A proposed development with robust sustainability and affordability components, considered by many in our community to be a slam dunk for approval, hit a surprising road block this week. Join Jess and Molly for our first Civic Therapy session with Lisa Sauvé and Scott Trudeau: what happened to SouthTown, and why what happened points to some larger problems.
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Transcript
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 (00:00:11):
Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Ann Arbor AF. I’m Jess Letaw 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 whatever we are 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. Today we are kicking off our new miniseries, civic therapy conversations where we embrace the big feelings, often really mad, unpleasant, shitty feelings we have about public policy and public process. Today we’re talking with Lisa Sobe and Scott Trudeau about what the thought planning grounded in one particular issue, but pointing to some larger issues. So let’s get into it. I’m going to introduce Lisa and Scott and then I’m going to let Lisa kick off our conversation.
So Lisa uses she her pronouns. She’s she’s the principal c e o and co-founder of Syn ConnectKey, an interdisciplinary architecture studio in Ann Arbor and Detroit. She’s also the founder of Do Good Work, a 5 0 1 C three nonprofit whose mission is to support creatives and community by turning radical ideas into positive change within the built environment. A licensed architect in the state of Michigan, she currently serves as a planning commissioner for the city of Ann Arbor and teaches at Todman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. In this episode, we’re being sensitive to Lisa’s complicated role. Not only is she on the development and design team, she’s also a planning conversation in this conversation. She’s here in the former role, but I imagine that will find its way into how we talk about things. Just
Molly (00:02:00):
Clarifying real quick, she’s a planning commissioner for the
Jess (00:02:02):
City of Ann Arbor. I am a hundred percent sure that’s what I said and I am delighted to find out later what I actually said. Scott Trudeau uses he him pronouns. He is a former city planning and transportation commissioner and currently elected to the Ann Arbor District Library Board and current president. He works as chief technology Officer for an artist owned and run internet, internet based business and is an observer of all things. Sorry, I lost track. Observer of all things related to housing policy and transportation. So Lisa, why are we here?
Lisa (00:02:42):
We’re here because at 4:00 AM on Tuesday I dropped a tweet with my reactions to some planning commission decisions about a project and the start of that Twitter thread started with this. There is a level of unseriousness about our housing crisis. I cannot comprehend in Ann Arbor along four bus lines that reach all over the county, a proposed zoning that would be far less f a r than TC one zoning, all electric limited parking and it couldn’t get approved. Why are we even trying? So yeah, I, a lot of feels a lot either late at night or early in the morning depending on your definition of 4:00 AM about a project that we put forward that included both rezoning and a site plan for a series of parcels on the south side of town that transformed 10 small building parcels houses and few apartment, a couple apartment buildings into 216 units, full electric, no gas connection, mass timber building and while sitting on planning commission, I think I’ve heard over the years a lot of the wishlist and so on the design team I really pushed forward how to incorporate many of the things hoping for this to be a precedent project about how to include all these things.
And unfortunately it’s starting to set a different precedent in the community about why we should stay with the status quo. Well
Jess (00:04:25):
And not even set that precedent but continue it right? Yes, yes. We have a demonstrated history of either not supporting or not seriously supporting ambitious projects. And Scott, I think you live close to a couple of those.
Scott (00:04:41):
Yeah, I also watched this meeting and I was just having been a follower of planning commission for years and years that, you know, we’ve been hearing the things that planning commissioners have been asking for that are above and beyond the rules that we have in our books. We ask for passive house standards or other energy efficiency standards. We look for solar panels, we look for not steel frame construction buildings, the laundry list of things that we don’t require but we would like to see. And I expected this project that was coming with having almost all those boxes checked and asking for what was a pretty reasonable and straightforward rezoning just ran into a wall and ultimately got voted to have their recommendation vote postponed with a number of planning commissioners potentially threatening to vote no on the recommendation entirely for, and it very felt a lot like moving the goal post and it was a bit of a surprise, but I think I stayed around to give public comments at the end. Cause I was watching on Zoom and I was surprised at just how resistant some of the planning commissions commissioners were in moving this forward. And I described the message they were sending was that planning commission is really like this is in line with how planning commission is accurate for a long time with any project that has come to the table, they’re always willing to ask for more with no regard for the costs that imposes and on our ability to actually make urgent progress. So yeah, I mean I think the issue on the table,
Molly (00:06:34):
I’m going to take us on a real quick pause to define a couple of the key things that have come up so far just to help make sure we’re all on the same page. A lot of this has been vocabulary that I’ve learned in the last year. So mass timber, what, why, and what’s nice about it?
Lisa (00:06:51):
Yeah, so mass timber is not stick-built two by fours, right? Mass timber, heavy timber is things like glue lamb beams, so making full structural beams out of wood. And the more advanced technology that we’re seeing now is clt. So cross laminated timber, which is basically bulky structural plywood that acts as a floor. And so mass timber actually isn’t on our building code books. And so even part of this project is going to have to go through a variance or wait for new building code adoption to be able to be in compliance. So we are far ahead of where the state of Michigan and our city is, but we, I’ll just say why we love mass timber is we did carbon emission studies about the structure of this project versus concrete or steel projects and it has 50% less emissions relative to the fabrication of the building materials, the transportation costs to get them to the site and the construction of them on the site than steel or concrete. Along with that it also embodies that carbon. So those trees suck up all that carbon and it keeps it in there and doesn’t emit it. And so between the reduction in carbon emissions and the sequestration of carbon, that reduces the carbon footprint of this building by 80% against typical construction. So we’re really jazzed about mass timber and what it basically means is structural wood, not two by fours.
