ann arbor is overrated. » Blog Archive » Not Easy Being 828 Greene

Not Easy Being 828 Greene

Murph meets with the neighborhood association that opposed the 828 Greene proposal and finds himself won over. Now, we’re not a planner of any sort and we know less about the proposal than he does, but we’re still unconvinced — not unconvinced that this proposal may have some major problems, but unconvinced that we wouldn’t be better off approving a version of it that the neighbors probably still wouldn’t support. Even though these residents may be nice people who played the anti-student card only because they had to and really wish there were some kind of drugstore downtown, we haven’t seen anything that suggests they recognize the need for density, or at least density in their neighborhood. And while a development like this may be an abuse of the zoning code, sometimes the zoning code may need to be abused.

24 Responses to “Not Easy Being 828 Greene”

I’m going with Murph on this one. Shot-down proposals are a problem until the next proposal; bad buildings are problems for 50-100 years.
posted by Dale on December 6th, 2004 at 3:23 pm
Well, a single shot-down proposal is one thing, but a lot of them can create problems that last just as long as the bad building does.

Why’d you have to sell out, Murph? What about the fans? What happened to “all about the density”?

Nah, we probably agree more than disagree.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on December 6th, 2004 at 3:26 pm
Oh, hmm. I apparently left out the part about them not being totally anti-density-in-their-neighborhood. I’ve edited it in, and put it as the second bullet point, since it’s pretty important…

And yes, I told them that the reason people like me fight people like them is that, from where I’m sitting, I just see proposals getting shouted down, and I worry about the system level effects.
posted by Murph on December 6th, 2004 at 7:38 pm
Oh, and Anna said in the next post down that you oughta advertise to A2 boosters. Some of the 828 neighbors mentioned that they were familiar not only with AU and CMF, but also with AAiO. Apparently when they bought their house, their realtor told them about AAiO. Which they thought was a really weird thing for a realtor to tell clients about.
posted by Murph on December 6th, 2004 at 7:45 pm
Hard to argue with Murph’s detailed analysis in technical terms. But I still am skeptical of any neighborhood argument that begins with “we really support density, but . . .”

But not this time
But not right there
But not this particular design
But birds like to fly over that plot of land
But my kid played hide and seek in those bushes twenty years ago
But not if the residents own cars

You wouldn’t believe some of the outright absurd arguments I heard when I first moved here about why particular tracts near our street needed to be protected for eternity. There is always something or another to bring up when the real reason is that they don’t want more people, and particularly certain types of people, nearby.

This project is a tough one for us. Some developments are bad, period, even if they promote density. Others would be more palatable to NIMBYs if they weren’t so ugly. Drive down Jackson west of Main before the Dexter fork and there are some hideous apartments that almost certainly loom large in the minds of NIMBY types when they oppose something more.

As a general rule, neighborhood vetoes are out of control. But I wonder if this project would even have reached the current stage if the neighbors were more affluent or lived a few streets over.
posted by Matt on December 7th, 2004 at 11:40 am
Has the Ecology Center come out and said anything about improving (increasing) density in Ann Arbor?
posted by Personality on December 7th, 2004 at 12:33 pm
Matt, it is the case that neighborhood vetoes are out of control, but the solution to that is *not* to remove the ability of the neighborhoods to participate in the planning process. One major purpose of planning is to control externalities of land use, and we shouldn’t be ignoring the neighborhood-level externalities of proposed land uses when trying to to fix the city-/region-level externalities of existing land uses.
posted by Murph on December 7th, 2004 at 2:03 pm
Murph,

Are you still holding to the concept that that someone in a neighborhood that a proposed project is going into should have veto power over the individual projects?

What is wrong with moving this input into shaping the zoning and building codes?
posted by todd leopold on December 7th, 2004 at 2:17 pm
I was at the planning commission meeting, and while I agree with Murph and the neighborhood association that 6 bedrooms per unit is too much, I had concerns about some of the statements made by people who spoke against the project that might come up again in future proposals for the site (provided that the planning commission did reject this one–I wasn’t able to stay for the end):
–One person said the housing should target lower-income working people, while another said it should me more “upscale,” similar to Ashley Mews; in both cases, it sounded like they were not open to more student housing, even with fewer bedrooms
–There seemed to be an assumption that students didn’t need any more housing because of the Frieze plan and the private dorm on North Campus
–I was disturbed that one person audibly laughed at a student who addressed parking issues and spoke for the project. A key aspect in working with neighborhood associations should be a mutual tolerance of the views of the “other side” in public meetings–it’s more professional, and the association had already more than adequately gotten their point across.
posted by Anonymous on December 8th, 2004 at 8:41 am
I’m with Todd on this one. Murph is right that neighborhoods should not be frozen out of the planning process, but their participation would be more welcome if we lived in a city with leaders who didn’t cave in at the slightest vocal opposition, and actually made decisions based on the merits rather than the politics of the project. As Todd says, if these concerns were institutionalized into the process rather than evaluated ad-hoc we wouldn’t have to parse the motives of the neighborhood opponents.

