In a continuation of our new miniseries, Civic Therapy, we are talking with Dan Adams about WTF, Library Lot.
Dan is a corporate attorney, local housing activist, and long-time bike person. He has lived in Ann Arbor since 2008 and grew up down the road in Dexter. In November 2022 he published a long piece in Damn Arbor about the current status of the Library Lot, how we got to this place, and what we should do to get out of it. He’s here today to talk about that piece and about the Library Lot, Prop A, and all the big mad feelings.
Referenced Articles
- Damn Arbor: Guest Opinion: Desolate and Uninviting—The Failure of 2018’s Proposal A and the Future of the Library Lot – Dan Adams
- Damn Arbor: Guest article: New Council, Who Dis? A Policy Wishlist – Jessica Letaw
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter and Facebook. And hey, if you wanted to ko-fi us a few dollars to help us with hosting, we wouldn’t say no.
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.
Molly (00:05):
Welcome to today’s episode of Ann Arbor af. I’m Molly Kleinman here with co-host Jess Leeta. We both use she her pronouns, Jess 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’re trying to accomplish, we can’t do it alone. So we’re right here with you learning about how to get informed so we can get involved. Today we’re continuing our new miniseries, civic therapy, civic
Jess (00:36):
Therapy
Molly (00:38):
Conversations where we embrace the big feelings we have about public policy and public process. Today we’re talking with Dan Adams about what the fuck library Lot grounded in one specific issue, but pointing to some larger issues. Dan is a corporate attorney, local housing activist and longtime bike person. He has lived in Ann Arbor since 2008 and grew up down the road in Dexter, so he’s been seeing all of this stuff play out here his whole life. In November of 2022, he published a long piece in Dan Arbor about the current status of the library law, how we got to this place and what we should do to get out of it. He’s here today to talk about that piece and about the library lot prope and all of the big mad feelings. All right, let’s get into it.
Jess (01:22):
All right, so I’m kicking this off because when we talk about big mad feelings, that’s basically my name tag for today. Jess is big mad and I’m also big hurt, and I want talk about that some today too. So I think, Dan, before we get into the actual article, I would love to ask you, because I, I’m really curious about the commonalities between your journey and mine. What got the library lot on your radar and then what went into the prep of writing that article? What was the process like?
Dan (01:57):
The library lot for me is, was something that I experienced as a voter and a resident in 2018, and I fully expected, I went to bed on the night of thinking that it was not, there was no chance that this was going to pass. And when I woke up and found that it had, and it was part of a broader election in which my ward became represented by Jeff Haner, I was shocked and disappointed and embarrassed, and I felt it personally because at the time I was largely disconnected from the local political scene. I wasn’t up to speed on the issues and I wasn’t paying attention and I wasn’t using my voice. So I felt like I had let a lot of people down and I felt like I’d let myself down. That as somebody with a law degree and the ability to participate in politics and engage the way I knew it could engage, I felt like it really fell on me and people like me who weren’t doing enough to be active in politics.
So a lot of the reason that I participate in housing politics now relates back to the library lot, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who report that in terms of writing the essay, I was motivated to write it because what we have on the library lot is an exceptionally stunning public policy failure. I can’t think of anything else quite like it. There are so many public policy problems that are complex than nuance and have all this history that needs to be unpacked and can’t be reduced to a single truth or narrative can’t be described as a success or a failure. The library lot is none of those things. It is not subjective. The failure was not unexpected. It was predicted in remarkably specific ways by leaders who spoke directly to the community about the inevitability of that failure. And then it happened more or less exactly the way that they predicted as bad public policy goes.
I think that’s kind of the equivalent of Wiley Coyote walking under the anvil and letting it smash them in, smash ’em in the head. It’s not there’s, we did an astonishingly stupid thing with smart people warning us it was a stupid thing and there hasn’t been a public reckoning with that. If you read the coverage of this issue in mli, I think you’d come to the opposite conclusion. You’d think we’re making progress. There was just an article that ran in March saying that we had made a big step forward, and I think that dovetails into the second reason I wanted to write it up. Of all the issues we grapple with in the city, there’s very few that are more warped by disinformation and deception and outright lies than this particular issue. And I say that with all due respect to the professional level liars who regularly call into council and planning to oppose housing projects.
This only happened four years ago. The facts of 2018 are fully accessible to anybody paying attention at that time. Anyone with a computer today can go back and watch the debate that Jess, you and Lynn Song participated in and see the things that were set at the time. But there is no public discussion right now, or at least there wasn’t in 2022 about the facts. The plain objective truth of this that wasn’t being twisted up into debatable propositions that relate to me are not debatable. So the point of the piece was to lay a marker down and show people, not tell people what was going on, what is going on, and give them access to the primary documents so they can reach their own conclusions about this site and how it should be used. And I think if people do that, they’ll reach the conclusion that I did that this is an insane public policy decision we made that needs to be reversed.
Jess (05:29):
Well, and you found the process of writing it somewhat surprising, I think. So for our listeners, Dan and I connected in September-ish of 2022. You had reached out, you said, Hey, I understand you were a little involved in that library lot thing. Can I run a couple of things by you? And at that point you’d been writing it since I think March, and you thought you were almost done and it was still another two mu. So I’m curious about how the process of it surprised you.
