Couch Porch Ban Is Go
Common Monkeyflower has obtained an e-mail exchange between councilmember Leigh Greden and concerned Old Fourth Ward resident Tony Ramirez on the impending porch couch ban. Writes Ramirez, “While the
obvious reason for those of us who are permanent residents in student
neighborhoods is that they’re unsightly, there’s no question that
they’re also a fire hazard, and probably a health hazard. The
all-too-common combination of young students, couches, barbeque
grills, and old wood-frame houses is dangerous.” He urges a ban “before the students come back in September.”
“I agree with you completely,” Greden writes.
The Council will be having a meeting on this subject on July 19. The couch porch ban supporters urge others to write to their councilmembers - Murph provides a list of e-mail addresses so we can do the same.
This is ridiculous. Tony Ramirez needs a hobby, and fast. Couches on porches are ugly if you choose to see them that way. I personally like the student atmosphere in AA’s OFW and in Ypsi, too, some degree of seediness notwithstanding. Live and let live already.
posted by Laura on July 3rd, 2004 at 5:45 pmHow can you move to the student ghetto and be concerned with porch couchs? If he really wants to do something for both the permanent residents and the students in this area, he should go around the neighborhood cleaning up the sidewalks of all of the vomit and used condoms.
posted by Anonymous on July 4th, 2004 at 7:28 amLet’s pass an ordinance against toenail fungus. It’s unsightly and a menace to society.
Getting rid of couches on porches may prevent foolish people from starting fires, but it won’t prevent the stupid foolish people from starting couch fires even if the couch is inside the house. Let’s face up to it, drunkenness is often a factor in these kinds of fires. We wouldn’t excuse someone from prosecution of they were DUI and caused an accident, so why would we excuse someone from doing something just as foolish while sitting on a couch on the porch.
In Japan, there are very few “accidental” fires. Falling asleep while smoking or leaving a candle unattended that causes a fire is a prosecutable offense.
It’s not just Ann Arbor. Government regulations like banning couch porches is just another (well meaning but misguided) attempt to legislate common sense behavior.
It should be a crime punishable by incarceration if someone is stupid enough to smoke in bed or leave open flame unattended that causes a fire while they fall off into a drunken stupor.
Instead, we enable bad behavior by calling these incidents “accidents” and then forgive the perpetrator. Smoking in bed or lighting a couch on fire is a conscious act and if, heaven forbid, a serious fire occurs, that person should be prosecuted. People who cannot figure this out should be removed from the gene pool.
A new law isn’t needed. What’s needed is low tolerance to foolish and stupid behavior that causes injury to person or property.
posted by Anonymous on July 4th, 2004 at 11:25 amI’m with Laura. I don’t care if people have couches on their porches as long as they don’t live next to me.
posted by Eric on July 4th, 2004 at 12:39 pmHello
this is the Current Columnist referred to in the May 28 update
Interestingly, that bitch of a woman lived in the dirt in Dexter, not in Ann Arbor. Which makes me even more sick to my stomach. She was trying so hard to be like the snooty assholes in Ann Arbor. I guess it’s the effert that matters, aye?
By the way, I am now the official enemy of snooty white rich assholes in Ann ARbor. Last night I was humiliated at Top Of the Park by the usualy suspects, 50 something elitists all in their uniforms of big flowered shirts and khaki pants, for the last time. After trying to be friendly and recieving only disapproving glares, I’m working on an essay about my experiences there. I just moved to Depot Town in Ypsi after 20 years as an Ann Arbor resident and I”ll never go back. Not until those fuckers are gone.
Love,
posted by Charmie Gholson on July 4th, 2004 at 2:42 pmCharmie
Welcome to Ypsilanti Charmie!
posted by Steven on July 4th, 2004 at 3:08 pmI guess Charmie’s piss and vinegar doesn’t apply to snooty black rich assholes in Ann Arbor.
Maybe the bitch of a woman (bitch=woman) wasn’t really trying to be like the snooty rich white assholes in Ann Arbor, but maybe she was one no matter where she lived.
Dexter (and Ypsilanti) has their fair share to snooty white rich assholes. Ann Arbor hasn’t cornered the market on snobs.
Fuckers don’t get gone. They’ll always be there.
