners want the record show I am making a face.
Ben (00:08:36):
So that’s one of the things that’s really changed I think in terms of the demographics and the audience shift. My wife Erica also is a former Dan Barber and we were housemates and dating when we started at Dan Arbor and we talked and she was a grad student at the time. And we’ve talked about how it’s dangerous to have most of your friends be grad students in Ann Arbor because there is an expiration date on that friendship. Not really.
Molly (00:09:17):
Yeah. Mean I’ve been through five or six cycles of friends over my however many years here
Ben (00:09:28):
And partially I think the audience has aged with me. There were definitely undergrads that were reading it that are now townies. There are grad students that are now townies. We we’ve sort of shifted to becoming, I think most, it used to be grad students in 20 somethings and now it’s 30 somethings. And young parents, I’ve joked about starting a sub blog or something called Dad Arbor where I just give my opinions on playgrounds
Molly (00:10:07):
About the playground review site. There’s a very detailed playground review.
Ben (00:10:11):
I know I’m a little jealous of it.
Molly (00:10:15):
Playground thirst trap. That’s awesome.
Ben (00:10:18):
Yeah, and as the audiences age, I used to be really religious about looking at my statistics from Google Analytics and Facebook analytics and now I can see that I get a ton more engagement on Twitter than I do on the blog. But I still think the blog is important because there’ll be two or three articles we write per year that I am linking to and reposting or that someone else will write. I think Eric contributed this. Eric who is a person who’s on Ann Arbor Twitter contributed a very good article breaking down our four tiered versus three-tiered water rate structure or for the city of Ann Arbor. And that has been something that every six months we have to repost because people, there was a faction on city council that wanted to revert to this the three-tiered structure which disfavor low water users at the expense of high water users.
(00:11:28):
That has been great. I wrote an article breaking down the idea that of distracted walking and looking at the data on that and distracted walking is not a thing and it doesn’t contribute to accidents in a statistically meaningful way. Yet every time someone talks about why more pedestrians are being hit by drivers, someone’s like, oh, it’s because people are looking at their cell phones and it’s not a thing. So I think that has been really important to maintain the blog. And I can say I, I’m realizing I lost the thread of what I was saying, but the age has definitely shifted of our mean audience. But I
Jess (00:12:12):
Mean we’ve seen that for sure. But on the hashtag, and for listeners who are not on Ann Arbor Twitter, the hashtag that we’re talking about is hashtag a two council and some smart allocate ones from time to time as you can find them. But I see younger folks on the hashtag all the time, especially folks in the planning school. But I see law school folks, school of information folks, people really social work all the time, public health for sure. So they may not be blogging, but they’re definitely on the Twitter and I’m guessing that they’re finding the content as well. So I think they’re coming along just in a different way.
Ben (00:12:52):
Yeah,
Jess (00:12:53):
I think so. I’m curious, oh go ahead. Go
Ben (00:12:55):
Ahead. I was just going to say that the hashtag A two council is something that it’s primarily used during Ann Arbor city council meetings, but also to talk about government issues within Ann Arbor and on a council meeting night, it’ll be one of the main trending hashtags in Michigan. So there’s a lot enough people reading it and writing it on it that it’s a really cool way because Molly, you said if you can’t watch the council meeting live, you can first thing in the morning scroll through the hashtag and figure it out a blow by blow of what agenda items were voted on, but also sort of the emotional tone of the meeting, which is really cool.
Molly (00:13:41):
Yeah, I mean the hashtag was definitely one of the things that sort of pulled me into engaging with city politics more and also finding the other people because when I first joined transportation commission, I really didn’t know anyone. I had been in this cave of doing a PhD while also having babies and didn’t know anyone sort of outside of that bubble anymore because all my old friends had moved away and people were tweeting not just about council, but about transportation commission stuff. So I started realizing that there was this place I could talk to people about what was happening and that was really big for me. I feel like you had mentioned when we sort of talked in preparation for this, that part of the goal with Dan Arbor was to maybe help move people onto the hashtag a little bit.