Dan (05:59):
There were two surprising things for me, big, really big surprises. The first surprise was this is now understood as arguably the frontline in Ann Arbor’s fight over development politics. And it’s a deeply contentious issue that politically a lot of people locally are sensitive about and sensitive to touch. Again, it’s the electric third rail that nobody really wants to grapple with. What was surprising to me was that when I dug into the documents and really, really one of the first documents I read that got me down the rabbit hole of doing the research and getting deeper into it was proposal that was made in 1964 by a local architect named Richard Ahern who proposed to city council in the sixties, Hey, let me buy the development rights for a client and put residential housing on this site. We think it’s a great place for professionals to live downtown.
And that from 1964, whenever that letter was sent all the way through maybe 2009, 2010, there was an unbroken through line of consensus that this site needed to be used for housing, that this was an appropriate, proper, productive place to put downtown professional housing, and we needed to do that. There were multiple city reports that were prepared along the way, a report in 1991 and then the Calthorpe report in 2006, and all of them recommended some combination of mixed use housing. This is where we need to activate our downtown. Seeing that and realizing that we had this Uncon uncontroversial plan that prop A in 2018, more or less stomped on and interrupted and broke, was surprising to me and got me deeper and deeper into the documents. It’s part of the reason it took nine months or whatever it did to get the thing written.
The other shocking thing to me was I had been thinking about the cost of a, in terms of the lost revenue from the sale. So we had an agreement with a developer in 2017 that would’ve brought in 10 million into the city, half of which was going to affordable housing, and the other half was going to be dedicated to paying down the debt from the why. Lot repurchase and I had been thinking about that as the primary cost of losing out on that sale and that development al among Al also with the housing units that we lost. And when I found, and Zach Ackerman former council member clued me into this a couple years ago, that 5 million in affordable housing money would’ve been paired with state and federal grant money that would’ve multiplied that $5 million by a 10 20 x multiply tax, 25 10. And Jennifer Hall with the Endever Housing Commission has said that she thinks that we would’ve netted 130 million from that 5 million and created 500 or so units of affordable housing in our city. And just I think you’ve pointed out recently that we’ve only created a hundred since 2015. So the damage that this did is it’s calculable, but it’s far beyond I think what’s been reported publicly or what’s in the public consciousness in terms of the amount of harm this is doing and it’s continuing to do to the city.
Molly (09:08):
I’m just going to take a quick moment because I think it’s probably fair to assume that almost all of our listeners know what we’re talking about, but just in case someone has just found us and they’re intrigued by the idea of civic therapy, very, very quick. Premarin, I’m going to give it because I know the least about all of it. So there’s this parking lot directly next to the downtown library in downtown Ann Arbor. It’s been city owned land for a long time. In the teens, the city decided to put in an underground parking deck that was built specifically to support a tall building on top of it with the idea that the city would sell the air rights and that we’d get a tall building and we’d get public space in front of the building and that there would be more housing and it would be a way to really activate that section of the city and meet one of our really big needs, which is more housing.
And then there were some people who were very opposed to the idea of housing, and I would argue that they’re really probably a pretty small minority here, but they were very loud and very effective and they put forward a charter amendment on the ballot which passed in 2018, and the charter amendment requires that land to stay in city control in perpet in perpetuity, which I think is Dan one of the key things you really hammered home in your piece and that it has to be a public commons. I forget the exact civic commons public space and city lawyers have interpreted that language to mean that can’t, we can’t build a building, we can’t build a tall housing building there under the language of this charter amendment and the people, oh, very key. The people who said we should make it a civic commons park kind of thing, spent a lot of time talking about how we would pay for it for priv with private funds. And that one of the big hangups throughout a through line through this is the demand from those people for more and more public funds to support this boondoggle. And it’s been several years. There’s still just a parking lot there. And now we’re talking about, okay, so what’s next? What can we do next? Is that basically the framing?
Jess (11:09):
Yeah. And for me, kind of the hinge point, maybe especially in conversation with you, Dan, is the 2018 vote. So Molly referred to a charter amendment for folks who are unfamiliar. Ann Arbor has a city charter. You can think of it as an analog to the US Constitution. So essentially they did a constitutional amendment to be able to say, and not just the site that every piece of publicly owned land on that block must remain publicly owned and if developed can only be developed as a civic commons. So they really kind of swung for the fences for not being able to change this decision once it was implemented. And part of the reason I think of it as a hinge point is because for that vote, I campaigned for it and I, I’d like to talk a little bit about how I got there because that process is why this is civic therapy, because I am coming into this with every single feeling I can imagine, except for, well, I was going to say except for pride.
I actually have some pride in some of the ways that our community showed up and some of the ways that I showed up. So let us flutter back to 2016 when shit was a circus everywhere and I was trying to figure out, I didn’t understand public discourse, I didn’t understand why we were having such extremist conversations online that seemed in my world to have no counterpart to conversations offline and also seemed kind of nebulous and hard to grab onto. And I was like, I don’t even know what to do. So in the wake of the 2016 election, I took all of my fear and anger and frustration and uncertainty into local politics. I’m like, all right, if nothing else, this is a scale that I can understand and engage. And because of my particular background in communications and architecture and urban history and urbanism curiosity and my values, that place is integral.
Where we are is a really important part of who we are. It’s been a value of mine for a really long time. Sustainability is one of my core values. And that for me, sort of burgeoning awareness of justice and how I as a white lady was going to navigate it well, that dovetailed into a real high focus on housing for me. And so I wanted to understand housing in Washtenaw County in general, and in Ann Arbor in particular, that led me to the library lot as something that was a concentration of housing, we would’ve gotten close to 400 units in one place. I was like, all right, that seems like an economy of scale for me to get into. I can advocate for 400 homes at the same time with the same energy that I advocate for. One, I gave my first public comment in 2017 in support of the library lot and found myself really confused that year.