Molly (00:08:21):
I like that. Structural wood. It also, I mean mass timber sounds like Ann Arbor catnip, right? Like that, right? A building but make it wood right
Lisa (00:08:30):
Out of trees in tree city
Molly (00:08:33):
Trees. So then the other, but we
Lisa (00:08:35):
Cut down so it’s bad.
Molly (00:08:41):
Other thing I wanted to get a handle on before we really dive into this is about this idea of rezoning. We’ve talked a lot about zoning. I think we understand what zoning is generally, but what was the issue with changing the zoning and why did we need it and why
Jess (00:08:54):
Is that such a sticking point?
Lisa (00:08:56):
Yeah, so logic from the petitioner side is eight out of the 10 lots are nonconforming in the current R four C, which means they don’t have the right dimensions to meet the standards, which means they couldn’t do site planning, do any improvements on the site. So the sites as they stand now need to either be combined or rezoned regardless. Our comprehensive plan has a land use recommendation document and it says along Stimson specifically on these parcels, they are encouraged to be rezoned to mixed use our four C that they’re currently zoned as is strictly residential use. So as the design team we said we need to go to a mixed use district and there are several kind of categories of density and we decided C one ar, which is the campus mixed use residential district, made the most sense relative to proximity to the athletic campus of U of M and a straight shot upstate Street. So rezoning makes sense and it’s really the first step that needed to happen on these parcels to see any development move forward even if these pro buildings needed renovations or additions or things like that. So that’s what the purpose of rezoning is, is to better align the land use with our community goals from the comprehensive plan.
Jess (00:10:28):
Awesome. And when it comes to zoning, I just want to say the minute you ask that question, Molly, my feelings started getting big. That happens pretty much anytime somebody says the word zoning. So it’s not unique to this conversation, but we’re going to talk about what is this development, what is the issue, we’re going to talk about why it matters and then we’re going to talk about what the fuck. So when it comes to the rezoning, part of what comes along with that is different requirements. And one of the frustrations about this development not moving through as expected is that with the new requirements, as far as I can tell, y’all exceed every single one except for one floor area R ratio or F A r. You exceeded open space, you exceeded bike parking by a lot, you under exceeded on car parking. Thank you very much. I’m trying to remember what a couple of the other, oh, there was a setback requirement that you were consistent with? I think so can you talk a little bit about that? About what the requirements were and how this development addressed them specific to the rezoning?
Lisa (00:11:36):
So I think this is actually the gray area that I think we had issue with the discussion because what you’re talking about is the site plan and how our designed project, which is a site plan application hit all of those marks. I see
The rezoning to c1 AR has requirements about minimum lot size, minimum lot width and especially in the kind of intention of each zoning use. And so if we are just looking at the first motion that was brought on Tuesday, should we rezone and combine these parcels to C one AR not considering the site plan, right? It met all those marks, we believe it met all those marks. The comprehensive plan recommended it, it has proximity to the campus, it’s the appropriate density and use for those things and for that motion planning commission should have only been considering that they had their blinders onto the site plan plan and if that then met C one ar. And I think that’s the big issue that fires me up is we do not evaluate things in the same logical structure to the rigor of our policy and procedure. We have been, so from a planning commission role, I have been a part of rezoning TC one in several areas of the city.
We have not seen what site plans would look like if they include mass timber, if they have enough bike parking, we don’t know what a proposal might look like. A rezone TC one site could be a hundred percent hotel fueled by natural gas maximizing its parking. But we thought we felt comfortable rezoning those parcels anyway to TC one we felt comfortable with the TC one district. The issue here is after we act looked at C one AR in 2020 and said do we have issues with the zoning district and commission voted no, we’re happy with how it is now. The conversation on Tuesday was we have issue with the zoning district and instead of owning up to the issues of allowing short-term rentals in the zoning district, we are going to halt this project. Which in, well how I hear it then is you’re going to put a moratorium on rezoning anything into a commercial mixed use district that allows short term rentals. Because that is the only filter I can hear when I think about rezoning as the first motion that was brought up on Tuesday night. And Scott, this was part of your issue, right?
Scott (00:14:02):
And I think an important thing to understand about the rezoning, and Lisa did a great job separating the challenge of the question of whether the zoning district was appropriate and then the second question of then the site plan that they’re proposing was appropriate for that district. But one of the things that’s really important about rezoning is it’s a discretionary decision, which means that both the planning commission and ultimately city council have a lot of leeway. There’s a lot of gray area to make a judgment call about is this appropriate or is this not? And sorry. And so because of that, and going back to my business as usual statement describing how planning commission has acted planning, commissioning city council have for a long time used that discretionary opportunity to try to extract various different kinds of concessions from developers as a way to essentially bargain for more than what would actually require of developers.