Ben (00:14:34):
Yes. So I had this sneaky goal of, I wanted more, lemme take a big step back. I came at this project from the point of view that Ann Arbor’s going to change and it’s important that we help the city chain or that we sort of shape the way that the city is going to change and that we guide that. And
Jess (00:15:00):
I want to pause on that for just a moment because that’s actually a really fundamental shift in how civic and conversations are generally approached. So can you just say what you said again, you started with the idea that cities are going to change
Ben (00:15:17):
So cities are going to change. Ann Arbor is going to, we want to think about how the city is going to change and we want to be good stewards of that. You can see examples if you don’t engage in the planning of the city or of if you don’t engage with how your city is changing in a positive way and you just are very sort of recalcitrant to that change, you end up the default is resisting change, housing prices go up. You start selecting for only people that can really only very high income earners. The politics of the city change and it’s this bad cycle. You can see there was someone posted recently on Twitter, the cheapest house for sale in Palo Alto is a 1.8 million tear down and that’s not where Ann Arbor is. But over time, that might be a few decades from now, but if we don’t engage with how we want to the city to change and thinking about how we make the city equitable for future generations and how we make sure the city’s environmentally sustainable and also think how we make sure the city is safe for residents writ large, it’s going to change in ways that you don’t necessarily want.
(00:16:53):
And I think one big thing that shaped that I’m realizing, so my dad no longer practices a architecture, but he was an architect in the city and he was on very, in the nineties he was on the Historic District commission and the building board of appeals, which I don’t know if that’s a board we still have, but it is okay. And his philosophy was very much, I am on these to help make good things happen because if we just follow the rules as written, there’s no reason to have a border commission and we are humans and we can see the big picture that the rules can’t like and let’s help these things happen. So he’s always, and it was cool to see new buildings happen and get to visit his building sites. So that was my first moment or I think the first event that made me get engaged or thinking about how cities change.
(00:17:50):
And when I was living in Chicago in the early aughts, early let’s say mid aughts, I was reading, I don’t know how I found Ann Arbor’s overrated, but I did. And that was also sort of a radicalizing moment because the tone of that was very much we should allow building to happen. And if you read the Ann Arbor is Overrated archives from 2008, you’ll see a lot of the same anti building arguments then as now. And it’s interesting to see. So I came into, moved back to Ann Arbor. I love loving the city, I love Ann Arbor. I was awesome growing up here, but wanting to engage with how the city is changing. And to tie this back into the start of the question, I wanted to trick people, not trick people, but trick people into getting engaged with the city. And I think one of my early Twitter questions I posted out into the world was like, how do you get young people to engage with?
(00:19:07):
And by young people, I mean students, grad students, young adults, young families to engage with the city writ large. And someone Murph for local Twitter users responded that writing about bars but also writing about city council meetings is a really good way. So it was just saying this is what your path is probably a good path. And I think in retrospect it has been. And I think another really important thing is if you decide to go down this path, I had a friend who had a blog about much more event focused, but life in San Francisco’s mission district. And I was talking to him while I was getting started and he said that people liked to read nice things about where they live. And that is something that really struck with stuck with me. So it’s really easy to have all your civic engagement being complaining, but because that that’s like thorn in your side motivates you to do something. And you’ll see that in a lot of people’s local engagement. But I think talking about things that you love, if you’re going to start writing about your local political scene, talking about things you love, talking about things you like, but also being talking about how you want change to happen, but what is your positive view for the future? And then we definitely do sprinkle in things like this is unequivocally bad.
(00:20:51):
Yeah, I’m trying to think of something. But struggling,
Jess (00:20:54):
Not having,
Molly (00:20:54):
I mean there was a couple years there where everything city council was doing was blocking bike lanes
Ben (00:20:59):
And yeah, making it more difficult to do road diets is unequivocally bad, right? You can, yeah, road diets are unequivocally good is maybe how we phrased that. But it was also, I mean there’s a clear connotation to what we were writing at that point. And I mean mostly me but also other people.
Jess (00:21:25):
I don’t know I, I’m having a very coming into myself moment because in 2017, August 4th, two days after the primary of that year I started what is now Ann Arbor housing for all it started life as Ann Arbor and spent a couple of years during the pandemic as Ann Arbor humans who wonk and is now Ann Arbor housing for all because I wanted to be more explicit and intentional about that focus. But my purpose for founding it and the timing was on the heels of a primary whose sole referendum was the library lot and for folks beyond Ann Arbor, I invite you to Google that with trepidation and horror because oh my god, it’s a shit show. Fun shit show I guess. But it has to do with housing and affordable housing and who gets access to the city and who gets to say what happens and where.