That was a council election year. That was one of the last years that we did three year cycles on council elections and every single person up for reelection that year. One of the litmus test issues for their vote was did they support the library lot? And I thought it was doing our city a disservice to have so much civic attention and energy and often distorted information focused on this one single site. So the election that year was on August 3rd. On August 4th, I founded what was then called Ann Arbor mbi, what’s now Ann Arbor Housing for All. Because I felt a desperate push for us to bring conversations about development into more public discourse and not walled behind at the point, at that time, mlife comments or private walls. And I also wanted us to have better information. I wanted us to have access to better information and relying on MLive or relying on individuals to provide a thoughtful presentation of things that Dan mentioned, the Calthorpe report and Richard Ahorns thing, Ahern’s thing in the 1991 report that suggested the sale of certain city lots in order to bring in revenue to be able to build things like affordable housing.
I just wanted us to be able to have a better conversation. So that was 28 20 17, and in 2018, the library lot was put on the ballot as this charter amendment. And I was like, at that point I’d sunk almost a year and a half into understanding the issue and understanding that housing in general is contentious in a way that I had no way to predict. I thought I was going to be coming into some interesting disagreements. And what I came into was bruising vitriolic, often abusive disagreements where people didn’t disagree with my ideas, they accused me of a variety of things. My both favorite and least favorite is when I was accused of being a Koch brothers show, what the fuck does that even mean in the context of Ann Arbor? Right? That can’t even hurt my feelings because it’s so specious, but also how dare you? And so yeah, I participated in the 2018 campaign not having done any kind of campaigning before and we did lose and it was a heartbreaker. And since then I mostly have not, my advocacy has rarely focused on single sites. I try to work more at the systemic scale, partly because again, it’s an economy of scale of energy for me in terms of advocacy, but also I don’t really want to touch that again. That still resonates. Yeah,
Dan (16:45):
I think the concept that you brought up that there’s no way for someone to be authentically enraged by housing politics in Ann Arbor, that you must be a Koch brothers shill, or in my case, it’s regularly thrown back at me while you’re a corporate attorney. You know, must have some developer friends or real estate friends. And the answer’s no, I don’t. Well, I mean I do, but I bought a house here in 2012. It’s not more complicated than that. I struggled to buy a house here in 2012 making a corporate attorney’s salary and you start asking yourself questions about what kind of community you want to live in. Is that fair? Is that right? Why does a 1200 square foot cape cod on the north side of town cost what my house costs to buy and shouldn’t cost that to buy? And then you start looking around at other communities nationally, particularly other university towns like Madison Charlottesville, and they’re tackling the same problems.
And you start seeing the commonalities there and it pulls you in. And again, the library lot, the in 2018 was a big catalyzing event at getting me involved. And I’m not doing this cause I have developer friends, I’m doing this because my house shouldn’t cost what costs and it impacts, it’s the straw that stirs the drink in this town. Everything gets harder because we can’t fix our housing problem. And the grad student strikes a great example of that. It’s in the news now and the cost of living in this town is not sustainable and it’s creating all these ripple effects and policy problems downstream for everybody else. We’ve got to tackle it
Jess (18:18):
Downstream, being neighboring communities, downstream being our kids downstream in a lot of different downstream, environmentally in terms of the 90,000 people that commute into this town every day. And because we live in Michigan and we’re allergic to anything that isn’t cars, most of them drive. So yeah, a lot of downstream effects. I think one of the things that surprised me about the process of the library lot and that has unfortunately become less surprising but no less disappointing, is that conversations around housing do get personal really quickly. And in a way I get that right. We are literally talking about changes in people’s backyards, but I do not understand the devolution to meanness that we stoop to. Why can’t we just say I’m nervous about a big building that abuts my backyard, which is rarely what we’re actually talking about, but let’s just say if we’re going to say it, I’m nervous about a big building on the other side of the fence from my house, and why do we have to turn it into personal attack? Why does the fact that you’re a corporate attorney and who your friends might be, I just don’t understand why that’s pulled into play. Are they doing that because there’s no real argument there, is there? No, they’re there. And so there has to be, it must be something wrong with you because I can’t find the fault with your idea what is going on. I mean,
Molly (19:45):
I see them do this too. If anyone affiliated with the university, if you work for the university, you don’t have a valid opinion about the city of Ann Arbor. You’re not from here. Even if you are from here, there are lots of people from here who work at the U, but that’s another association that they try to use to delegitimize people’s opinions about the direction the city should go. So I think it’s like it’s bigger than just, oh, they’ll, whatever you do, they will find a reason why you should not be able to have a voice in these discussions that only they should be able to have a voice.
Jess (20:18):
Yeah, there’s definitely a real Ann Arbor, and I’m putting this in quotes, a real Ann Arbor, it feels like a nativist tone that runs through here. Who gets to contribute to these conversations whose voices really matter? It’s people who were born here or who have been here since the 1960s or 1984 or whatever date that you got here and decided that things shouldn’t change after. That is also a tone that’s running through our discourse of who gets to contribute. And like you said, it’s the chains are always being moved about who that is. I am a renter if Ann Arbor purports to support folks who are vulnerable and typically that’s renters over homeowners, but I get invalidated for different reasons. We’re all invalidated for different reasons. And that’s really, it’s frustrating too. And I think part of the reason that this is civic therapy for me, I, so I wasn’t even, was I mad about the vote outcome?