My understanding to Personality’s question is that key leaders of the Ecology Center support the density goal–even though those who label themselves as environmentalists in this community are divided on the issue and that includes quite a few of the Ecology Center’s backers and funders. But the Ecology Center leadership believes they cannot make density a priority because of their other obligations and that someone else should lead the way. I can’t claim to speak for them directly, but I think this is accurate.
posted by Matt on December 8th, 2004 at 11:36 am
Todd, I think that the current method (of not involving any neighborhood input aside from the choice of whether or not to protest individual developments when they come up for Commission review) is a pretty poor one–this method can’t help but be adversarial, leading to to the neighbors making any arguments they can to defeat bad developments and the academics/bloggers defending absolutely any development, under the reasoning, “This is where we say, ‘no more!’ and defeat the obstructionists!” I’d really really like to see a method that took local concerns into account earlier–giving the neighbors a say into how their neighborhood would experience growth (but not giving them a veto on *whether* it would experience growth) would probably be preferable to the neighbors, the planning commission, and all the rest of us. I just don’t know how to get from here to there.
posted by Murph on December 8th, 2004 at 11:44 am
No-name, I wasn’t able to make last night’s re-hearing, but turned on the tv at 9. A few public comments struck me, such as one homeowner who noted that he’d lived in that house since he was a (architecture) student, and walked or took the bus to school all the time, and walked to work downtown now, yet still owned a car–he certainly wasn’t anti-student. The only comment I heard that was outwardly anti-student was made by a grad student. (AAiO, you gotta instill some order in your ranks–this kind of in-fighting just won’t do.) The grad student neighbor of the site was the only person I heard call (other) students “transient residents”.

Also, one of the Commissioners, fairly late in the discussion (which lasted until 11:30, when they voted 7-1 to recommend disapproval to the City Council, with Jennifer Hall being the only dissenting vote), mentioned that “there seems to have been a lot of discussion about this issue on the blogs lately,” and commented that “while a lot of that discussion seems to consider the neighbors to be NIMBYs, they don’t seem to be considering the quality of any given development. They strike me as BEANs, Build All of it, Everywhere, Now.” (He then apologized for making up lame acronyms on the fly.)
posted by Murph on December 8th, 2004 at 11:53 am
“–giving the neighbors a say into how their neighborhood would experience growth (but not giving them a veto on *whether* it would experience growth) would probably be preferable to the neighbors, the planning commission, and all the rest of us. I just don’t know how to get from here to there.”

You and I both know that what we need is a true Master Plan. The problem, of course, is that this should have been done decades ago. And I’m not talking about the current list of smaller plans….I’m talking about an integrated Master Plan that actually tries to incorporate (gasp) ideas from neighboring communities like Ypsi, Dexter and Saline.

Did you stay up late enough to see the woman from the project’s neighborhood? This complete rockstar stayed late to tell the commission that she and her neighbors were *for* mixed-use areas….by mixed use she meant students and residents. She wanted to point out that they weren’t NIMBY’s. It was great. These wishes/needs need to be put into the short term Master Plan.

And AAIO…..you should be pleased that policy makers are reading your site.
posted by todd leopold on December 8th, 2004 at 12:36 pm
Sorry I forgot to post my name–I don’t mean to imply that the neighborhod association is completely “wrong,” and I in fact agree with your comments that housing should be of a high quality and that neighborhoods need to be involved early on in the planning process. But I don’t feel that this justifies being disrespectful toward the “opposition” during public meetings, and I was concerned by some comments, other than the grad student’s, that seemed to downplay student housing issues. One man did argue that the Frieze and private dorms on north campus would mean that there wouldn’t be as much of a need to build new student housing, and that development at the site shouldn’t be exclusively marketed to students. This may not be the “official” position of the neighborhood association, but it still suggests that anti-student feelings are present. On the plus side, I’m encouraged that they contacted Murph and seem willing to accept increased density in the neighborhood. But I feel that the neighborhood associations are equally prone to acting on stereotypes about students as we are in sometimes interpreting them as homogenous NIMBYs.
posted by Audrey on December 8th, 2004 at 12:47 pm
Todd, I tuned out immediately after the Commission finished discussion of 828 Greene. I suspect the rockstar was the woman named Julie who dragged me into all of this in the first place. She e-mailed me this morning saying, “so this was disapproved by the commission, *now* what do we do?”

More on the “now what” question later…
posted by Murph on December 8th, 2004 at 1:25 pm
AAiO — Do you get/keep statistics and information about visitation and referrals for the site? I’d be interested in how big the audience is and proportion of participants vs lurkers.
posted by Dale on December 8th, 2004 at 4:21 pm
We do need a new master plan with minimal density requirements by geographic zone and mandates that particular areas with much less density get with the program. This would also scatter multi-unit housing fairly around the city rather than have particular areas feel they are overly burdened by living on the “campus/town frontier.” Rick Hills circulated a good letter last year about this and of course the mayor and city council completely ignored it.
posted by Matt on December 9th, 2004 at 11:47 am
My last post should have said: minimum density requirements, not minimal. Sorry for the brief venture into NIMBYland.
posted by Matt on December 11th, 2004 at 12:23 pm
Lurkers??
posted by kate on December 12th, 2004 at 1:39 pm
Someone who reads but doesn’t post.
posted by Dale on December 12th, 2004 at 2:49 pm
and you see that as a problem?
posted by kate on December 12th, 2004 at 4:19 pm
??

“AAiO — Do you get/keep statistics and information about visitation and referrals for the site? I’d be interested in how big the audience is and proportion of participants vs lurkers.”

I just want to know how many people think Ann Arbor is overrated (and, if AAiO gets listings of IP addresses, where they are).
posted by Dale on December 12th, 2004 at 6:07 pm
I understood what you were trying to do, Dale, and what you meant by “lurkers.” I was just questioning your use of that particular word. (In my mind “lurkers” carries a negative connotation.) I thought because you used that word you were implying something negative about those of us who read but do not post. Doesn’t seem to be the case though. (Right?)
posted by kate on December 13th, 2004 at 10:51 am
Right.
posted by Dale on December 13th, 2004 at 3:53 pm