(00:22:16):
And when I saw the that it was like I said a referendum, that election was really about that one site. I was horrified because I felt like we weren’t having any of the right conversations. And when I took a look at where a lot of the conversations were being had online, it was Facebook on people’s private pages where I saw really intelligent, very thoughtful, even disagreements happening but not in public. And then the public conversations were in these townie community pages where people would post our local news Article M live and then there was really only one right way to talk about developments and if you didn’t talk about them that way, you got piled on. And I was like, that’s not discourse, that’s mob rule, that’s bullying. I don’t understand why this is okay for the people that I look to as the grownups in the room.
(00:23:07):
So I founded Ann Arbor Humans for All because I wanted an online space for discourse And I’m really coming into my understanding of that project A, I’m clearly stepping in your footsteps. So I love that I am the online baby of Dan Arbor that makes me feel really happy. I’ve always seen Ann Arbor af as very clearly moving in your sphere, no question. But I never really looked at humans for all as that because my ambition was for us to have better conversations about change. I am a huge fan of the new, I love new buildings, they’re not always beautiful, but I love that they exist and I think that the process by which they come to be is really interesting. And I think that we’re terrible at talking about change as a community, as a culture, as a country, but especially about buildings and development.
(00:23:58):
And I just wanted to normalize talking about change and I just think that that’s so interesting that you had that motivation and that you grounded in your dad. I have that motivation as well and I’d probably ground that a little bit in my dad as well for slightly different reasons. My father was in recovery for a lot of the time growing up for different things. And so to think about change, to think about recovery is to think about change. The idea of recovery is that different habits and a different you is possible. And so for me, my attitudes toward development are grounded in my attitudes towards recovery. So I just, I’m loving finding the overlaps here.
Molly (00:24:45):
So this is maybe a moment to shift Ben to talk about where you live now. Yes. Cause there we’ve been talking about Ann Arbor, you’re from Ann Arbor. Your title is still Dan Arbor, but you live in Ipsi now. I
Ben (00:25:01):
Do.
Molly (00:25:03):
I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about that shift and some of the meaning that you take from it given everything that we’ve been talking about.
Ben (00:25:13):
Yes. So I live in Ypsilanti now and for people listening in from outside of southeast Michigan, Ypsilanti is a smaller city that’s more or less right next to Ann Arbor. We share a transit system, which is awesome. And Ann Arbor at the time of recording is like 125,000 people in Ypsilanti is like 21,000 people. So it’s about a 50 size and it has a bit more of a blue collar history than Ann Arbor. Both are sort of college towns. Ypsilanti has Eastern Michigan University. I’m probably going in way too much depth. So no, I think this is
Molly (00:26:01):
Great. Ok. I think it’s helpful to remember even for those of us who live here, remember what those distinctions are
Ben (00:26:09):
And I will say, oh, so other two other points about Ypsilanti. Yeah, Ypsilanti’s population is down from a high watermark between 1970 and 1980 of about 30,000 people. Recently it’s gone up between the 2010 and 2020 census and the, it’s shifted but from a manufacturing community or was at various times there have been Ford or GM plants within city limits and also within the region. So it’s no longer, we don’t have a lot of factory workers coming into the city anymore. And now I, it’s really shifting to become a sort of a bedroom community for Ann Arbor. So Erica and I bought our house here in 2013 and in that time we’ve really seen, I mean the housing prices almost double for I guess home purchase prices almost double rent has gone up a ton as well. I don’t have that data at the tip of my fingers.
(00:27:26):
I actually wrote an article on affordable housing in Ypsilanti for a different regional publication a while ago. But it’s it which is just to say Ypsilanti used to be or is sort of the most affordable place within the greater Ann Arbor area where you can live without a car. So you can, because of the transit system, if you work more or less normal hours and within downtown Ann Arbor or the university, Ypsilanti is sort of the last affordable place where you don’t have to also take on the cost of car ownership, which I think is an important thing about the city. Yeah,
Jess (00:28:21):
There there’s attention to that too though that I’ll name, I think a lot of folks in our region know it, but a lot don’t and folks outside may not that Ipsy being more affordable is not a value neutral statement. If we say it’s easier for folks to move there. Let’s say you’re making an Ann Arbor salary, but living in Ipsi housing, does that mean that you’ve displaced someone to get there or that you are keeping somebody from living there for whom Ipsi is not actually affordable, it’s the only thing that they can afford in the region, especially for the job that they’re working. But it’s difficult because a lot of folks get legitimately get priced out of Ann Arbor and so the only place that they can live and still be able to access their job, their community, whatever it is, is to be able to live in Ipsy. And this is one of the reasons why talk about a housing is infrastructure and B housing is regional infrastructure because if we look at it municipality by municipality, we’re missing the bigger picture. So I don’t want to take the words out of your mouth for anything. Anything you were getting ready to say but Ipsy being more affordable is fraud is a fraught thing.