Probably what stays with me is that I was so disappointed in my city and when I looked closer at the numbers, we barely lost the homeowners. In fact, I’m not sure that we did, but who we lost and drove were the students. And Dan, you talked earlier about I really reproached myself for not getting more involved. Somebody like me should be somebody who is participating and contributing because I have the bandwidth. I went to school here and I assumed I don’t, what did I assume? I assumed that I didn’t know how to make the issue legible to students and I wasn’t sure how to have those conversations anyway. And there were a couple of departmental debates and some people put up signs on the telephone poles, but for the most part, how to reach students felt really opaque to me. And so just speaking for me personally, I didn’t try and the result of the election for me really reproached me for not having made that effort.
Dan (22:13):
There’s very few examples I think of this tendency for housing to create a lot of nastiness. Then the way that, I’ll use a specific example here that Chris Taylor is discussed in these conversations. I’ve met Mayor Taylor a few times and I find him unfailingly polite almost to a fault, almost to a fault that think people will say things to him during council council meetings that if I were in his shoes I would respond to and he usually grinds his teeth and or smiles through it all. And yet going back and the library lot again is my first exposure to this. He is regularly cast as this villain who is pulling the strings on me. One of his puppets, I’m one of his minions and the ballot caption, so the language that went on, the ballot that passed was, and I robbing his racing as they say.
I understand that they put that language together to be deceptive in a way that’s permitted by the law about what they were proposing and what it would require. And by deceptive, I mean it omitted any mention of funding. It just says, we’re going to do this thing. We’re going to put an urban park and civic center commons on this site and that’s the only permissible use of it. It made no mention of money, of course it was going to require a lot of it. And the opponents of the project like Mayor Taylor, Lynn Song, Jen I or other folks that were involved in that election cycle, Jess swell, were trying to make it clear to the public, no, this is going to require a lot of money. And as part of that process, city council voted to put a caption on the ballot that explained in a way that the court of appeals ultimately found to be impermissible because it was argumentative, it wasn’t objective, but tried to explain to voters by passing this, you’re going to spike a land deal.
We have a sale agreement to sell this that’s going to bring in these amenities and this amount of money and that’s going to be over and we’re going to have all these costs. It was trying to lay all that out because the language on the ballot didn’t do any of that. And that’s really important for people to understand when they walked into the ballot box and it wasn’t being communicated. Now again, that language was struck down by the court of appeals. It was not struck down, it was found acceptable by the trial court. Sometimes that happens. But if you go and engage on this topic now on social media or in other forums, that caption decision will be characterized by multi-housing activists in the community as evidence of this nefarious conspiracy that is going on swirling constantly around them with Chris Taylor at the center of it. And it’s preposterous, right? He was engaged in a political fight over an issue he cared about and he made an effort to explain to voters some of the facts were omitted from the ballot language that in my opinion was as deceptive or more so than the caption. And he’s regularly demonized for that. And Cartoonishly characterized,
Jess (25:18):
And I’m going to say I am also going to take some personal exception to some of the accusations that are allowed Mayor, mayor Taylor’s Way, and I’m specifically going to call it out as misogynist because what they’re saying is that the people around Mayor Taylor are not capable of having their own thoughts, opinions, and motivations. And most of us who campaigned against Prop A were women. The two people on that debate, dais for the League of Women Voters were me and current council member Lynn Song, the list of people that you just read off, all women, most of us around this issue are none there, Taylor and our women. And every single time you devalue our participation, what you’re saying is I don’t believe that you as a woman are capable of participating in this without somebody else’s a man’s opinions and energy kind of driving how you behave in this.
And that is really frustrating. The Taylor Ette thing where folks kind of mock p I don’t know if this is specific to the council members around Mayor Taylor just as supporting dancing cast members to the Mayor Taylor Show. Honestly, all due respect to Mayor Taylor, maybe minimize your focus on him and his actions and his whatever. And this isn’t to you Dan, this is like to Ann Arbor. Pay attention to the women around, listen to what we’re saying and what we’re doing and engage us in those criticisms and stop this 1950 Sherrod of, I’m sorry, you can’t act without your husband’s words in your mouth. It’s just so it’s not a good look for y’all.
Molly (26:58):
Yeah, Dan, you were starting to get at this point that I feel like was really key. No, no, no. This is, we’re having feelings all over the place. That’s the point. But you got, you’re starting to get at this here, and you talked about it a fair bit in your essay, which was that there was the cost, the direct lost things we lost when Prope passed. So we lost the $10,000 that the city was going to get. We lost the 400 units of housing including affordable housing, but there’s also the costs of what it would take to turn this into some magical mystical urban park on top of a parking structure. And that that’s what the ballot language really obscured. And that’s now four and a half years later the proponents of this magical park continue to obscure, but now they’re, it’s just lies in a different way, right? About who was supposed to pay for this park and where that money was supposed to come from.
Dan (27:53):
And that’s got lots of feelings about this. It is just so unserious to suggest after four years that there’s any pathway for Library Green. The folks that organized the ballot initiative in 2017 and 18, the ones who promised the public over and over and over again that they would conduct private fundraising and raised serious money to put together the project that they’d gotten on the ballot and passed. It is unserious at this point to say that they are organizationally capable of following through on their promises to the community and raising the money to get this done. And let me sharpen the point they have as of last month or the month prior after four years of fundraising. So they had set a goal of we’re going to have this park ready, buy the bicentennial bicentennial is next year 2024 this past in 2018. So that’s roughly six years of runway fundraising runway.