And I think when we get to why, we can talk more about why that’s an issue further along in this conversation. But I think that is a big fundamental problem. So the planning commission just looked at this as yet another opportunity to push even harder to ask for even more before they were willing to grant the rezoning and to get a little bit even more into the weeds, this particular rezoning request is called a conditional rezoning request where the developer can offer conditions to the rezoning above and beyond what the zoning ordinance says they’re allowed to do. So they can say we’re going to limit to a shorter height than what it allows or we’re going to be further away from a lot line or whatever the conditions they’re offering. But the planning condition is not, and the city council are not legally allowed to ask for specific conditions, but at the table they have a lot of conversation about things they would like to see guaranteed by the conditional rezoning and talk about how they’re willing to vote or not vote. So they’re really skirt the line of whether they’re asking for things or not, which is again, I think part of the problem,
Lisa (00:16:25):
Oh,
Jess (00:16:25):
Go ahead
Lisa (00:16:25):
Lisa. I was going to say it’s subversive negotiation for commissioners to basically request to give things to buy their vote is I think the very clear way. Give us this and we will vote yes. And that’s neither right or legal, it feels
Jess (00:16:46):
I do. Molly, what were you going to say? No, I think Lisa explained it really well. No, I want to get into the big feelings. I think Lisa and Scott, you in particular and me kind of trailing along behind you have really big feelings about that and I about this project and about the issues implicated. And I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what those feelings are, take it back to kindergarten or eighth grade or whenever you started having the feeling that you have right now. Now I sound like my therapist, but what is the feeling and why are you having it?
Lisa (00:17:19):
Oh gosh. I mean, I’ll say my biggest feeling, and I said this in the Twitter, I am personally hurt. There were things that were questioned relative to this petition. We don’t believe this will actually meet our housing goals. And to hear that about a project that I put forward feels really disheartening and discredits my intentions to my own community that hurts, that personally hurts and to the hours and the time and the effort that I put into things like I’m offended for my team. Those were hurtful comments. Those were just mean. It was bullying to what we’re intended to do. And if it’s somebody and I feel like I’ve got a tough outer skin and I know the nuance of the system, I’ve been sitting at that table for five years. If I get dragged through and questioned on my intentions, then what is any other petitioner going to feel comfortable and welcome to propose projects.
And so when I say it’s a precedent project at this point, I’m going to ram it into every speed bump so that it smooths them out. I want to blow through every hurdle so that red tape for anybody following behind me doesn’t exist because I’ve been there. I’ve been the person with the loans and the no access point and it’s hard. And we need to make more pathways for people to see their projects through without having the privilege of knowing how to get a project through with so many resources. And having come from starting my career with zero, less than zero resources, I recognize where that starting point is and we need to be able to pull people up the ladder behind us. And I’m not seeing that happening. And that’s what this project for me, those big fields look like. We were pulling up the ladder, not pulling up people.
Scott (00:19:27):
From my end, I think I’m just so incredibly frustrated because I think we all say we want the same thing. We all want, we all recognize we are in a climate crisis and we are in a housing crisis. We have urgent problems problem. The way we have worked in the past has not helped us solve those problems. We need to change the way we’re working to make things happen. And this project came trying to break down those barriers and demonstrate that another path is possible and we fell right back on the old pattern. And it’s just like I kind of having watched this repeat itself over and over again, it’s incredibly frustrating and the risks we’re taking are not huge risks. The risks that outlined by the discussion at the table were, well, what if this project fails? We do the rezoning and this project fails.
Anything else that could be built by that rezoning could be built. And if that’s the risk we’re taking, it seems like we should be willing to take that risk to make it possible for something this to have a chance of happening. And the fact that we’re so afraid for any kind of failure to make it easier and possible to maybe break some of these barriers down it we’re just getting in our own way and we’ll never get there if this is how we continue to make decisions and just seeing it happen over and over again. And here. So here the planning commission, articulate all the things I care about. We need to get gas out of buildings, we need energy efficiency, we need housing where people can live without cars, on transit lines, your campus, campus. And then still we can delay it based on things that aren’t even on the rules that we have written out. And yeah, it’s frustrating. And I was just at a breaking point at this point
Jess (00:21:41):
To that point I, I’ve been trying to figure out are my feelings so big about this? And I’ll go back to something that Molly said last year. I think about an urgency gap where I feel like I’m looking at, I feel like I’m looking at our city experiencing right now an affordability crisis. I am looking at our country and our planet right now experiencing a climate crisis. And I, I wonder what the bike metaphor is for this, but I feel just driven by that urgency and when other people in my community do not see those as urgent or even really problems, my surface level response is anger. I, I’m close to fury about the fact that we are not recognizing the same crises and the feeling under that is fear because we’re not addressing these problems. We are continuing to harm people who are trying to live here and hanging on by a thread or are getting displaced out, which is a very real thing.