Ben (00:29:30):
Yes. Yeah. And since we’ve lived here there’s been almost no net new housing construction despite this big housing pressure. So that means people are getting displaced. I think when we moved here you could rent a one bedroom for within one bedroom a couple blocks from the transit station in Ypsilanti. So a couple blocks from downtown you could rent that and it might be a little rundown, but for a hundred, $400 a month, which is a really, and that’s 20 $13 but that’s still a really good price. That is, I think we’re, see I’m seeing one bedrooms now for the cheapest thing is maybe 800 but much a lot more between 900 and a thousand dollars a month. So that’s, that really shifts who can afford to live here and that is hard. And it also, IPSI is in a very financial, the IPSI as a municipality is in a financial situation that’s different than Ann Arbor in that I think we’re running, I guess Ann Arbor might be running a slight deficit this year and Ypsilanti is too, but Ypsilanti is much more, has a much smaller fund balance and has had to make tough choices financially.
(00:31:02):
So is which is to say it could really use some new construction and to help flush out the tax base. But I don’t, and I am not quite sure what will be the magic that makes more housing get built at NIPS entity
Jess (00:31:23):
I want to go to into something and I’m not totally sure I want to commit to having this on air. Yeah, totally. But I want to open this because skirting around it I feel like is going to make me confused about where the conversation is. What I hear from housing advocates in Ypsilanti is don’t build anything that’s market rate only build affordable or deeply subsidized housing. And while there’s a lot of good reasons for that and need for that, you’re not really expanding the tax base, you’re not expanding the ability to be able to serve existing and future residents. And that feels like a really tense space for me. On the one hand, we definitely want to listen to folks that are on the ground and folks that are vulnerable. And on the other hand, I feel like in Ann Arbor we’re only having one kind of advocacy conversation and in Ipsy we’re only having one kind of advocacy conversation and I don’t know that either is serving us well.
Ben (00:32:18):
Yeah, I will say I think and my point of view on the ground, my point of view on the ground like now is I’m sort of making fun of that now I’m realizing we probably have, Scott will have to edit some of this.
Jess (00:32:34):
It’s me so we can be nice.
Ben (00:32:36):
Ok, it’s all good. Breaking the fourth wall a little, I think it’s a little bit more complicated. There are definitely some, there’s some really vocal housing advocates in Ypsilanti and I think they do the, they’ve done a really good job. I think if you look at one of the complicated things in Ypsilanti is there’s not like a ton of greenfield, so undeveloped land for new development and some of the sites, one of the sites or a lot of the sites are city owned. So that shifts things around too. It means that people have a lot more say in what happens. I think a really positive development has been, we have a site that everyone calls the Old Boys and Girls club site and I don’t think there was a Boys and Girls club there even when I moved the city, but it’s city owned. The address is two 20 North Park if people want to look it up.
(00:33:47):
And because, so if solani passed a community benefits resolution and that means that there for projects on city owned land, my understanding is that there has to be a community benefits process and there was a, there’s city council people apply to be on the run, the community benefits meetings, city council selects and I think they did. I think sometimes there’s attention we you’ve talked about on the pod that their process is in and of itself is not necessarily a neutral phenomenon. It adding more process adds costs to projects, which shifts how much the housing they provide will cost. And by shifts I mean increases.
(00:34:47):
So I think there’s some skepticism broadly speaking from housing advocates sometimes about these community benefits processes. I will say we’ve had our first two iterations of this locally and I think that it’s been really good. And so the people on the community benefits process or running the community benefits process really did a good job of both working with the developers to maybe change the cost sru the subsidized cost structure for some of the units that are being developed and think about how we make sure that the subsidized units will be affordable to people. People are working at the lower end of the income spectrum in Ypsilanti, but also they were super strong when there was some skepticism at council about these two projects. The community benefits board members were super strong advocates for these two projects and made sure that they really were vocal in maybe fighting some of the misinformation in the community about the projects and also being good stewards of the projects and making sure that the community rallied around them and getting people to call in to city council meetings.