Now they’ve raised $70,000 as of maybe March or April. That’s the amount that they claimed during a meeting in October that they had. So they made no progress that we know about from October to say March or so, just from city documents that I pulled in connection with writing the article. We know that Liberty Plaza next door is about 15 grand or so a year to maintain. That’s just upkeep. So the amount of money that they’ve raised in four years is roughly adequate to just maintain the urban plaza that’s next door. It is nowhere near it. I don’t have to say that it’s nowhere near what we’re going to need to build what they want to build. It was only after four years, was it barely enough with a significant throw in from the city of $40,000 to start the design process. So they’re going to blow their deadline in 2024.
They’re going to blow it badly. But what I want to get at here is organizationally they’ve demonstrated incompetence and dysfunction that is disqualifying. They have not demonstrated that after four years that they are capable of doing what they said they were going to do. There’s no amount of time we could give them that would allow them to come to the table with money that would at least make a prima fascia case that this is viable. It is not viable. We know that now there’s been no engineering study that I’m aware of that is comprehensively professionally evaluated the feasibility of what they want to do. That may seem like a crazy thing, folks listening may think there’s no way that’s true. It’s true. The only study that I could find that I’m aware of is not a study at all. The D D A in 2018, probably in response to a MLI inquiry asked their engineering consultant, I don’t know who it was, I don’t remember to opine on the feasibility of building a urban plaza on top of the subterranean parking deck.
And they got an email back. They didn’t get a report, they didn’t get commission the study. They got an email back that listed off some problems, some challenges that have to be overcome. Those include removing the entire top of the deck and the underlying aggregate layer, the repair or replacement of the deck’s, waterproofing and the complete redesign of the structures, stormwater management systems. And even then, we don’t know whether the way the deck was designed to support load will work with wet dirt and trees and the other stuff that we’re probably going to want to put on top of it other and just other key other network would avoided the warranty. That is the key part. And that’s the part that even people, even folks who are local leaders who are, I’ve talked to some of the folks on council and brought this up and they weren’t aware of that fact.
We have a warranty on that deck as part of its construction. That deck costs 50 million to build. So the changes we’re talking about, even if they can be done in a way that will support the project we might want to build, will require us to void the warranty on a 50 million capital investment. If you got a time machine went back in time and you were able to sit down in a room with people that were thinking about making this decision to do this thing that they claim to want to do, and you pointed that out, that alone would be a fatal stopping point. You would not voluntarily choose to proceed with this project without having that engineering study done and some assurances that it could be done without cracking the deck. Because if that happens in connection with the project, let’s imagine that library green wins the Powerball and runs into a huge amount of money and starts the work. What if they break the deck? Right? We’re not talking about that. And very few people have thought about it and when you bring it up to people they’re like, well, yeah, that’s a big problem. It’s, it’s a huge problem.
Molly (32:42):
It was built to support a tall building and it’s easy to think, oh, well a tall building is much bigger than a little park, so why wouldn’t it be able to hold a little park? But dirt and trees are very, very different from concrete and girders and a structure that’s been designed to support the concrete and girders above it. I mean the amount of magical thinking that has come from that side is really just shocking to me. I want to come back again to cost because there’s one more piece of this that I think is so important and you talked about how this would be a scandal. This should be a scandal. So there’s the opportunity cost, there’s the potential cost of the magical park and there’s also how much the city has invent invested since 2018 to support this completely implausible vision, right?
Dan (33:40):
This is another one of these stubborn pieces of anti-development folk wisdom in this town that the city hasn’t supported this project. It actually has been the single largest supporter of this project in terms of just raw budget, outlays, staff support and other types of support. When I talked to people in preparation for the article, lots of people said to me, you have no idea how much staff time this is chewed up. You have absolutely no idea and there’s no accounting of that. But in three consecutive budget years, we allocated in the 2020 budget, 175 grand, 20 grand the following year and $40,000 after that. And that was the design outlay. They’ve raised the private sector library. Green has raised 70 by comparison. The city has supported this project, has been the largest supporter of this project. And I don’t mean to go backwards, but I don’t want to miss the point when we’re talking about the structure of that deck.
Very often people who oppose the Library Green Project who oppose proposal layer are cast as anti park anti-urban park. There is no way to build a building on some portion of the site that is not insignificant. And I don’t know the exact amount of square feet, but I’ve seen estimates of 8,000, 10,000. I think the park that core spaces was going to build, the splash pad that they were going to build and maintain on their own dime was by contract required to be 10,000 to 12,000 square feet. That portion of the deck is not buildable. It wasn’t designed to support a building, can’t be made to support a building. There’s no building we could put on that site that would go on top of that space. And there’s no scenario I can imagine where a development wouldn’t be coupled with some type of urban plaza, splash pad, public park. I want us to put this back on the ballot and start the process of reversing this because I want a park on that site. And I know because if you look at these facts close enough, anyone will come to the conclusion that we will not get that on any reasonable timeline the longer we sit here and tread water with this language in the charter.
Molly (35:43):
So that really gets us to the next sort of piece of what we wanted to talk about with you, which is the what’s the, what’s next on this. And one question that I have before, I think we dive into the specifics of the what next is this question that I have for both of you. You both have stated publicly pretty strongly that we need to amend or repeal this charter amendment and that it’s key to our broader housing goals. And I would love to hear you both talk a bit more about why this one site and this one amendment feels so key to the bigger picture.