We are harming folks that are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis and we know we have all of the data to say that it’s low income folks and people of color and older folks and children who are disproportionately impacted by those things. And so what we’re saying is those of us who are comfortable are prioritizing our comfort over our neighbor’s safety. And I’m back into fury again right there. And there’s no fear under this one. I’m just mad. So yeah, it’s the urgency gap and the fact that we are willing to harm. Let’s just say that we are willing to harm people because we don’t want to be a little uncomfortable. That’s what it feels like. Oh man, my nervous system has just totally entered the jet
Molly (00:23:35):
And y’all are so much stronger on these topics than I am. And Jess, you I took the words out of my mouth. Urgency gap is really so much of what it comes down to me that Scott, you were laying out the things that planning identified as risks, but they’re not that like, oh no a hotel, we actually need more of those versus the known harms of the status quo. And so then of course there’s the specific things that I care about and the ways that this building touches on things like transportation because these are people who don’t have to drive into the city. And in fact many of these people will be living there without cars and they will be easy for them to ride bikes and they will be more people riding the buses, which will promote expansion of transit lines, which is what I want to see there. There are all of these things that each potential building, this can have so many positive knock on effects throughout all the systems beyond climate and housing specifically. And we keep saying no, we keep putting up these roadblocks and so that makes all the other fights harder also, and this is sort of an argument for why should I care about an apartment building if I’m a transit advocate or if I care about some of these other things and it’s because they’re all so connected and the impacts are real. Those are my feelings.
Lisa (00:25:05):
I’m just going to add to the thing that I’m really bummed we never got to talk about is part of this project is going to require water main replacement and utility updates. And since the beginning, one of the first people we called when we knew we were going to do this project was Avalon and the Ann Amber Housing Commission and we said we want to be good neighbors. And that’s literally the mission of the project. When we had to set a north star that began this project, we said, what is the aspiration of this project and it’s to be a good neighbors. And we said, what do you need? And we asked, do you need some adjacent parking? We hear for staff, can we work on giving you playground? What can we add to our project that we can do? You need a community space And really what we heard staff will figure out parking, it’s great, we really appreciate it.
We love public space and all these things. One, the p u d that they have on Henry went all electric and they couldn’t figure out why their utility bills were too high. Our design team went in pro bono, evaluated all of their systems, realized that they were zoned for a warmer climate and made recommendations about how to update them. The next thing that we did is we, because this is a higher increase intensity, we have to replace the water main. And so we ran calculations to say if the housing commission project on Stimson were to scale up to a similar size, what size water main would we have to have? Let’s make sure we engineer that size as the replacement. So they are not using their funds to do this background infrastructure that the funding for the housing commission goes towards supportive housing and programming and not water main upgrades.
And the same is true for D T E. And so when people also come and say this needs to have affordable units in it, well we have the affordable housing millage. This directly reduces the cost to affordable housing as our neighbors and increases the program. We even had conversations, if you guys renovate the project on Stimson, how can we offer the units so all of those residents can stay in the neighborhood when we redevelop that property, we’re open to those sorts of redevelopment negotiations. But those are the things we’re not able to talk about and are not visible in site plan petitions either. And it’s hard to prove. It’s all down to the numbers. There’s 18 affordable units and that’s all. Some community members vocalize as their priority when we see how nebulous some of these connections are, and it’s the nuance and it sucks and I love opportunities to talk about it like this, to unpack and say you can make an impact with market rate and big money and big projects at a local scale if you actually gave a fuck or you going to be a keyboard warrior,
Molly (00:28:03):
Right? So I think we’re, we were about to zoom out anyway and I’m taking it in a direction that we didn’t plan on, but this what else is new when you talk about that, I think about the way that developers capital D are demonized and lumped into one single bucket in the discourse loc in the city nationally. And it is happening from all sides, right? It’s not a clear left right balance. There’s a lot of progressive folks or self-identified progressive folks who believe that in fighting developers, they’re fighting the man. But the, it’s like you’re here, you’re like, you’re here. You are embedded in the community and you are not the only one who’s doing this. There’s another project in the neighborhood on Packard that’s like a local person who’s the, they’re putting a apartments on a parking lot. And I was talking to them about how there’s so many empty parking lots on Packard and he was like, yeah, one of those empty parking lots used to be my dad’s house and I want to put housing back there.
And this process and these conversations don’t account for the human connection and the human relationship. And I don’t mean to say this even to contrast with, oh those out of town developers are evil. I mean I’m sure some of them are. Listen, I worked for a luxury home builder that will not be named when I was at a temp right out of college. And I have some stories, but my point is that this, it makes it so easy to erase all of the nuance and all of the care that is possible even in this process that might generate some profit for someone someday
Lisa (00:29:58):
Mean this is what we vote, good design is good for business and that’s okay. We’re not trying to squeeze every dime out of a bad project is a lot less pennies. But if you actually invest in the community, everything has higher value and you get more out of you get what you put in. And I think, yeah, the narrative of the greedy developer, it’s like the greediest developer should have a long vision about improving this thing, this whole community to get their returns as well and the amount of risk, the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars in time that they have put in and seen no dime that this specifically this project could just completely collapse. They’re owed their dues, right? Risk reward and the developer is putting everything on the line. And I think this gets back to the equity thing too. When you have the money to put it on the line and you can get a big reward, great. But if you want to see somebody put their family savings into building an A D U or buying a parking lot and doing an infill thing and all we’re doing is saying you’re greedy, not, you’re risking everything for your community. That is a broken message. And that is an unsupportive community, not an unsupportive developer.