(00:36:14):
So I guess landscape is perhaps more complicated in Ypsilanti. I think there are people that are acutely aware of the fact that the cost to rent a one bedroom has more than doubled in less than 10 years. And I think, so they’re, they’re strong advocates for making sure that there is subsidized housing. And I’ll also say, and I think per pushing back, there was a notion, there was Washtenaw County housing report that came out in 2015 I want to say. And it was like Ann Arbor needs x number of affordable units and IPSI has an overabundance of affordable sort of writ large in terms of subsidized below market rate and just below the cost of Ann Arbor. And Ypsilanti has too much of, that’s only my favorite report then.
(00:37:16):
And Ypsilanti has too much of that and it needs more market rate to stabilize the tax base. And I think, I’m not sure what’s keeping market rate developments from happening partially, I think it’s a lot of that the Greenfield is city owned. So I think the two 20 North Park development is going to be, there’s partial, it’s partially market rate and partially subsidized. And I think the way we got that was through the city s selling the land for less than market rate, which I think is a good position for the city to take and it’s a cool development to see happening. And then we also have a big, and this is me being a bad Ipsy engager, I think it might be a hundred percent subsidized development going in on the north side of town. And there is the way the city’s getting that happening or the way the city is encouraging that development or helping make it happen, it means that there will not be property taxes or there are property tax subsidy. I’m not sure the exact mechanics of that, but if I can ask myself a question, I think we talked about sort of pivoting to how my engagement in Ann Arbor is different than my engagement in Ypsilanti, if that seems Yeah, I’m seeing you both. Yeah.
(00:38:50):
So I just listened to your podcast episode with Jen. Is that the Jenny? Jenny SCHs Jenny, yes. Yeah. And Jess, you talked about how you are trying not to have all of your engagement be online and all of my engagement in Man Arbor is online.
Jess (00:39:15):
I was thinking about that earlier when you were talking, that was part of the conversation with Jenny Wright was how do you do this in a way that makes you not lose your mind? And Jenny’s answer was Find your people. And yes, we named a few different examples of that. And in retrospect, of course Ann Arbor is one of them, especially the way that you’re talking about honestly the hashtag is one of those things, the hashtag. But for me, I cannot say that this is an absolute tru truism, but I don’t feel community and I don’t know how to create change only online. I only know how to do those things offline. That’s a Gen X thing. That’s an absolute truth about the universe. I don’t know what the answer is, but that’s the answer for me. Yeah,
Ben (00:39:55):
I think so what that conversation made me think about was I have to constantly remind myself, I find myself engaging too much in conversations on Facebook here. I have several secret nextdoor accounts so that I can see what’s happening in various neighborhoods. And I’ve like definitely, well one I found I can’t engage in Nextdoor because it’s super toxic, right? Two, you’re
Jess (00:40:29):
Your own cabal and I’m just loving it.
Ben (00:40:31):
You’re like, oh people
Jess (00:40:32):
Will, I’m in conspiracy with myself.
Ben (00:40:34):
I’ve definitely been flagged as this person doesn’t live at this address and had lost some nextdoor account. So that’s the other reason it, it’s a good check on me cause it keeps me from engaging in Nextdoor. But really I have to remind myself that you own a website, don’t waste time engaging in toxic discussions on Facebook. So I think maybe the larger lesson for if you are going to choose online engagement, think about what the best use of that is. And for me it’s not getting in arguments with people that are never going to agree with me. It’s thinking through a positive vision for change and writing that in a public facing way on Dan Arbor and using Twitter to help bring people into the conversation. And that’s like that. And also publishing city council previews and making people excited about watching city council meetings.
