For a city that prides itself on being the most educated in America, Ann Arbor sure has a lot to learn on housing affordability
Begins with the Greenbelt
In 2003, Ann Arbor implemented the Greenbelt Program in an effort to minimize urban sprawl. The program authorized the city to purchase plots of land on the outskirts of city limits. The city believed this would concentrate future development within the city, rather than in the outskirts, and they were motivated to avoid the urban planning mistakes of the Metro Detroit area which spans nearly 4,000 square miles (or 10% of Michigan), greatly increasing the commute time for hundreds of thousands of middle- and low-income folk.
The city believed this program would increase the number of people who could afford to live within city limits, and hence reduce the number of commuters. The thery was that the program would also have indirect spillover effects such as alleviating socioeconomic inequality and minimize environmental degradation. Or so they thought.
What the city failed to consider is how such a program could be weaponized for social control, and following the 2018 city council elections, new council members did exactly that.
Those Damn Student Renters
As I wrote in this blog's opening entry, the issue of housing affordability revolves around the basic laws of supply and demand. Since 1999, the University of Michigan has expanded net enrollment by 27%, bringing tens of thousands of additional students and faculty members to Ann Arbor. Housing demand skyrocketed, but supply couldn’t keep up. And as a result, housing prices have skyrocketed.
To address these housing shortages, the city council has voted three times since 2003 to raise height limits for new development projects and allow more high-density, high-volume apartment buildings to be built in downtown Ann Arbor. This led to rapid change of the downtown area. Over a dozen new apartment buildings cropped up in a matter of years, including most of the luxury high rises we see today.
But once the construction dust began to settle, some Ann Arbor residents began to take notice of the increased downtown development. Resentment towards these new developments culminated in the 2018 city elections, in which 80% of the council seats were won by NIMBYs, and with their newfound majority, the council enacted a slate of policies aimed at making it harder to develop more housing in Ann Arbor.
These councilpersons used housing policies as a means of social control to regulate who is allowed to live in Ann Arbor by disproportionately affecting people of lower socioeconomic status and people of color. During the campaign, one NIMBY candidate referred to affordable housing as “an elaborate…experiment in social engineering…to change the demographics of Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti’s.” His message to voters was clear: vote for me to keep out the poor and black folks.