All right, now I’m charged up
Scott (00:31:26):
To bring it back to the specifics of this issue and then zoom it back out again is what happened. That planning commission wasn’t an outright denial, but it was a delay. And that’s another business as usual thing with planning commission is we can always delay it another month and another month and another month and another month because we need more information. We’re not sure, we’re not comfortable whether or not it’s related to things that are in the rules or just the vibes of the planning commission at the table. And tying it back to the whole idea of there are people really making big risks, trying to actually do something meaningful and good in the community and to completely be dismissive of the cost. That kind of delay imposes on the projects themselves, ignores all the damage that does because it means we’re raising anybody who wants to do something like this knows that’s what’s going to happen and they have to price it in. And when they do the math, a lot of projects that we might love to see happen don’t even show up at the table and we’re just callous about it. We’re like, oh, it’s just another worst best case scenario. Another month is tens of thousands of dollars for a project like this and then it doesn’t even count the damage of all the projects we lose. That never happened.
Lisa (00:32:50):
You got to add the days at project review too where the reviewers waited till the last day, didn’t get the review done on time. And so submitted a response that said, please provide more information because I procrastinated. And so this project is also 41 business days. 41 business days are 10 weeks behind the promised deadlines for each review. So 10 weeks plus a month of postponement. We’re delayed on both ends of this. The, there’s an invisible delay of this project as well from the staff side that is even harder to hold accountable.
Jess (00:33:26):
So that’s something that I was missing. I did what I could to read all of the public documents pertaining to this project before coming into this conversation. I didn’t hit all of them, but you guys know real heroes read reports. So I was trying to do my homework and when I was reading staff comments, something that I was missing was any timeline of submissions and responses. There’s nothing, there’s no dates, any correlation between this project and housing need. And I’m going to circle back to that in a second. Any kind of acknowledgement of the developer consequences of delay. And the reason that the city might want to be accountable for that is that time equals money. Every moment that you are not collecting rent or planning to collect rent on this project is an actual cost, which means it will be less affordable. And that is a consequence to the city that we have control over.
And there’s no acknowledgement of the environmental cost of delay if this goes out another construction season. We have really ambitious V M T vehicle mile travel coals that we’re trying to hit by 2030. We’ve only got seven years. A one year delay on that is huge. And I felt no accountability from staff about the consequences of delay and I want to bring that back. So we’re, we’re going to try to take our big feelings and shove them up towards the system. And one of the things that I’ve talked about before, and I’m going to drop a link to this in the show notes, is last year when I wrote my biannual policy wishlist, a couple of the things that I included, and I’m not even sure which order to do this in, but whatever one, we need a comprehensive housing plan. Right now the only housing goals that we have are from the Washtenaw County 2015 housing affordability and economic accessibility or economic equity report.
Again, that was county level. Again, that was eight years ago. And the only housing goal targets that it set were for the very great need for affordability. Great. Good. I’m glad we started there. But we have no other housing targets. We don’t, not for the city, not for any other level of affordability, not per ward, nothing. Because we don’t have those targets we can pretend like we are, okay, we can pretend like we don’t have a crisis because we are not counting A, we’re not counting what we’re creating and B, we’re not tracking what we’re backsliding on. And the other thing that’s relevant to this conversation that has got my big feelings going is that I think I’ve said this out loud before, I feel weird about saying this because this feels like such a give me and yet this is actually fairly controversial and I don’t totally understand why I think we need to overhaul the design review board right now.
It is a fairly arbitrary overview and editing of downtown projects. And what I’d love to see is how Portland, Portland, Oregon manages their design review board. I think they call it A D R C, A design review committee where they are actually focused on city processes and what they edit is not the buildings from the developer side or the builder side, but the development from the city administration side. They measure how long projects take, they measure how long it takes to get from permit to permit and they use that information to invite cost information from developers and then bring that to back to the administration and say, okay, how can we do better? So their benchmarks, affordability benchmarks are tied to city processes and I think that’s really important because the only way we can get to more affordable development is if our process is transparent, replicable, and what’s the other one?
I had another one in here. Predictable. Thank you. And predictable, unless you have those three things there. We cannot make development for affordable. It is not a wand that developers can waive, especially those that are providing any kind of sustainability component, any kind of affordability component like they are operating at a high risk and a lower margin as it is. So those are the two things that I think we need to get there. And I feel that urgency gap every day that we don’t have housing targets and we don’t have development targets and that is causing us problems back in the bucket.
Lisa (00:37:48):
Abolish the design review board. That’s it. I got asked to be on it and I was like, no thank you. Then I actually recommended Ellie Abras to join and she said, no thank you. And that’s how they ended up on plane commission with me. Nice. Cause I was an ly useless path. But I will say I had a conversation today with staff who do have spreadsheets that this project is actually precedent sending to map out every reviewer when they opened it, when they touched it, when they submitted it for every step of the process to really understand that. And part of my understanding is across all projects, especially on first review, they’re trying to understand at what day from the day it starts, review to when it’s due to reviewers touch this thing. And what they’re finding is that there’s a high percentage of reviewers that open it on the last few days, don’t have enough time to review.