(00:41:37):
Those are, that’s my focus. That needs to be my focus. But most of my Ann Arbor engagement is that and partially the community of people I’ve built in Ann Arbor. Yeah. I also in person don’t really, arguing is a personality trait that I have. And so I pivoting to how I engage in Ypsilanti, my engagement in Ypsilanti is much more like in-person talking with neighbors. I am a member of the Parks and Recreation Commission in Ypsilanti. I’ve covered some city council meetings and I try to be much neutral ish when I’m covering Ann Arbor city council meetings. But insert, clearly insert my opinion when I think it’s important With Ypsilanti, I’ve tried to be much more neutral and partially my retcon reason is, well as a member of a board commission I should be more neutral. But also Ypsilanti is so small compared to Ann Arbor and I am prioritizing. I want to prioritize my in-person relationships with people and have more space for disagreement and not quite be as loud in the community I think. So Ypsilanti is right, 21,000 people and the council is seven members, so a mayor and six people. Ann Arbor, right? 125,000 with an 11 member council, like 10 councilors and one mayor. So the ratio of citizens to the ratio of citizens to
Jess (00:43:36):
Council members.
Ben (00:43:37):
Council members, yes, thank you. Is much smaller in Ypsilanti. So there’s it just, it’s more intimate and I don’t necessarily feel as comfortable being, I want to have those in-person community conversations. So a lot of my advocacy is my neighbors. I have new neighbors and just chatting with them, explaining to them the structure of municipal government in Michigan and what a charter township is. And that’s like, yeah. So I think that that’s what your conversation with Jenny really made me think about is how I’ve differentiated how my engagement style in these different communities that I engage in.
Jess (00:44:29):
There’s so many things that you said in there that I just wanted to stop and breathe on for a full moment. One was, you’ve written a positive vision for change and can I just invite all of our listeners? I think most folks who listen have strong feelings and do advocate and are activists in one form or another. But do you really have a super clear vision of where you want to get to? Do you know what your goal is? And if you’ve gotten there, I was actually just thinking about that this morning. So I just want to encourage folks who listen, if you haven’t, please do a positive vision of change. And I also wanted to pick up something that you said, Ben, I can’t remember if I’ve said this on air or not. It’s not a secret, it’s just kind of a new understanding for me.
(00:45:17):
Up until recently, I described myself as conflict averse and I could not adequately describe to myself why I kept finding myself in conversations and relationships and work about politics and development, which are not known for not having conflict. And what I came to understand is that I actually don’t have a problem with conflict. I actually think conflict and disagreement are a part of what it means to be human with each other. It’s a part of what it means to be in community with people. That was a huge light bulb moment for me. What I hate is mean-spirited stuff. And what I hate are policy and community conversations where we’re not disagreeing about the idea on the table. We’re going after each other’s next that I would probably always hate, whether it’s at the Thanksgiving dinner table or on next door or at a community meeting. I do not care for that kind of engagement, but I just kind of want to uplift as somebody else who’s identified as I don’t disagreement until recently I was one of you. And I just have a new understanding of myself that’s actually made me much more comfortable about moving into disagreements because I’m much more comfortable about identifying what I’m there for and what I’m not there for. That’s my positive vision change. I want good fights.
Ben (00:46:28):
I like it. That made me think of, I guess all of Dan Robert’s editorial policies are just internal thoughts in my head at this point. But one thing that I do is when I’m writing about writing a city council preview or writing about a policy that I want to advocate for or advocate against, I really try and this is easier sometimes than others, but I really try to only write about the policy and not the people that are sponsoring it. It’s easy every now and then you have to think about the council members that are sponsoring things and maybe make a note of that. And sometimes you do election endorsements, which is a very, not people neutral, but in general I think it’s a way that you can make the space make, if you’re trying to cultivate an online space, the way you can make it safer for people to engage and try to bring more people in is have my spicy takes on policies. I try not to have spicy takes on people because yeah, I guess that’s just how I feel more comfortable engaging.
Molly (00:47:45):
And to me that really is part of the key in the place as small, even as Ann Arbor, as small as Ipsy, but also as small as Ann Arbor. It’s the people you’re talking about are somebody’s neighbor, somebody’s mom, it’s
Jess (00:48:01):
Somebody’s teacher.
Molly (00:48:05):
There’s just a much higher likelihood that there are these relationships and those relationships are important even if you disagree with them. And so trying not to burn all of those bridges, I think it’s really, to me that’s a key part of working in the city like this.