Dan (36:21):
My own perspective on this, beyond the fact of its location and beyond the fact of the investment we’ve made in reinforcing the deck, again, 15 million to put something here like what I’m proposing we build, when I walk around in Ann Arbor, there are these dead zones that box pedestrian traffic in and change the way our city works in ways that are very insidious and that a lot of people that I didn’t start thinking about until somebody pointed it out to me and they pointed it out to me in connection with the block on Main Street, that is where the chase building is. So that’s on the north side of Maine once you get past where the old Mongolian barbecue used to be, and it’s on the west side, east side of the street. And there’s a reason why the business is I think on the north side of that dead zone struggle.
And it’s because we have this block of nothing there, no housing, it’s blank dead bank space. And the same effect is created as you walk up towards campus from Main Street. When you get to the post office and the library block, which isn’t activated with commercial activity, there’s nobody living there. There’s a few businesses on that side of the street and then of course there’s the library, but it’s just extremely poorly activated for several blocks and it operates as this psychological, I don’t have any reason to go any farther because it’s going to take me several blocks to get to something I want to see. So you don’t, and to the extent that Division Street still separates one side of the city from the other, part of the reason for that is we haven’t activated that site and we need to,
Jess (37:59):
That’s a really good question, Molly, about why this site and this amendment matter to our overall housing goals. I think for me, it comes down in part to something that Dan mentioned in passing earlier that I think is really important, which is that we had a contract on this site. We had a signed contract, not completed, not completely executed contract, but a signed contract for the development of the site in 2017 that the 2018 Charter Amendment voided essentially. And what we did with that action was we told developers that the city of Ann Arbor is an unreliable partner and the city in any transaction and the city of Ann Arbor as a place is a dangerous place to develop. And that’s not extrapolation. We know developers have not ventured despite the fact that we have developer, do I want to call it developer friendly zoning, I’ll call it density friendly zoning in the downtown, in the form of our D one and D two zoning designations in spite of the fact that we’ve made some strides towards making our development process more predictable, more transparent, more reliable. The only multifamily development that we’re seeing downtown is along Huron and up south u i e student heavy and transit corridors because developers are extremely gun shy about putting any kind of proposal in front of the Ann Arbor voters that have told them, you are extremely unwelcome here and it’s going to get ugly when you come.
The devastation that this is causing. And it’s hard to calculate the lack of a benefit, but we cannot fulfill our sustainability or our vision zero goals without having dense housing downtown and we cannot fulfill our housing goals. And we don’t even know what all of those are, but just the affordability goals that we set almost a decade ago and we’re making so little progress on that as to say none. And we did pass an affordable housing millage in 2020, that’s meaningful dollars. Multiple projects are underway and will likely be built in this decade. It’s 2023 and I feel a little bit bad to say then maybe be built this decade hopefully. But that’s the reality of where we’re at. But Ann Arbor voters said that they were unserious about our housing goals, our sustainability goals, and our vision zero goals when they said, we do not want housing downtown.
And I think it is incumbent upon us and our elected officials to demonstrate that we are serious about those goals. We don’t take, just take them seriously, we take them urgently. And so for me, the only real solution is a repeal. I know Daniel, you and I may talk a little bit about the repeal and amendment nuance and that’s totally fine, but for me, the only responsible thing to do is to take that amendment out of the charter and then what we decide to do is whatever we decide to do. But I don’t think we will have any developer partners taking us seriously, especially without government intervention as a developer partner or something else like that, some heavy subsidy. I don’t think we’re going to see them come back until we see some movement on that lot.
Dan (41:30):
No, that’s a great point. People often say these are out of town developers coming in here and swindling us and putting up these buildings to make a buck. Part of the reason why only sophisticated out of town large money center firms can operate in this housing market is the complexity of our planning process, the complexity of getting a project through it all and then only to have this risk waiting at the end. You make it all the way through, you go through all of that work, that design, and that all takes money and the firms incur opportunity costs because they’re not operating in a market that’s more simple to build. So they’ve gone all that way. And then to have residents come along and change the charter to essentially create the circumstances of the city’s breach of a purchase agreement, and I didn’t touch on this that much in the article, but the city could have gotten sued and it looked for a minute they were going to get sued, and it may have only been because the developer of core spaces might have wanted to participate in the market again that they didn’t. But that was another risk we ran. It was reckless, but again, it did, you’re right, it did create this additional, do we really want to build something ambitious in Ann Arbor? Why would we do that?
Molly (42:48):
Okay, so let’s talk about how we fix it. Time machine. Well, aside from a time machine, this is going to take fixing. It is going to take time. We’re tied ourselves into terrible knots and it’s going to take a while to unravel them. But Dan, you talked about the two plausible options for truly fixing this would be either to amend the charter amendment or to get rid of it entirely. Could you just lay those out, what those options might look like out really quickly, and then maybe you two can go head to head about one versus the other.
Dan (43:23):
For the record, I agree as an attorney, as somebody who cares about simplicity and having the loss be clearly to what our values are, if I could wipe this off the books, if I were making a decision on what to put on the ballot and I had the time to organize around it and go door to door, I would be pushing for justice position. I want this out of the charter. It doesn’t have any business being in the charter. The reason that I suggested amendment, and maybe backing up just a second, some people talk about, well, why can’t we find a way to thread the needle with the language in the charter to do something we want to do in that site? Again, I think that just comes back to litigation risk. If you’re talking about, for example, we argue a new library on that site would be a public park and a civic center commons. That’s a bet you’re making with somebody else’s political capital and somebody else’s actual capital. In this case, the downtown library which tried and didn’t get a bond passed about a decade ago to do a new library building. Why would they add another risk on top of that? They would theoretically, procedurally they could get almost to groundbreaking and maybe into groundbreaking and then get sued. I mean, why would they do that? It’s going to be complex enough to get that done.