So their response is please submit more information and they kick the can down the road so it then becomes a punt on their procrastination burdened on the project. And it’s not transparent. I think of those three things that’s not really transparent, there’s not an accountable body, there’s no public hearings. It’s just the business that happens in city hall. And the other point I want to make to it is that along those process lines I forwarded, and you can put it in the show notes I forwarded, I mapped out the whole timeline of those due dates and things that went along at the second review. So not the first review by the second review staff was like, we’d love to see you apply the downtown street guideline draft, not adopted draft into this and we can’t support it unless you do. So now staff is asking for burden that isn’t part of our UDC code.
They have preferred asks as well, so is that legal? You can’t get our staff recommendation unless you do this thing that we cannot require of you. Sounds pretty negotiating. As I came in the second review, I go and look up the setbacks because it wants 19 feet curb to front of building and the U D C was updated and republished in February. So here’s my side tangent rant. In February, the C1 AR got posted 10 foot setbacks. The last three versions, it was published with zero foot setbacks because in 2020 we had a conversation about C1 ar and what changes we might want to see. Staff made edits to the C1 AR to show what it would look like if we adopt those changes. They made a clerical error and didn’t revert it back. So for three years we had a policy change of zero foot setbacks and C one AR that no one caught, that no one had adopted through legislative process.
As a petitioner, I recognized this and I called it out to staff and I said, did you realize that this was it? Because we haven’t seen any staff comments that call this out. By the way, A P U D up the road also has this screen printed and put on their title sheet of zero foot setbacks. If it’s 10 foot setbacks, you need to notify any project that is pursuing C one AR because their assumptions and design of the project are going to need to be redesigned. I did that because that is a responsibility as planning commissioner, it put a burden as a petitioner, but it was like I could’ve been like, we just shouldn’t tell them it’s going to really screw. We got to move. We had to move the building, literally pick up and move the building, re-engineer grading things and all of it from that. It was just a staff air never mentioned. Definitely on Tuesday night we talked a lot about that 19 foot setback and that pedestrian street that was conditional to staff recommendation. Not once did they say that this error was part of the project that we had to pick up and notified them of
Scott (00:41:46):
And to define a term, the UDC that Lisa referred to as the Uniform Development Code, which is the name of the document that contains all of our zoning ordinances, which describe the different zoning districts and what the requirements are for each one.
Molly (00:42:08):
So I keep coming back to, sorry Jess, real quick. No, do your
Jess (00:42:11):
Thing.
Molly (00:42:12):
We need a lot more housing. Someone has to build it right? We it need someone to build the housing. Someone like the city doesn’t want to build all this housing. We need people who can do it. And the extent to which we’re alienating people, and I know that we’re focusing in on this one project, but I think one thing that’s clear is that it is exemplary of many. These problems are happening over and over again. This is happening to anyone who’s trying to build an Ann Arbor. We have so many past examples and that just means people aren’t going to try and build here. They’re going to build somewhere else and we’re just going to keep marketing the
Jess (00:42:55):
Housing. The problems aren’t endemic to this project. This project is highlighting systemic problems. So we don’t have systemic benchmarking for housing. We do not have accountability for moving sustainability goals or not hitting them. We’ve got gray area process happening at planning commission. We’ve got gray area process happening with staff and all of that accumulates to what I have heard from multiple sectors. Now, developers are architects and builders, probably realtors too. I just haven’t, you heard them use this phrase, the Ann Arbor factor, which is they know it’s going to add on. Some companies actually have a percent increase of the projected price of a project versus if they were to try to develop in Ypsilanti or Saline or Canton or something like that. They’re like, Nope, we know it’s going to take too long and we know things are going to change that we cannot predict. So we’re just going to assume that the project is going to cost X percent more than it would if we developed somewhere else. And that is systemic. An arb. Perfector is not the south town problem that is systemic.
Lisa (00:44:05):
I mean, you referenced a lot of neighborhoods. So I’m currently recusing myself from discussions about downtown premiums because I’m advising on a downtown project with a team from New York City. So the fact that New York City expert mean’s a firm that has designed all globally huge projects and they need a local expert to navigate the system and they understand the investment of people that know what’s going on here says big things about how fucked up this is. And I, I’ve conversations with ’em and explain the process and sure New York has its level of corruption of like, oh, we just buy off that bit. But here it’s like you can’t even map out a corrupt path even in the certainty of well, who do we just need to shake down that there’s uncertainty there. No, there, there’s no shakedowns. Like maybe I’m not shaking anybody down. I’m not bribing anybody. New York is speeding. These ideas exist. But that’s almost the point. There is no clear path. It is so opaque in its intended process. And then the process, that process that people have figured out to get there and only those that have deep enough pockets to figure out how to get there, continue to get there. And we get the same damn thing that
Jess (00:45:35):
You anticipated. Exactly what I was going to say, which is the folks that have figured out this design process, all we are going to get is what we’ve got folks. I I’ve heard community members criticize the fact that all new developments look the same. We need to prioritize a different process to get a different result. We cannot use what we’ve got to get something different. Interesting, worse, whatever. We will not get something different unless we do something different.