Ben (00:48:23):
Yeah, I try to keep in mind that even when I’m vehemently disagreeing with someone about the direction I think anarch how to embrace or the direction I think Ann Arbor should embrace, even when I’m vehemently disagreeing with someone, people who are engaging with the community are coming out of a place where they really deeply care about the community. And some people I think we even have the same values. We still want the same thing, which is an equitable sustainable community, but we really just disagree about how to get there. So I try to keep that in mind. Some of the people that most vehemently disagree with me are my friends from high school’s, moms and dads. But the people I’m thinking about are, I went to their house in high school, I care about them when I was in grad school. We ran into each other and they super disagree with me. I think they think I’m a developer shill, I think they’re worried about that I’ve embraced capitalism too much or lost my crunchy Ann Arbor values from growing up. So I try to keep that in mind. I try to, when they post things that are like that I agree with, I try, I make sure. Yes. So comment on those are the Facebook comments they make sure to make. Yes, I agree with you that this is a great thing or that this is bad. So they are aware of the common ground. But definitely, yeah,
Jess (00:50:08):
I have a beloved colleague who says that you cannot work on change with someone until you can answer to their satisfactions two questions, do you see me and do I matter? And I really hear that in how you’re talking about things. I feel like we can get super tongue and cheek and do tongue and cheek and kind of sharp and as you mentioned spicy in how we talk about these things. But like you said, this comes down to a community that we care about and ultimately people that we care about or want to care about, we care about them having good lives and so do we see each other, do we matter? I appreciate how you embody that in the ways that you move.
Ben (00:50:52):
Thank you.
Jess (00:50:56):
So in moving towards wrapping up, what is a pretty awesome conversation? I have two questions for you. The first one is, isn’t the city and I will let you decide which city you’re answering for or both, isn’t the city working on that you wish it was?
Ben (00:51:19):
I’m going to answer for Ann Arbor cause I’m going to file this sort of online advocacy. I think that there are parts of the city that are working on these things, but I want it to be policy. I’m trying to think of how to phrase this. Oh, I feel like the city staff have had some whiplash in the last four years and for people outside of the Ann Arbor area or learning about this newly, the 2018 election pulled council in a sort of more conservative anti-development election, the 2020 and 2022 council elections have been a reputation of that. So I think there’s some whiplash for city staff and I think when we had the conservative majority and council people would disagree with that stance. But conservative is and resistant to change. They made it. Yeah. Okay, good. We’ll stay conservative. They made it harder. One of the policies they enacted is they made it so that it was a council decision.
(00:52:35):
Council had to approve road diets instead of it being a city administrative decision. And that I think sent a signal to staff that council is going to medal and it’s not a simply setting a vision. And I think, so what I want is I want council to set a clear vision and to that staff move quickly on implementing those things. Let’s make it policy. If we’re going to repave the street and it goes to a school or it has above a certain threshold of vehicle traffic today it’s a neighborhood street, but it’s a main neighborhood street. We need to make sure that it has sidewalks like a hundred percent. We need to make sure that it has protected infrastructure for cyclists. So I want that to be things like that to be a policy. I think I want it I the city to really quickly move on, not even necessarily rewriting the comprehensive land use plan, but let’s fix zoning.
(00:53:49):
And over the summer the city council made it fixed some problems with the R two, the duplex zoning where they fixed minimum lot size issues. And let’s take that a step further and fix minimum lot size for all residential or at least R one right now if you’re in the R one a residential that the minimum lot size is a half acre, which is obscene. I’m like morally obscene that we even have that. Let’s make it all minimum lot sizes in residential, regardless if you’re R one A or R one E, all minimum lot sizes, like 3000 square feet. Fix that. Fix setbacks, make it so people can do lot splits. Easier one, I guess. Does that answer your question Jess? I’m going to go out.
Jess (00:54:45):
I dunno. But what I enjoy, so this is another, let listeners let the record show for listeners at some points. Molly has been nodding so hard. I was worried that her chair was going to tip over. And what I’m saying is we’re a hard yes on everything that you’re talking about and a lot of it sounds really familiar. We, we’ve talked about process on here, talked about less about the specifics of zoning, but understanding that Ann Arbor’s approach to land use and land use strategy is so stale. So stale, yeah. And the process is broken.
Ben (00:55:19):
Something I say a lot is that, so Ann Arbor has less than half the dense city in Michigan is Hamtramck, which is I guess an exclave of Detroit technically because it’s almost completely surrounded by Detroit. It has over 10,000 people per square unit either kilometer or mile and I’m not, or acre, oh gosh. Anyway, it has over twice the density of Ann Arbor and it does not have tall buildings. It has small lots and duplexes. I think there’s a single five or six story building downtown. So thinking about what that means for Ann Arbor is we have this really suburban zoning. I don’t think people of the prezoning near downtown neighborhoods, when you think of Ann Arbor, but a lot of Ann Arbor is of Ann Arbor is like 1000 square foot ranch houses on Big lots. And that is not sustainable that we need to think of how we change that and how we bring the next a hundred thousand people into the city.