Jess (44:33):
Again, I would just like to encourage us to give people credit. The library has had access to the exact same public information that the rest of us had and they have run very quickly not in the direction of building on that lot. So can we just take that as information that maybe they haven’t missed, something that we should just tell them they should build there because they haven’t thought of it before.
Dan (44:53):
Right, exactly. So I’ve only proposed an amendment because it feels like a more politically viable path. The difference with an amendment is that it gets back to the caption that I mentioned earlier in the episode that I want, if I have a choice to have language on the ballot that commits the city to politically consensus policy priorities with the revenue from any sailor or lease of the development rights, and an amendment allows me to do that without adding language as part of a caption or other something else that might get challenged and thrown out. I can and have written up draft amendment language that says, as part of any sale or lease of the error rights, 50% of the proceeds go to affordable housing and 50% go to pay down debt. And any development must include a developer funded public plaza that’s maintained and includes an easement that gives the public access rights the same way that they enjoy with other public parks. It’s just a political calculation on my part. But I agree with Jess.
Jess (46:02):
I really agree with me too. And here, what I keep in mind is a hundred years from now, making a political calculation a hundred years from now is foolish. But I am thinking from the human perspective of a hundred years from now fo and folks are going to look back and first of all, I think they’re going to be really confused about why this was such a problem for 15 years in the first place. From 29, 2009, approximately when the rumbling started to 2024 or five or whenever we fix this, they’re going to be like, what was that anomaly? But I don’t want them to look back with the handicap that they still have a charter amendment on the books that they have to navigate around for whatever changes they need to make in that site. I think of it as a hundred years. I recently finished Robin Wakim’s braiding Sweetgrass, which now that is my new personality.
That book was so amazing. But she talks about the indigenous philosophy of thinking about things in terms of seven generations, seven generations before and seven generations after, and how the decisions that you make and the actions that you take should fold both of those into account. And so I feel like it’s not just my feelings about the a hundred years. I feel like there’s some kind of good community wisdom behind the long game. I feel like I cannot in good conscience and with integrity towards the efforts that I put towards the 2018 campaign in the first place, and everything that went before towards cultivating better community conversation around better information. And the reason that I cared about cultivating community conversation is because I wanted better community relationships regardless of outcome. I wouldn’t have felt nearly so bad about the 2018 outcome if I felt like we had been having meaningful discourse the whole time.
Instead, we had meaningful discourse, almost never. So nothing about it felt great, but I still want that to be true. And so for me to feel like I am in meaningful connection with myself then, and hopefully myself and all of our future selves, I can’t short walk this. And the other reason that I really push back against that, it’s a two-part reason, is one, this whole thing is inside baseball. And so the minute we put this on the ballot, both sides are going to be fighting a real uphill battle on should we or shouldn’t we pass a repeal or pass an amendment and no matter what the status quo has, by far the home field advantage, right? It’s going to be so much easier to get to know than it is to yes. And another reason that I deeply resist an amendment over in a repeal is that I feel that that is conciliatory and working towards the comfort of comfortable affluent people, largely comfortable, affluent white people. And I don’t make it a policy of doing that in any other aspect of my life, and I wouldn’t do it for this. Having said that, if the only thing that is available to vote for is an amendment, I will do it and I will smash that button so hard. It’s not even a button. I will smash that button so hard, something will break. But I hope that we have the opportunity to repeal this and start fresh on this site.
Dan (49:20):
The concept you just mentioned about community conversation really resonated with me. And that’s one of the things I think is true about this issue right now is that regardless of your point of view on outcomes, the status quo is the worst situation we can be in. We have this parking lot that we don’t need, that the library can’t use. It’s currently a underused site, and we’re wasting this resource. Now, I think putting a park on there is irresponsible, but by not putting something on the ballot, which will prompt it doesn’t matter what it is, could be amendment, could be repeal, could be something else, could even be something like a special millage, but something that requires both sides to come to the table and have the debate that I think we didn’t have in 2018, because again, the dishonest way, dishonest or irresponsible way, that Library Green was behaving in the way that it proposed the issue.
There really wasn’t a fulsome discussion around, is this something we want to pay for? They dodged that question in 2018, and I think they won’t be able to do that. Now, we’re four years past that, and anything that goes on the ballot will prompt the discussion around that specific issue. Is this something, is this a priority for us or not? What’s our priority for the site? What do we want to do with the site? And right now, when you have the debate with folks who are, I want to follow through with the proposal, a vision for the library lot, which is some privately funded or publicly funded park, they claim a mandate that they don’t have. It’s an open question on whether I, well, I don’t think it’s an open question. It’s arguably an open question on whether voters want to pay for the multi-million dollar project that they want to put on this site.
And I think we deserve some clarity around that. And the sooner we get it, the better. If I lose, if my side loses the fight, the political, the democratic fight, if we make our case and voters say, you know what? I really want a public park on that site, then counseling can get to work doing the thing that the voters have said they want to do. I hope that doesn’t happen, but that’s not going to happen now and it won’t happen. It’s not going to happen because the council correctly, in my estimation, thinks that it’s not something that voters want, but they’re sort of guessing a little bit, and they’re working off of the survey that was done last year in support of the pros plan. And voters were asked, do you support funding for new downtown parks? And it was one of the lowest scoring parks priorities out of everything on the survey.