Molly (00:46:02):
I I love that. You can’t even bribe your way out of the Ann Arbor factor. We’re too, we’re much too moral and ethical to take bribes. You just can’t ever build anything problem solved. Yeah,
Lisa (00:46:17):
I like PUD is about the, it’s the bribery path at this point. Even PUDs are just planned unit
Jess (00:46:23):
Development.
Lisa (00:46:24):
Uncertain. Right? Again, PUDs are this, they open up almost a legal path for negotiation because it really is how do we measure public benefit to the exchange for a zoning district. But that is so risky because you could just get a coalition of people that say, we want the perfect project deliver us, and you keep hitting roadblock and roadblock and you never actually get there. Those goalposts keep moving. That is the measure of A P U D is the moving goalposts. It’s the highest risk. And people think it’s the clear path. I’ve been asked many times about this project, why didn’t you just do a P U D? And I was like, because we have the appropriate zoning, why would I do a P U D? The zoning exists about our process says we should use the zoning we have and I’m not going to lend, this is a murky process.
This is not straightforward. It seems complic. Everyone’s like, you have such a complicated project rezone site plan. It feels really easy to me. And the rezoning seems the selection of the zoning seems obvious, but I also refuse to do the path everyone else does, which is p u d, which confuses them. And maybe that’s where it feels complicated because they’re like, this is not the path we keep seeing. We’re just ready to negotiate. We can’t negotiate with you and they don’t know what to do. So they freeze and they postpone and that’s where we’re at.
Scott (00:48:03):
Yeah. Getting things done by approach we’ve seen is evidence that things are broken, that sites that are very normal, like rectangular parcels on normal streets, on flat ground with normal looking buildings on them shouldn’t require of the spoke zoning district. There’s nothing interesting or unique about that. And what a planned unit development is, a bespoke zoning, which is intended to really help make the kinds of projects that are either weird kinds of buildings that you don’t normally plan for, or really weird kinds of sites where you have different kinds of partnerships or geographic features or something. And none of that exists in where most of these beauties are going, but it’s the only path that developers have found if they’re willing to throw money at it to get away to an approval because then the city feels like they can negotiate parcel by parcel what’s going to happen. But that is the exact opposite of transparent and predictable, which is why Yeah,
Jess (00:49:12):
I, I’m, I resist negotiate because the process feels incredibly extractive. And I say that as a community member who wants every good benefit for our city, but I don’t think in the planning process, the city of Ann Arbor enters into negotiations with developers in good faith. I think most community processes, conversations, whatever are geared towards how much can I extract from you? And then there’s no consequence if the developer decides it’s not worth it. And if they resist or if they say, this doesn’t fit our proforma, our business plan or anything like that, then they immediately become the bad guy without Lisa, as you referenced or any nuance to the conversation. And I’m not saying we need to pay attention to the business model of every single developer. It’s not that. But what I’m saying is it’s not a negotiation, it’s a hostage situation. And I get that planning is precious. The buildings that we put forward are precious and we should take care with them. But we really aren’t having these good conversations, a good faith conversations. And I wonder what it would look like in our process and in our
Molly (00:50:27):
Language if we were to reorient towards that. That’s an I wonder.
Lisa (00:50:33):
I think part of it that still stings about Southtown too is we put in everything we thought was being asked for as a community. So we had nothing left to give and then we were asked for more, right? And like none of it was recognized, right? Donelle said, thanks for the bike hoops that the post and loop bike hoops that he kept ranting about. We put them in because I heard, and he made such good arguments about why those bike hoops. And it’s like I actually tied a little bow around every single element. The planning commissioners had smart ideas and want to see in projects. We put them all in to the point that we pushed the edge of the project and had nothing left to give. And then we spent Tuesday hearing about how they wanted us to give them more. And all it does is send a message that we should have designed less into it so that we had something in our back pocket, we emptied out our pockets, we were naked in front of them and they still asked for more. And it was just abusive. So
Molly (00:51:38):
Yeah. So what would it look like mean? So on the very short version is you would’ve gone to before the commission, they would’ve granted the conditional rezoning on a micro level. That’s what have happened in that situation. But trying to think about process accountability, which is clearly a big piece of this. Are there specific policies? Because one of the things that drives me up a wall is that other cities can build things. It’s like it is possible. This is not an unsolvable problem. And so I’m wondering if we know what the best practices are, not in terms of zoning reform, but in terms of process reform or whatever that is or looks like. Where do you wish you were doing this? Because they’re doing it right.
Lisa (00:52:30):
We made one good step that only rezonings go to city council, right? Everything else should be a check mark of does this site plan meet the zoning requirements, buy right, check the box, approve it. So we started bringing projects down a step in the approvals process because it’s not a legislative action to approve a site plan in a buy right project. City council shouldn’t have to review those. And so that, that’s a good first step in having shorter processes and things. A lot of things that I’m also pushing like site plan light every project, may it be a south town full block development with all the bells and whistles as sustainability or an addition of a 2000 square foot addition to small business. They all have to do the same level of engineering and have all of the checklist for site plan submission. And I think it really goes back to the equity question again of who can access the market to make change and be active developers in their own community.