Charmie has a pretty think skin, aye?
posted by west of A2 on July 4th, 2004 at 4:04 pmCharmie will never make it in Ypsi with skin as thin as that.
posted by David on July 4th, 2004 at 11:33 pmCharmie will be fine here. She’s a terrific writer and an admirable person with a wonderful sense of humor among other talents–I have the pleasure of knowing her. Welcome to Ypsi, Charmie! [/OT] OK, back to porch couches.
posted by Laura on July 5th, 2004 at 1:58 amSounds to me like it’s the porches that need to go, not the couches.
Wonder if that would pass?
posted by todd on July 5th, 2004 at 10:33 amBan porch couches? What’s next banning homeless people, they can be unsightly and unsafe too. Oh yeah, Ann Arbor doesn’t have those. I’m glad Ann Arbor’s city council has the time to do this kind of stuff while not addressing real problems.
posted by Kozzie on July 5th, 2004 at 11:09 amIts all about property value.
No students= higher property value. That’s all that this is about.
Gentrification is here to stay in Ann Arbor…and it’s going to get worse. Check out last years Census. The population has stayed the same, for the most part, since 2000…
……but if you look at the number Ann Arbor residents that earn more than $75K per year, the bracket has doubled. Guess which income brackets fled the city?
The city will continue to move in this direction as taxes go up, and citizens refuse to build up (up as in higher buildings). It’s really a shame.
posted by todd on July 5th, 2004 at 12:05 pmSo I’m guessing this couch ban would also apply to the african-amercan neighborhoods in northwest Ann Arbor where sitting on your porch couch during the hot summer with your socializing neighbors has been a tradition since the 1940’s. Did city counil think of this or just drunk students? There not snooty and there not white either. Ann Arbor is pretty diverse, some of you choose not to see it for whatever reason.
posted by Bez on July 5th, 2004 at 3:50 pmHighlights from the Census 2000 Demographic Profiles: Ann Arbor
(A2/Nat’l Avg)
White 74.7%/75.1%
Black 8.8%/ 12.3%
Asian 11.9%/3.6%
According to the Census, Annarbour is averagely white, above averagely asian, and below-average black.
But diversity isn’t just about skin-color, it’s about income diversity which lack of is a sure-fire porch-couch-killer.
In 1999 47% of Annarbour families made more than $75k/year. 67% make more than $50k/year. I’m sure it’s much higher today.
The median family income was $71,293/year. As Annarbour loses it’s income diversity we’ll all start to notice other changes.
posted by Steven on July 5th, 2004 at 5:16 pmThey complain about the students without realizing that without the University, Ann Arbor would be nothing.
posted by Kozzie on July 5th, 2004 at 5:56 pmTodd, I must disagree on one point. No students = downward property values. Unless of course, AA managed to herd all the students into some obscure, off site housing. Students could still come to town to spend money, merchants would be happy, but the unsightly look of the student housing area would be cleaned up. Wait…who would live in those houses? Renovaters? There would have to be a lot of renovaters. How about, tear downs and replacing the entire area with grand, new housing. Again, there would have to be a lot of wealthy people to manage that. So, I guess the town will just have to suck up and enjoy the students and all the benefits they bring.
posted by marcie on July 5th, 2004 at 6:26 pmLike everything else in life, ya gotta take the bad with the good.
Dead horse topic #16. Couch porches. Most any ordinance that the city could write would be enforced on a complaint basis in the neighborhoods and student neighborhoods would be patrolled and ticketed. Beware the Community Standards Police!
Dead horse topic # 23. Ann Arbor would be nothing without the U. Ann Arbor wouldn’t be the same without the U. It might be a nicer place to live and not have it’s economic, social and political landscapes dominated by the UM.
Dead horse topic #3 City taxes. Ya gotta pay to play. If businesses didn’t think they couldn’t make a buck in A2, even with all the expenses involved, businesses like todd’s would not be investing here. If Ann Arbor was a terrible place to live, people would pay as much for property. Anybody with any sense knows school taxes are high and the city uses about 20+% of the dough. Yes, because of higher taxes fewer people of lesser means can afford a home or even to live here, but if people desire or must live here, they can either afford it or they find a way.
I just have to keep wondering why that people come to A2, love it and then love to hate it. I lived in Ypsi from ‘72 to ‘76 and liked living there. I think Ypsi was and still is cool for all the right reasons, yet I don’t hate it.
posted by mucho gusto on July 5th, 2004 at 9:08 pm“Ann Arbor wouldn’t be the same without the U. It might be a nicer place to live and not have it’s economic, social and political landscapes dominated by the UM.”
