ann arbor is overrated.

Do They Come in “Baby Tee” Sizes?

Dave Cahill, frequent Arbor Update poster, is offering the latest in A2 hipster irony-wear: shirts that bear either the slogan “Town Not City” or a picture of a tall building with a line through it. These are poised to replace the Neighborhoodies “Straight Outta Skokie” shirts as the hottest local-inspired fashion trend; get one now before Ashton Kutcher picks up on it and ruins it for everyone.

58 Responses to “Do They Come in “Baby Tee” Sizes?”

Simply amazing.
posted by Big John on April 5th, 2006 at 11:35 am
I smell sarcasm aaio.

1) Of course they will come in “baby tee”, since a town is a baby city, and

2) will you give Cahill more props if his shirts have a “Ann Arbor Is Overpopulated” motto??
posted by David Boyle on April 5th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Cahill and Boyle make a lovely couple, but they really should seek out Blaine and complete the Three Stooges impersonation.
posted by Parking Structure Dude! on April 5th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
I apologize to one and all for inspiring Cahill’s new fashion line. Also, sorry again for the fanny pack craze of decades past. Yeah, that was me too.
posted by FAA on April 5th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
Poor Sucture Dud, your gutter sensibilities are coming to the fore again; maybe you and Joseph Mengele would make a truly “lovely couple”. I am not championing Cahill above, just making some jokes (including one re “Ann Arbor Is Overrated”). Re Arbor Update, I did right by calling Dale Winling on his public and possibly slanderous abuse of Cahill; Cahill, though, may have gone too far re Leigh Greden on another AU thread, so that Greden was perfectly within his rights to respond aggressively to Cahill. So I am not a mindless Cahill partisan; I’ve never even met Cahill.
Moreover, comparing either Cahill or me to Blaine is not exactly fair or accurate; Cahill, in particular, has some local standing and is not some cringing anonymous coward like you, with your particular brand of time-wasting public online masturbation. As always, you have my pity and my prayers.
posted by David Boyle on April 5th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
I try to follow the threads on AU about downtown development, but most of it is lost on me. I have, however, picked up on the fact that few seem to like David Cahill. Tell me: Who is David Cahill and why should I not like him?
posted by Daniel Adams on April 5th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Thanks for some levelheadedness Dan.

–Was that your letter in the Freep or DetNews the other day? I forget the topic, but it was a good letter…diversity-related, was it?
posted by David Boyle on April 5th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
David Boyle:

Usually the person lecturing on “gutter sensibilities” isn’t also the guy comparing others to Josef Mengele.

As always, I pray for you.

Leviticus 20:25,
posted by Daniel Adams on April 5th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
It had to do with a bad editorial the News ran Re: Ann Arbor and requiring developers to pay for low income housing. I think the Detnews is generally a better paper than the Free Press, but the libertarian leaning of their editorial board pisses me off.
posted by Daniel Adams on April 5th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Well, I get a shot back at PS Dud after what he did, so there we go.
Thanks for prayers and Bible verse–didn’t know you were a believer!

…Are DetNews really “libertarian”, or just Republican? There’s a difference.
posted by David Boyle on April 5th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
I’m not. Leviticus 20:25 is a passage on abominable birds.

RE: The Detroit News. I don’t believe that there is a difference. Libertarianism has become a sort of ideological bomb shelter for fiscal conservatives to hide in and wait for the republican party to kick its religious fanaticism. But given that most libertarians that I’ve met still vote republican, I don’t believe I’ll allow them the distinction. Since I use both terms synonymously and it was a free market policy that I was criticizing, I went with “libertarian.”
posted by Daniel Adams on April 5th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Check the Arbor Update thread for a pro-vs-anti-development haiku faceoff!

As for why people don’t like Dave Cahill, I don’t think it’s a personal thing; he’s just the most visible representative of the anti-density position who’s regularly seen around the blogosphere.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on April 5th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
test…let’s see if this starts listing the correct times now.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on April 5th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
David Cahill is an attorney and longtime local activist in the local Democratic Party and the ACLU, a former aide to Perry Bullard in the legislature (where he helped birth the Open Meetings Act and the Freedom of Information Act), a longtime participant in local online conferencing (starting years before blogs existed), and currently an elected member of the Ann Arbor District Library Board.

I know a lot of local bloggers like to think of Dave as a “typical NIMBY”, but that is a very mistaken view. He is sui generis, a concept unto himself, not typical of anything.

Unless you are simultaneously pro-development, pro-censorship, pro-government-secrecy, and pro-Republican, you will probably find that you agree with Dave’s advocacy on something.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on April 5th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
There are lots of people who I completely agree with on national issues but they turn into total NIMBYs as soon as anything threatens the status quo in their neighborhood (look at the stereotypical Cape Cod-summering liberal who wants to keep beaches private and windmills away from his gorgeous view.)
posted by ann arbor is overrated on April 5th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Indeed, discerning bloggers will hopefully agree with my advocacy on *everything.*

On development, I’m just a typical homeowner who wants AA to stay pretty much as is, rather than turn into Chicago.
posted by DaveCahill on April 5th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
Because Ann Arbor is in great danger of becoming Chicago . . .
posted by Nick on April 5th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
Well then maybe you can answer this: Why 4 stories? I like Ann Arbor. I like Chicago too, but agree that it would be bad in Ann Arbor turned into Chicago. I notice that most buildings in downtown Chicago are well above 4 stories. And while I don’t have numbers on this, I’d speculate that most commercial buildings in Ann Arbor at or around 4 stories. With the gulf between the Sears Tower and Burton Tower so wide, why is it important to limit buildings in Ann Arbor to 4 stories? Was that a number arbitrarily selected? Is there an optimal sunlight-to-height ratio that we’re looking for?