And when there is this level of professional burden and expectation on all scales of projects, it only invites large projects. It only invites developers that can do parcel assembly to maximize the square footage and the development impact. It does not incentivize incremental development. And so I think that’s the big push that I keep preaching is we need, planning is about adaptive reuse because adaptive reuse is the most sustainable way forward and site plan light to give quicker paths and easier paths for incremental developers, which also might be novice developers. And so if we had a smaller team of reviewers, it creates less nebulous burden of passing the baton in staff. So those are my two.
Scott (00:54:28):
And I think in cases like this where there is an appropriate zoning district or a parcel that it suits suits, the location planning commission should really be bringing it to commission. They should be really following their charter of evaluating the zoning on its merits and then moving forward with the slight site plan review instead of trying to mash those two things together and be playing with the rule book that we have written and not trying to enforce rules that we don’t have written down in cases where we have a way forward because there’s a lot of things we can’t do and that are going to take some time that we could fix. It’s going to take some time to streamline the planning department. It’s going to take some time to write a comprehensive plan. It’s going to take some time to set housing goals. And I think those are all things we should do. But it doesn’t take any time to rezone a parcel, an appropriate zoning designation that is already on the books that planning commission has confirmed as an appropriate one that the comprehensive plan that we already have already recommends. So if planning commission just did its job, they’re supposed to do their job, it would also just help and it would make things more predictable and more transparent and make it easier for the non deep pocketed small parcel developers to have a chance and actually making something happen.
Lisa (00:55:58):
So maybe, I don’t know if we’re, we’ll, we’ll segment by ways that I’m trying outside of this project and outside of myself as a commissioner that I’m seeing these pain points and I want to talk more things like this, but I’m organizing this thing called House Party, which is like this, I don’t know, grassroots ground up idea. I don’t know what it is because it’s whatever the community decides it is soy. My design firm has just decided we will be the hub organizer, pro bono to collaborate with Do good work, which is my nonprofit, which can collect all of the support to help be a connect of people, ideas, conversations, and spaces to have them in over a week in September. So the 12th through the 17th. And so we need to continue the conversation, but we have to have a lot of different entry points too.
And I think that’s what gets back to you novices in invited non-experts. And your experiences are probably not even, probably are definitely more valuable to be heard. We need to hear the voices of those people that haven’t been able to enter this process and explain that. And we need, I have the fortune to be a voice for that. And we hear the same 30 voices. I want to open up a platform for no more voices and hopefully house Party is a really fun way that it doesn’t feel bureaucratic and lame and public comment that we can literally party around ideas to move housing forward.
Jess (00:57:34):
And full disclosure slash very excited, I am doing a panel for house party around local history, housing and race. And I feel like you can’t have that conversation enough in every single room about reckoning with Ann Arbor’s complicity, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit in enforcing class and racial segregation in enforcing displacement, especially economic displacement from folks who can’t afford to live in specific neighborhoods or even within the city. So I’m looking forward to house party too in terms of what I hope to see change and what I hope folks like anyone will do. I want those benchmarks. I feel like our city urgently needs a comprehensive housing plan. Comprehensive meaning all levels of, for affordability from the most subsidized housing up to market. We need to understand what are our production goals, annual maybe over the course of 10 or 20 years, what are our goals for housing production?
And then accountability. We need accountability. I’m going to say economic and environmental, but what it comes down to is justice. I feel like when we are not accountable to everyone trying to gauge engage the city, we are not behaving justly and we are in no way holding ourselves accountable to that. And I wish that we would. So in terms of folks helping make a comprehensive housing plan possible, helping us be more accountable to our justice aspirations, something that I’d like to note is that we’re moving towards comprehensive planning there. There’s going to be community engagement starting soon and developing a new comprehensive land use plan and idea for the city, which is the first, I think the first substantive one since 1998. Scott said, tell me if I’m missing anything. I know we’ve had updates to components, but in terms of a truly community-wide conversation about how we envision ourselves and what we see for ourselves in the future, this is the first one in 25 years, right? Yeah. So please be listening out for that. And please, we always say get informed. Get involved. Do your voice is important and badly needed.
Molly (01:00:04):
Is that the end? Are we done?
Jess (01:00:06):
I think we said all the things.
Molly (01:00:07):
We vented all our feelings. That’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor. F. Many thanks to our guests, Lisa Sobe and Scott Trudeau. Come check out past episodes and transcripts at our website, ann arbor f.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor Fers. We’re still on Twitter kind of, but it’s like, I don’t know, you don’t
Jess (01:00:35):
Have to find us. Just find the hashtag.
Molly (01:00:37):
Yeah. Yeah, the it’s a two council. Those conversations are still happening. And we’re also on Facebook in the Ann Arbor Housing for All Facebook group. And if you want to send us a few dollars@kofi.com slash ann Arbor AF to support with hosting, we always appreciate it. We are your co-hosts, Molly Kleinman and Jess Leeta. An extra thanks to Scott who is doing double duty today as our guest and our producer. Our theme music is, I don’t know, by grapes. Get informed and get involved. It’s your city.