Or, it would be an extremely boring town of 2,000 or so folks. Nice, maybe, as in very quiet. If the U wasn’t here, this city may have never developed any sort of real economy. Ann Arbor never had much in the way of industry… hell, if the U wasn’t here, Ypsi might have been the largest city in the county today while Ann Arbor ended up as just another Manchester or Milan (not that there’s anything wrong with those towns– it’s just that they are indeed TOWNS). If the U wasn’t in Ann Arbor, the vast majority of us, whose jobs are either directly or indirectly connected to the presence of the University and its students, wouldn’t even be here.
posted by Brandon on July 5th, 2004 at 10:55 pmMarcie,
I think that you misunderstood what I meant to say….or, I wasn’t clear (probably the latter).
What I should have written was that “no students in a particular area”. Don’t think for a second that people in particular areas would (and apparently are) do anything that they could to keep student renters out of their neighborhoods.
Watch how hard the locals fight high density solutions like allowing homeowners to add a room for a renter (read: student renters).
The very fact that this email explains that the couch ban should be enacted before September tell you that: a. they don’t want students to be around when this passes, and
b. this is about students, not fire.
If it was about fire, then why wasn’t this initiative brought about by our fire chief? Or is the petitioner some sort of fire guru, and we just don’t know it?
It’s all about $$. That’s why covenent developments exist….and Ann Arbor is moving down this road at full speed. I’m not blaming Mr. Ramirez for wanting this in his neighborhood (it’s his neighborhood, and his opinion)….I’m just pointing out that this has nothing to do with fire.
Just my opinion.
posted by todd on July 6th, 2004 at 10:17 amoops. covenAnt. you know what i meant.
posted by todd on July 6th, 2004 at 10:23 amSteven is right, as usual. Ann Arbor is losing it’s income diversity.
Here’s the data, and it’s pretty telling:
http://www.ci.ann-arbor.mi.us/Planning/census/census%20comparison-final.pdf
Perhaps I am misreading what you are saying Mucho, but I think that you are saying that because Ann Arbor is a desirable place, it has become expensive. In other words, you feel that this is inevitable. This seems to be the overall sentiment for locals.
I couldn’t disagree with this more. This is a controllable phenomenon. My entire argument with Ann Arbor is that locals desperately want Ann Arbor to stay the same…Boulder made this very same mistake, and as a result, the entire “metro” area became gentrified.
Now if that’s what the people want, then that’s fine….but I don’t think that everyone wants more corporate chains, and a complete loss of unique character that Ann Arbor is supposed to have. In my opinion, we are losing the character of this town….in the opinion of AAIO and others, the battle is already lost.
posted by todd on July 6th, 2004 at 11:22 amSo where do the landlords fit into all of this? Is the onus of getting rid of the couches or enforcing the couch ban on them? Or is this going to be part of the AA police detail? Quick–hide the porch couch–the pigs are coming.
posted by AA Hater on July 6th, 2004 at 12:05 pmthanks to todd for the census data info. as i looked at it, there were two things that jumped out at me that could (at least partly) explain the jump in median income and housing prices, and theoretically the increased snobbery which is said to be so rampant in AA.
the first is the general rate of inflation. from 1990 to 2000, the CPI has increased 32%. that means that the $150K house in 1990 is now valued at $200K and your 30K salary is worth almost $40K. if you consider that the bulk of new units will tend to be $200K and up, its not surprising that the median house value would jump from $116K to $181K.
the second is the level of education of the city’s residents. i would argue that the overall shift toward a more educated population is a good thing. a higher education generally results in a bigger salary, thus further explaining the “jump” in median salary (along with point #1).
as for the “gentrification” of an area, well, that can happen whether or not housing prices and income go up. i hate to break it to you, but its happening all over the place. my old roommate just moved from AA and when i saw him in march, he said that the town had changed in the last 8 years- not necessarily for the better. i suppose it had, but it still had much of the good stuff that i remembered. the fact is, i’m hoping to move back (egads!)- this time with family in tow.
posted by craig on July 6th, 2004 at 5:31 pmSome mixed reactions to some of the above comments:
(1) As I tried to post in the later comment thread, Mucho is right that most longtime residents don’t give a fig about couch porches. I don’t see a wave of support for this, outside of the handful of people quoted in the paper.
(2) Boulder has an overall growth cap, a limit on how many units can be built citywide. The fact that housing prices have skyrocketed there is hardly surprising, but it is not at all comparable to Ann Arbor’s situation.
