New housing is expensive, but the way to affordability is to build more of it.

It's a common refrain: "We need to stop building expensive housing--we need to build housing that's really *affordable*".

I think when people hear something like "build affordable housing", they imagine that if builders would just cut a few corners--use some cheaper materials, leave out the exercise room--that they could build brand new apartments that are cheap right from the start.

But that's not how it works. New construction is expensive. The only way the resulting apartments will be cheap is to subsidize--and then ask your tenants for tax returns and stuff to make sure your subsidy is going to people who couldn't afford the rent otherwise.

So, what to do for all those people that would like to live in the city they work in, can't afford new market-rate housing, but also wouldn't qualify for income-limited housing?

What you do is to realize that brand new housing is just a small part of the market, and that the older housing can be cheap--IF (big if!) there's enough of it to go around. And that the way we get there is to allow people to build. Yes, the new housing will always be the most expensive, but it's what allows us to keep up with demand.

Rephrase that common refrain as "we can't build any new housing, new housing is too expensive", and I think you'll see the problem.

But I'm also glad we're building more affordable housing. We should help everyone we can, and this is one of the ways to do it. Just don't think it's a cheap thing to do.

And, note, the two aren't exclusive, quite the opposite: allowing more market-rate housing makes it easier to build more affordable housing, by contributing tax base and infrastructure.

We're all in this together.

Reference: Why do affordable Ann Arbor apartments cost over $200M to build? Project explained.

The people opposing the library's plan for a new downtown library are calling themselves "Save A2 Parks", on the grounds that the plan would use, in part, this:

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. It's less a park, more a parking lot. (In fact, it's the top of an underground parking structure.) Their objection rests on the idea that it could be turned into a park. The history of this whole idea is long and tortured, but suffice it to say that the idea turns out to be about as feasible as you'd expect.

"Save A2 Parks" is remarkably reminiscent of an earlier group, "Protect A2 Parks", which was formed to block a plan to build a train station in Fuller Park. But wait, what was the actual exact location of the proposed train station?

Yep, another parking lot! And, once again, there was some claim that this parking lot could also be park, a complicated story involving a long-term lease to UM. You will not be surprised to learn that it is still, today, a parking lot.

Some of the same people are involved. They seem to have trouble distinguishing parks from parking.

More history, if you really want it:

• A2 residents raise concern about new Amtrak station plan
• Desolate and Uninviting—The Failure of 2018’s Proposal A and the Future of the Library Lot

Update: how could I forget the three-site plan? The three sites in question were two surface parking lots and a parking garage. Opposition was based on the claim one of the parking lots should be a park. The actual result of the successful opposition is that, twenty years later, both of the parking lots are still parking lots.)

As a cheapskate on a budget, all the housing I've lived in was built before I was born. I don't really care what the price of brand new housing is, I've never even looked at that stuff. What I care about is that older one-bedrooms start at $1500 a month.

When we don't build anything new, that's what happens. It's not the wealthy that suffer in a housing shortage; they're perfectly capable of buying an old house and renovating it. The people saying "oh, we can't build new housing because new things are expensive" are not our friends.

We chose our house partly because it's walking distance from a library branch, Traverwood.

It's a great spot, and it's unfortunate that more people don't have that chance, but it's illegal to build an apartment building, or even a duplex, on my street, so our zoning puts a hard limit on how many people can live here.

Repeated across this city, this has limited our housing growth to about a half a percent a year for decades now. And this is how we've ended up with only about 50,000 housing units to serve the 90,000 people that work in Ann Arbor and the 50,000 that study here.

Which is one of the reasons I was so delighted by our library's new proposal, which addresses three problems at once:

• First, it gets us a new downtown library without having to ask voters to approve taxes for a new bond.
• Second, it finds a use for the lot next door which has languished as surface parking for years.
• And third--and the thing that makes it pencil out without requiring new taxes--it puts new housing above the new library.

This is a library that a lot of people will be able to walk to!

OK, we're not going to fill our decades-old housing debt with one project. But I appreciate the library doing their part.

And they're a great organization to take this on.

If you haven't seen the documentary about the building of the Traverwood branch, I recommend it. It was a unique, ambitious project, so there were issues. But they figured it out, and the results speak for themselves: a lovely, useful, heavily used building.