And I think that governing by survey I think is a fraud idea. But it tells us a little bit about when you actually put the real question in front of people, what they’ll say and they’ll say, we don’t really want to fund that with our tax dollars. So again, I have a point of view, I think we all have a point of view. The city council as our stewards, as people who are representing us, they ought to want this clarity. They ought to want to know what the mandate is and where the public is on this. And the only way to do that is the ballot.
Jess (52:18):
So remember kids, when you see something about the library lot or fifth and division or whatever, when you see the next charter amendment come up on the ballot, read it closely. And if it’s about this, please support the future.
Molly (52:35):
So when Jess and I came up with this idea for civic therapy as the theme for this season, because it felt like something we could do without a ton of prep, to be perfectly honest, we’re both beyond overstretch at this point. I think we were imagining, or at least I was imagining the sort of gleeful rage that often animates this work where it’s like there’s real anger and there’s real frustration, but there’s also real pleasure in airing it and working it through. And I feel like what I have learned in the last hour is that this particular topic, there’s not nearly as much glee in the rage and that there’s a lot more hurt, at least for some of the folks who are really involved in this from the beginning. But also the degree to which the attacks have been so personal, it seems like really have altered the tone of this particular debate even more than some of the other ones in the city, which also get personal. I, I’ve been accused of being a liar in half a dozen different ways for advocating for things like a bike lane. So I’m wondering, as we’re wrapping this up, if there are any last thoughts or feelings that either of you want to share or this doesn’t get tied up in a neat bow. We’re still deep in the mess right now, but are there any last things we want to process before our therapy session is over?
Dan (54:04):
I struggled with scrubbing profanity out of the piece that I wrote. I really did. I, because you go back and you watch again that debate, just that you were involved in, if you go back and you watch that video, and I really encourage anybody, anybody who still has questions about this issue or wants to learn more should go there. And it takes, it’s about an hour long. But the things that people who proposed proposal A but got on the ballot, campaigned to pass it, passed it. The things that they said to the voters in 2018 were, I think fraudulent is too strong of a word, but it’s not that far off the mark. I think that there were some people who were operating in good faith. There were some people that believed that they could do the things that they said they were going to do, but they believed those things unreasonably.
And that’s the best thing you can say about what they did. I think there were folks as part of that coalition who knew deep down or consciously in the front of their minds that this was always about blocking housing. This wasn’t about putting a park on that site, and I’m incredibly angry about that. I’m incredibly angry. Angry that they won and it, it’s galling and infuriating. And then to deal with the same arguments that they were making four years ago today after four years of data for them to insist today that they made no funding promises that they intended the city to do this financially, that this was always understood as a city obligation. It’s gaslighting, I mean, or something else. It’s hard to listen to that and it’s hard to take it seriously and it’s hard to not just spew profanity and invective and be personally outraged by it.
Jess (55:55):
I have a lot of final thoughts, so I’m just trying to spin it down to the one. I would say that, Molly, to your point about gleeful rage, if my therapist were to listen to this, which she won’t goes out of her way to not listen to anything that I do for work, she’d be really proud of this episode. We have talked a lot about anger and she says that a lot of anger is an avatar or the first thing you feel before dealing with fear, embarrassment, or hurt, and that is angering. But I take her point, and for me, I have had so much anger over this process and this specific site and a lot of it, I have no fear around it. I have no embarrassment around it. I’m really proud of every way that I have engaged this issue, this site, these larger structures.
But, and what you heard today, and honestly you guys, this is not the conversation I expected to have. It’s not even the conversation we had in the prep, but the thing that I have left is hurt that our community, when it went to bat for what it said it believed was mean and sometimes cruel. And that’s not a process problem. That’s a person problem. And so my hope when we go forward from here is that for those of us who are arguing for the things that we’re arguing for, when you are having these conversations, talk to the human in front of you and address their ideas and not the other way around because we are causing harm when we engage in these as like political free for alls and not what they really are, which are emotional transactions.
Molly (57:46):
That’s just a little mic drop gesture describing for the audience. Jessie, you’re usually usually not the person who does the wrap up, but today you were going to do the wrap up.
Jess (57:56):
I’ll do the wrap up. Yeah, you guys, we did the thing. We did so much. I’m so proud of us. So listeners, thanks for coming along. That is it for this episode of Ann Arbor. Many, many thanks to Nanas for joining us today and for having the capacity and the stomach to write that article. Really appreciate it. Our city benefited from it. Do you
Dan (58:23):
Welcome, thanks for listening to ramp.
Jess (58:26):
You are all welcome to come check out past episodes and transcripts at our website, ann arbor af.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AERs on Twitter if you’re still there at the A two council hashtag and Facebook and the Ann Arbor Housing for All, which is what ypi became Facebook group. And hey, if you wanted to send us a few dollars@kofi.com slash Ann Arbor af to help us with hosting Molly and I always appreciate it. We are your co-hosts. I’m Jess Leet, and that was Molly Kleinman. And we always are thankful for our producer, Scott Trudeau. Our theme music is, I dunno, by grapes, get informed. Get mad, then get involved. It’s your city.
Dan (59:08):
I made a promise to myself. I wouldn’t say the word fuck on the podcast and I did it. I got there.