(3) Ann Arbor losing its income diversity is old news. Most low-income residents were driven out of the city long ago by higher housing prices. The Observer had a funny piece a few years back about how all these charitable orgs and city programs which were geared to helping the poor in Ann Arbor had lost their raison d’etre.
But that doesn’t mean that the inverse situation would be better. Just look at any other sizeable Michigan city: Detroit, Flint, Sagainaw, Kalamazoo, Lansing, say. The middle class fled the city, which became ultra cheap and run down, with high crime and bad schools. Result is intense racial and income segregation.
By any housing segregation metric, Ann Arbor is the least racially segregated metro in the state, one of the least in the country. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great place to live, but it’s down one problem from, say, Metro Detroit.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on July 6th, 2004 at 10:24 pmWe have lived on the North side of town for almost 15 years, and one of the reasons that we chose this area is because of the diversity. The local grade school has almost twice the number of minority students than, say, Burns Park Elementary does.
My post is actually meant to address both the issue of diversity, and the snotty attitude of the “rich, white, 50 somethings” that Charmie writes about.
Where we live, the area is populated by primarily professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc…) These people consider the place an enclave of safety here on the North side, and almost an island surrounded by “others.” There is a neighbor who, at Holloween, I was horrified to discover, actually had different treats to give out to the children resident outside of “the neighborhood.”
Here’s the thing, though, many who live here are incredibly classist, racist, and unfriendly to EACH OTHER. It’s like a pissing contest to see who can be the most aloof and rude. For the first three years we lived here, there were people who never deigned to speak to us, but who sent their children to play in our front yard uninvited and unsupervised.
I don’t have a spare couch for my front porch, so I do the next best thing to send a little “screw you” to the snotty assholes whose houses face ours: I refuse to keep up the front grass. All summer long I have the satisfaction of watching them pull up weeds out of their Chem Lawned masterpieces.
Lifer
posted by Lifer on July 8th, 2004 at 3:41 pmLifer, Maybe you need a breath mint?
posted by Anonymous on July 8th, 2004 at 5:53 pmIf they use Chem Lawn, why are they pulling weeds?
posted by mucho gusto on July 8th, 2004 at 6:16 pmAt least Lifer’s neighbors picked a predominantly non-student area on which to impose their narrow aesthetic sensibilities. Tony Ramirez lives somewhere on Ann St. by Kerrytown.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on July 8th, 2004 at 6:59 pmI think that Lifer’s the one with the narrow aesthetic sensibilities. Thumbing one’s nose too often just makes it look like their digging for boulders.
posted by Anonymous on July 8th, 2004 at 7:20 pmI would have to agree with Lifer somewhat. At work we have free coffee and you would think it would kill someone to actually lift a finger to make a new pot. Most of the time when I go get a cup there are a few coffee molecules at the bottom. Fortunately they have enough sense to turn off the burner when they do that.
posted by Kozzie on July 8th, 2004 at 9:09 pmAghhh! Those scoundrels! Now they’re resorting to torture!! How dare they deign to not leave a cup for the poor boy or consider his feelings when he finds the pot empty.
Kozzie being deprived of caffeine is not a pretty sight!
posted by mucho gusto on July 9th, 2004 at 6:53 amThose scoundrels do it every frickin’ time though. It’s not like it’s an isolated incident. It’s as if they think the Magic Coffee Fairy sprinkles some magic dust in the coffee pot and coffee magically appears. Or they are just displaying the “I got mine” attitude that seems to be so prevelant in the generation preceding mine.
posted by Kozzie on July 9th, 2004 at 9:26 amNorth side represent!
posted by js on July 9th, 2004 at 3:03 pmYeah, up around us a slew of new McMansions have gone in, and I view every inconvenience for them as a victory for good and justice. They finally lost the fight over allowing low-income housing to come in at Carrot Way, and the classist/racist rhetoric out of these newbs was staggering, what with the discussion of how hard it would be to raise good children with “that element” around. Fuck you guys, that element was there at Arrowwood before you came! I also looked on gleefully as the City shut down their bullshit demands for burms to protect their new houses from highway noise, what since the highway has been there for, say, a good 40 years already. But the guy who developed all of those little ‘burbs was already a documented cockmonger for his renigging on promises to pay for paving and extention of sewer/water services, forcing the City to take him to court.
What would be nice to see, though, is things being zoned for mixed-use around the edge of town, so that the areas now that are turning into sprawling edifices to automobile’s power of alienation could have shops and residences, neighborhood stores and restaurants, instead of strip malls and McMansions.
But hey, time to toss some couches on some lawns…