ann arbor is overrated.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest’s Nutrition Action newsletter may have out-Ann-Arbored Ann Arbor with its endorsement of Mother Nature’s Goodies brand pie shells, which contain only whole-wheat flour, canola oil, “purified water” and sea salt. Why are we posting this? Because we’re out of town and bored. Does anyone else find CSPI’s “food porn” designation for products that don’t meet its nutritional standards to be emblematic of the puritanism that pervades their movement? Have we lost everyone yet?

Not every chain puts a local competitor out of business, at least when it’s a fair fight, as the Free Press illustrates with its profile of the healthy competition between Stucchi’s and next-door neighbor Ben & Jerry’s on State Street. (Of course, if Toscanini’s ever expanded past Boston, it could be a dire day for both of them.)

A letter in the News again propagates a well-meaning fallacy: that local businesses, no matter what they do or how well they do it, are superior to chains. “It is clear that one of the most important factors in increasing both coolness and good old fashioned economic success is supporting and cultivating locally owned, independent businesses,” writes Lisa Dugdale of the Washtenaw Living Economy Network. While that’s not exactly wrong, what it leaves out is enough to explain why Ann Arbor was never cool, even before local New Age gift shops started closing.

There are usually three parts to the local-business boosters’ argument:

It’s always better to have local businesses than chains downtown. What local businesses, and what chains are they keeping out? If you could eat scented candles, then maybe we’d have the right mix of businesses downtown.

Local businesses invest more in the community. Fair enough. But in A2, that investment might take the form of supporting the Old Fourth Ward Association’s organized teams of party informants.

It’s worth paying a little more to support local business. But how do you know you’re paying more for well-compensated workers and a diverse downtown, rather than for downtown businesses to take advantage of students without cars?

This isn’t just an idle bit of contrarianism. Failure to recognize that local businesses are not intrinsically cool can lead to areas like Ashley Street. In an oft-quoted passage, Mark Maynard voices concern about those who would make Ypsi cool. Their efforts, he worries, will one day lead to a Starbucks in downtown Ypsi. “Success, to these people, I’m quite sure, isn’t [Henrietta Fahrenheit], it’s the shopping complex which might follow it.” What if success is, instead of a mall and Starbucks, a Downtown Home and Garden and Vintage to Vogue? Is that any cooler?

Also, Jim Rees has a fascinating archive of Ann Arbor photos. Perhaps the most eye-opening are the “lost Ann Arbor” ones. These should pretty much dispel any ideas that A2 was a bohemian paradise before Jimmy John’s and Starbucks moved in. The only thing he’s missing is Bill Knapp’s, the embodiment of lost Ann Arbor.

The holiday news slowdown has led Gawker to promise not to mock PR people who send press releases its way, but for some reason, despite our tone of relentless boosterism, we don’t get a lot of those. We can, however, link to a Saginaw News article from days ago. While meeting with the Saginaw Downtown Development Authority, the writer correctly identifies ways to make the city cooler: “unique restaurants to hit before the show (or the bar) and a few bright cafes with cool music, tasty sandwiches, big couches and coffee that costs three times what it’s worth.” All of which would put them ahead of A2. But the cool-planners’ first choice? “Daddy Starbucks.” Unfortunately, Saginaw’s demographics make it one of what must be about four places in the country that Starbucks would be reluctant to move into, which puts a major snag in the plan to “create a ’scene’ similar to Royal Oak or Ann Arbor.”

Watching an A2 Planning Commission meeting on CTN now and then can be very instructive in explaining the housing shortage. Watching ten minutes from the middle of a meeting where you’re not even sure what they’re discussing is probably less so. But we were intrigued to watch the arguments against a 24-apartment building. We’re not sure where the proposed building was to be located, but the neighborhood was described by a committee member as “struggling” due to a recent influx of students. A few families live there, she said, but “they live there with difficulty.” This committee member was the only dissenter in the 4-1 vote in favor of the development - which counts as a defeat because six members would have had to vote for it in order for it to pass.

While driving down 23 yesterday, we saw three cars lying in ditches along the snow-covered road, well after the snow had fallen. We’ve never seen anything like this in any other city we’ve lived in, but we see it every year around this time in A2. As soon as you cross out of A2, the roads seem to become noticeably better.

And A2 inspectors actually did something about a landlord who violated city regulations. The offending landlord was running a virtual Tree Town gulag, packing tenants into spaces approved for half as many people, forcing them to pretend to be her relatives, making them switch rooms randomly, not allowing the inside temperature to top 60 degrees and not allowing residents to use water for cooking.

Saginaw is so far down on the cool scale that they’re desperately trying to emulate A2. As cool-cities guru Richard Florida put it, “the kind of people Saginaw covets sometimes prefer tending bar in a cool city such as Ann Arbor to tending a career in an uncool one.” (This is actually a reporter’s paraphrase of what Florida said; if he did in fact mention A2, his credilbility has been severely undermined.)

The Saginaw task force on cool, which some have suggested dubbing “G’Naw T by Nature”, then, has a long road uphill, even with a new “upscale hat store” in town. But don’t worry, says the state’s man in charge of coolness, Robert Johnson. In order to be cool, “you don’t have to become Ann Arbor.” Whew. That sound you hear is a collective sigh of relief from New York, Boston and Chicago.

Two University of Illinois professors are concerned that state budget cuts may consign the institution to a “degree in mediocrity,” leaving it hard-pressed to keep its standing among other prestigious Big Ten schools like Michigan and Wisconsin. Not to worry.

The specter of Bill Knapp’s still hangs over A2 like a, well, specter that refuses to go away. “I really miss some of the old Bill Knapp’s classics, such as chicken and biscuits,” writes a reader in today’s Connection, who we will assume is not a reader of this weblog trying to spoof the News. “This was a restaurant that many folks miss.” The Connection columnist was unable to provide the exact Knapp’s recipe, but offers a General Mills one instead.

New York is now as safe as Ann Arbor (thanks to a reader for sending this along.)