Molly (00:56:31):
Totally. Yeah. I mean that the suburban thing is something we, Jess and I have, we’ve been batting this around on the podcast and off the podcast for ages, but I grew up in an east coast suburb that was twice as dense as Ann Arbor is, and it was a suburb like 100%. Everything about it felt suburban, but it was so much denser than here. And so I have such suburban feelings about this city that I know people get upset about. And I think a goal should be to be less suburban and be more city-like. But I know that that’s uncomfortable for a lot of
Ben (00:57:08):
Folks. Oh, Justin,
Jess (00:57:18):
I’m pointing at Molly to ask the last question. Okay,
Molly (00:57:23):
So last question talked a lot today. We’ve talked about how you got informed and then got involved. Yeah. And what would you suggest to people who are at this moment where they’re trying to get more involved, they’re already getting more informed because they’re listening to us. But what would you suggest for getting more involved?
Jess (00:57:43):
And that’s for here and for really any community that’s struggling with these
Molly (00:57:47):
Questions.
Ben (00:57:48):
Yeah, yeah. I think
(00:57:51):
About your engage, I think about your vision for the community. And I don’t have specific metrics that I’m thinking about, but I’m thinking I want Ann Arbor to be more equitable and more sustainable and safer. So more housing equity, reduced CO2 emissions per capita and few safer, I mean fewer injuries. So really a lot of that I’m thinking is safer streets are the three things. And what gets us there, and for a lot of me or for a lot of that, it’s like for Ann Arbor, it’s more housing of both subsidized and market rate housing, letting, allowing more people to take part in the community. And that also helps with sustainability and it also helps with making, it’s a catalyst for making our streets safer. So that’s like, that’s in a nutshell, my vision. So I think about what you want for the community or think about what you need. If you don’t know what you want for the community, think about what you need to know and then think about your engagement. I think talking, reading your city council agendas, talking with your neighbors, trying to figure out what their concerns are, what their questions are. If you’re going to engage online, I think avoid Facebook as much as possible unless you’re trying to build an audience.
(00:59:19):
The golden age of the blog is Facebook next door. Twitter has sort of killed the blog a little bit, but if you’re in a news desert, there is something really valuable about having a static place for your writing to reside. So I think I, I’m biased. Let’s start a WordPress or a blogger and start writing. Be consistent. Think about how to find the people in your community online. I only follow Ann Arbor people or Ypsilanti people and two Lansing accounts on Twitter and a couple of Detroit accounts. But I be really intentional with your engagement. People talk about how toxic a place Twitter is. I follow under 200 people and it’s all people talking about local stuff. And that helps me keep my eyes on the prize and stay focused. So I think about how you want to engage locally, think about what you want for the community and what you need to know.
(01:00:29):
And then I think really looking back on 12 years of writing, about 12 years of previewing city council meetings, be consistent like that in and of itself. There’s sort of an aesthetic nature of practice there, but every two weeks I am writing a city council preview. And that snowballs over time to helping be part of this community where there are maybe hundreds of people, there are dozens of people engaging with the city council meeting actively online every meeting. And then there’s imagine hundreds of people reading, well, I know there’s at least one to 200 people read the city council preview every two weeks. And yeah, that’s something there that is something like the news doesn’t even review what’s going to happen at city council meeting, so it makes it easier for people to engage. So just be consistent and have a positive or say nice things about where you live.
Molly (01:01:41):
That’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor. Thank you so much, Ben, for being with us here today. This was awesome.
Ben (01:01:47):
Absolute pleasure.
Molly (01:01:48):
So you can come check out past episodes and transcripts at our website, ann arbor f.com, keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor efforts on Twitter at the A2 Council hashtag and on Facebook in the Ann Arbor Housing for all Facebook group that can be like your Facebook exception is to hang out in groups. And if you want to send us a few dollars on ko fi.com/ann Arbor to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it. We’re your co-hosts, Molly Kleinman and Jess Lita. And thanks to producer Scott Trudeau. Theme music is, I don’t know, by grapes. Get informed, then Get involved. It’s your city.