ann arbor is overrated.

The recent A2 scandal involving a county prosecutor who stole a quarter from a phone booth widens. Ann Arbor News columnist Judy McGovern reports that Brian Mackie, the principal figure in what she dubs “Quartergate”, is “literally, if not clinically, compulsive about scooping up all the lost change in his path.”

More local business clarification. trampslikeus writes:

For accuracy’s sake: Potbelly replaced Discount Records (Harmony House [which was a regional independent before it went under last year] was replaced by that gallery for the art school). Discount was a fairly useless and crappy record store but did once employ Iggy Pop, a distinction its fratty successor will likely never claim.

A reader on the current hand-wringing about the state of local businesses in A2:

You know, that Potbelly place replaced a Harmony House. And Cosi replaced a Hallmark. EMS? A ghetto party store that charged twice as much as Diag. Local businesses, my ass.

Ann Arbor was so much cooler in 2002.

No, not really. But the Daily’s recent well-intentioned editorial on the “Starbuckization” of A2 makes us think that this will be the rallying cry in a few years. In it, the Daily mourns the loss of local businesses like the recently departed Decker Drugs.

Let’s take a look at these local businesses that the Daily misses so much. There’s Ethnic Creations and Shiva Moon, both of which roughly fit into the “New Age gift shop” category. Schoolkids Records, which still maintains a State Street presence, last we checked. Finally, there’s Campus Bike and Toys. We’ve always felt there were more than enough bike stores in A2, but we’ll leave this to the outdoorsy types. As an example of a still-thriving business with local “ambience”, they offer Rod’s Diner, which serves up funky atmosphere between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.

Replacing these kinds of establishments, which serve mainly to inflate A2’s sense of its own bohemian-ness, with the latest sandwich chain doesn’t have much effect on the actual student experience. The Daily should be lamenting the local businesses that we’ve rarely or never had in A2, at least in recent memory. The 24-hour diner that’s less pretentious than the Fleetwood. The coffeehouse that serves up the caffeine well past midnight. The rock venue that manages to steal a few acts away from the Magic Stick.

“It is time the government allocated resources and worked with proprietors in order to aid these local businesses,” the Daily writes. We can only hope that the independent, locally-owned stores designed to prey on carless students with prices several times what you’d pay at Kroger get all the help they need.

“Yeeech, the dry season has arrived! Now that school’s out at the University of Michigan, you’ll find the pickings slim indeed for offbeat movies in Ann Arbor - a deprivation that will likely persist until September,” laments The Ann Arbor News.

And here we thought they were slim all year round, unless six-month runs of “Amelie” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” count as offbeat.

Electric Current reader Chris Taylor details the hostile reception artists and musicians get from the city of A2. His letter is too long to recap here, but here’s the main point:

Ann Arbor promotes itself as a Midwestern artists’ Mecca. This couldn’t be further from the truth! The Technology Center, the last affordable artists space in town, is being torn down at the end of June to make way for a new $18-million-dollar YMCA.

…

This is the type of attitude that the “powers that be” have been inflicting upon the Ann Arbor underground sub-culture for decades, going back some 30 years to incidents involving people like John Sinclair and the MC5. Yet Ann Arbor claims that it welcomes cultural/artistic diversity. We have the Art Fair, don’t we?

Never let it be said that A2 lacks a sense of punk-style excess and abandon. The Washtenaw Audubon Society’s “Big Day”, an “extreme birding” event, is, The Ann Arbor News warns, “for hard-core birders - not the ones who think a big breakfast at a Dexter or Chelsea eatery is indispensable on a birding trip.” The birders “show their mettle by stopping only long enough to eat gas station food as they rush around the county.”

Kick out the birds!

The News hasn’t neglected the tree beat in this frenzy, though.

It’s yuppie landowners against yuppie “house lovers” in a battle to the death!

The “house lovers” want to preserve the “character” of Ann Arbor, which to them lies in expensive houses whose meticulous maintenance is enforced by historic district fascists. That we can’t dispute. But, as a weblog devoted to destroying the character of Ann Arbor wherever it rears its Bobo head, we’ve got to side with the landowners.

“Is that magnificent or is it magnificent? Look at it!” gushes a preservationist quoted in the article as she drives through A2. “We should have a show…We would call it, ‘The Old War Horses of Ann Arbor.’ Join us as we tour our city and show you why we love it.” One preservationist even keeps an “inch-thick file” on a house that was demolished 17 years ago.

The historic character of the city is under siege by property owners and student renters. Students, the reporter editorializes, come with the “typical student issues of noise and mess.” But there are even more appalling indignities. Among them: a house rented by students to which an unsightly fire escape had been added, “obscur[ing] much of the second-floor architecture.” Icky! Next they’ll be blighting our fair city with wheelchair ramps. (Collapsing porches are probably okay, as long as you can’t see the rubble from the street.)

Still, we can’t help but not feel sorry for the opposing Citizens For Sensible Preservation. Group member Jeff DeBoer points out that these rules would only disallow changes to the outside of a house - read “gargantuan McMansion additions.” He asks, “As a homeowner, how’d you feel if you spent $800,000 for your home and a small group of people you don’t even know decide your neighborhood is in crisis and impose a historic district on you without any vote?” That was probably rhetorical, but we would feel wealthy.

Essentially, this is a win-win.

In discussions of A2 housing prices we’ve had, references to New York invariably appear - this can’t possibly be an expensive place to live because it’s cheaper than Manhattan. Now The Ann Arbor News gives the same treatment to pollution. Apparently surprised at the failing grade given to Washtenaw County’s air quality by the American Lung Association, they draw a comparison: “But that’s minimal compared to other counties nationwide. Los Angeles County had 122 bad air days between 1999 and 2001.”

Lower housing prices than Manhattan, less smog than LA. This is fun. Let’s see, we’d be willing to bet that A2 has fewer traffic problems than Boston during the Big Dig. How about less crime than 1980’s New York? And let’s hear it for higher mean temperatures than Bismarck.