Or visit the Library's most popular branch, in the Westgate mall. The surroundings are totally different from Traverwood's, but in each case it fits in fantastically.

This is an organization that knows how to build great community spaces. I look forward to seeing what they do with downtown!

Mainly, I want to thank the library for showing that we live in a community that can take on these kinds of projects. We don't have to let issues build up, year after year, paralyzed by indecision. We can face our problems head on and come up with creative, ambitious solutions.

And now, something exactly *nobody* has asked for, my thoughts on the new Thurston construction:

• Apparently they're breaking ground in March? I'm no expert on construction, but surely that means it's a done deal--and has been for a while now.
• A new building will be a huge benefit for the school. From my brief time on the PTO board, I know they've done some creative things to keep the old building working. But let's get our schools facilities that are great from the start.
• I live a few hundred feet away. I like taking walks there, watching the herons, and the geese, and the skaters. And it looks to me like the pond is probably going to be fine, a little different, but OK. But even if it couldn't be saved at all--fundamentally, it's on school land, and always has been, and the school board's primary responsibility must be to staff and students, not to me as a neighbor who enjoys taking walks there.
• In general, Ann Arbor does great on parks. (At least on quantity. I sometimes worry about whether we're doing as good a job at maintaining them.) Schools have been more of a struggle. I'd rather not have to choose between them, but if push comes to shove, education comes first for me every time. It doesn't sit well with me to prioritize park use over school use on school property.
• Cities take up something like 2% of US land area. If you're concerned about losing forests--good!--please spare some thought for agricultural policy. Or for suburban sprawl--but even there, I'm not worried about the amount of land used so much as the expense (in terms of energy and carbon emissions) required to spread our infrastructure (especially transportation) over wider and wider areas.
• The impulse to care about the small patches of green we see around us daily is understandable, but when it comes to cities, I think we really need to be focused on ensuring they serve everyone efficiently and well. Parks are an important part of that! But that doesn't mean they need to be insulated from change. Like a lot of natural areas in cities, the landscapes we're talking about on the Thurston property are relatively young, and human-made, and can be remade if necessary.

Anyway, I think we're all going to be OK. I'd rather focus my activism elsewhere. And with that, I'll try to shut up on this subject....

April 10 update: hah, I failed. A couple more points that people are worrying about:

• Proximity to construction: construction next to in-use schools is normal and commonplace. Most of us have lived, studied, or worked next to construction sites at some point in our lives. I really don't think we need to worry about this.
• Any new construction requires a plan showing that the site can manage expected stormwater. Standards for stormwater management have gone up since Thurston was originally built. If anything I expect the result will be to decrease the risk of, say, a neighbor's basement being flooded.

From what I can tell, Ann Arbor's building bike lanes exactly the way that makes sense if your goal is to get the maximum infrastructure for your buck:

The key observation is: if you're already tearing up a street and digging a big trench to do utility work--say, to replace a water main--then reconfiguring the lanes at the same time is cheap. You were going to have to repaint anyway!

So, say you've got a fixed budget to build bike lanes next year. Then the smart thing to do is to look at the list of streets that are already scheduled for major work next year, and spend your bike lane money there.

Sometimes people will complain that "millions" were spent on some bike lane. That usually means that they're confusing the cost of the whole project with the cost of adding bike lanes to it. Yes, it's very expensive to tear up and replace a street. The cost of repainting--and maybe adding some kind of barriers if you're making a physically separated bike lane--is small in comparison.

Now, this approach will sometimes lead to a bike "network" that isn't really a very good network--they're not going to connect up the way you'd ideally like at first. Lanes are going to stop before they go where you want.

Its frustrating, but I take the long view. By getting the maximum lane-miles for our dollar, we're able to grow the network faster, and those awkward gaps will get filled eventually.

By the way, don't forget why we're doing this. One of the pillars of the A2Zero plan is a 50% reduction in vehicle-miles traveled by 2035. I dont think that's unusual--pretty much any serious climate plan depends in part on shifting some of our personal transportation to modes that emit fewer greenhouse gases. It's an ambitious goal. (But note also that a 50% reduction isn't *elimination*--nobody's confiscating anyone's car, and they'll still be the right choice for many situations!)

At a time when progress on carbon emissions is hard at the federal level, this is something substantial and easy that cities--where voters are generally more willing to do the work--have a lot of opportunities for substantial changes that aren't actually that hard.

Reference: this was prompted by $8.6M project aims to improve safety, calm traffic along major Ann Arbor corridor. Note: "The project also includes traffic signal updates at the Maple Road and Seventh Street intersections, replacing water mains from Newport Road to Chapin Street, making stormwater management improvements, resurfacing the street and more." That's quite an "also includes"!

One of the odder parts of the language which proposal D adds to the Ann Arbor city charter is that it puts out-of-town landlords on the same footing as residents. The city would match donations from "small donors" 9-to-1 (so, for each dollar donated to a campaign, the city would contribute $9). Who's a small donor?:

contributions $50 and under in the aggregate that are received from individual eligible voters and taxpayers in the City of Ann Arbor.

(Emphasis mine; excerpted from the full text of the amendment at the no on D site.)

Does that mean the city would also subsidize donations from out-of-town landlords? Why on earth?

Worth reading the whole text of the amendment. It doesn't give a good impression.

Ann Arbor friends: please vote NO on city proposals C and D.

The local League of Women voters has a good press release explaining why, with a longer report attached if you want the details: League of Women Voters of Washtenaw County Opposes Ann Arbor 2024 Ballot Proposals C and D.

Prop D attempts to set up public financing for Ann Arbor city council and mayor races. Like the League of Women voters, I'm in *favor* of public financing, but this is not a serious attempt. It's something that appears to have been developed by people on the losing side of recent elections who have an axe to grind, and went their own way instead of trying to make any kind of coalition with actual advocates or exports on election reform.

Ditto prop C, which makes local mayor and city council elections into a nonpartisan multi-way free-for-all. I'm skeptical of nonpartisan elections, honestly--I think party labels have some value--but I think there are arguments to be made for it. But if you were going to do it right, you'd make it conditional on ranked choice voting, or keep a primary and advance the top two vote-getters to the November election--something to mitigate spoiler effects and assure that the eventual winner has an actual majority. These folks aren't trying to do it right.

The proposals do have some chance of passing, because election day will be the first time a lot of people see them, and they may sound reasonable based on the ballot language itself. So we really do need those "no" votes from everyone else.

Websites from the "vote no" campaigns:

• Vote NO on Prop C
• Vote NO on Prop D

Other references:

• From mlive, Fair Elections Fund proposal in Ann Arbor conflicts with state law, AG’s office says
• From Damn Arbor, Opinion: Against Ann Arbor's nonpartisan and publicly funded election ballot initiatives
• Look up your November ballot at https://mvic.sos.state.mi.us/Voter/Index

Ann Arbor has an increasingly severe housing shortage. People with the lowest income see the largest impact of the shortage, but, as everyone's noticed by now, we're pricing out a lot of middle-income people as well.

The way out of this is to build more housing.

The new housing will be expensive. But that's OK--it still increases the number of units, which frees up older units for everyone else.

Sometimes people will say things like "Ann Arbor doesn't need new housing, it needs new *affordable* housing"! But that's not the way things work.

It always costs more to live in new construction.

That rule has one small but important exception: what governments call "affordable housing", which is means-tested--if you want to live in affordable housing, you'll have to apply and turn over your tax returns and bank statements. (And, unfortunately, get on a long wait list). Ann Arbor is making important progress towards building more affordable housing. We should do a lot more. But there is no realistic scenario where that makes up more than a small fraction of our new housing. Market-rate housing is where the big numbers are.

Anyway, there's no reason we have to choose one or the other! We should do as much of both as we can.

This presentation is useful for understanding some of their building plans.

My main concern: The A2Zero plan says we should cut vehicle miles traveled in half. It's a difficult goal, unfortunately, but I don't think it's weird or arbitrary: every serious climate plan assumes similar changes.

From what I've heard of preliminary plans for new schools (for example, Thurston Elementary), we're going in the opposite direction: adding more space for parking and for dropping off and picking up kids in cars.

We're going to be living with these plans for decades. We should do better.