As an aside, while I like Ann Arbor in its current state, I do think that height is a good thing - even if it changes the character of the downtown area. When I think about what’s wrong with the American city, I don’t think vertical development. I think horizontal development - sprawl. Its the lesser of two evils.
posted by Daniel Adams on April 5th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
I remember two sources for the 4story limit. One is the now-classic Broadway Village Haiku. The other is Larry Kestenbaum saying that he thought a 4-story limit would pass in a city-wide vote. I don’t know where he came up with it.
posted by DaveCahill on April 5th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
“NOW, we blame LARRY…” (heh)
posted by David Boyle on April 5th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
“As for why people don’t like Dave Cahill, I don’t think it’s a personal thing; he’s just the most visible representative of the anti-density position who’s regularly seen around the blogosphere. ”

No, that’s not it.

Personally, I’d love to hear from people of the “anti-density” position with interesting things to say. David Cahill isn’t one of them. He decided on the answer long ago and appears to have absolutely no interest in the question, only in the personalities surrounding it. Probably he’s an otherwise interesting and intelligent person, but on this subject he’s mind-numbingly dull. The “Broadway Village Haiku” seems to be about as deep as his thinking on the subject goes.

But, hey, I’d love to be proved wrong.
posted by Bruce Fields on April 5th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
The Broadway four-story haiku came first, probably in the same thread where I speculated about the popularity of height limits.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on April 6th, 2006 at 1:29 am
Better T-shirt logo — Town Without City
A word play on 60’s Gene Pitney hit song “Town Without Pity”
Angst-ridden, aging A2 Baby Boomers would start humming & weeping nostalgic and Cahill could sell thousands of his T-shirts.
posted by E. Michael on April 6th, 2006 at 7:23 am
Gene Pitney died last night in his Cardiff hotel room. He was touring the UK.
posted by peter honeyman on April 6th, 2006 at 11:33 am
So the BVH was first? I’m surprised. And I didn’t even compose it. The BVH was written by someone who lives up the hill on Harbal.
posted by Dave Cahill on April 6th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
I’m sorry. I didn’t know about Gene Pitney’s death when I posted my snotty comment about using one of his songs to keep A2 silliness snarly.
My apologies to his family & fans.
posted by E. Michael on April 6th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
You meant no harm, I think.
As for not knowing: “eerie” coincidence there! Maybe Gene P. brushed out with one of his angel wings into your subconscious, so you came up with one of his songs…
posted by David Boyle on April 6th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
As far as snotty music references go, I’d wear an A2 Dems-branded “We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliate” shirt and I don’t agree with Mr. Cahill at all. That’d just be awesome.
posted by Dan on April 6th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Well done.
posted by Brandon on April 6th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
Didn’t Queen do a song that went, “We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliate, my friends” or something?
posted by David Boyle on April 6th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Hmmmm…well, I kind of think you’re overrated. Sometimes hilarious, but mostly desperate and pretentious, much like Ann Arbor itself. Funny how that works.
posted by 01Sass01 on April 6th, 2006 at 7:48 pm
When my sister came here to look for rental housing with me, she noted that Ann Arbor is like “a suburb without the urb”. I think she hit the nail on the head.
posted by Transplant on April 6th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
“We all live in a Yellow Arbmarine…”
posted by David Boyle on April 6th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
It was the Kinks.
posted by Dale on April 7th, 2006 at 6:26 am
From the also apt-for-Annarbour song on the album of the same name, The Village Green Preservation Society. One of my favorites. Todd, that’d be a good jukebox album, actually.
posted by Brandon on April 7th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Hey Sass, were you referring to David Boyle or AAIO?
posted by Brandon on April 7th, 2006 at 10:04 am
AAIO, I like David Boyle.
posted by 01Sass01 on April 7th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
I’m an Ann Arbor native. I left in part because Ann Arbor was developing in ways I didn’t like. It was in large part the realization that if I stayed I was unlikely to ever have a job that didn’t involve a long drive to work. I ended up in Berkeley, first commuting into San Francisco by BART (train), then working at home, and now moving into an office in my neighborhood that I’ll have a nice walk to. Everything else is in walking distance to my residential neighborhood — at least four grocery stores, lots of restaurants, stores selling almost everything else I need. Little of that is actually downtown, but in walkable commercial districts that dot the residential neighborhoods there.

In Ann Arbor I always lived fairly close to the center, and did tend to walk downtown, but there were always several times a day when I needed to drive somewhere. In Berkeley I have a car. It’s useful for getting out of town, and occasionally I really like having it, but I can go weeks without being tempted to drive it at times.

Ann Arbor’s got lots of development going on (or maybe Ann Arbor had lots of development, and now it’s all in the Townships). It just isn’t development that’s pleasant or easy to get around. I don’t understand the appeal. I don’t understand why people object to a sort of development that would seem a lot nicer to me.

Berkeley had a ballot proposal for a height limit a few years ago, that would have limited things to four stories downtown (shorter than a lot of what’s there now), and two stories everywhere else. It lost overwhelmingly, but it’s backers don’t seem to have noticed. They still claim to be speaking for everybody but the developers whenever they oppose something.

And, for the record, I’ve known Dave Cahill for many years, and generally found him to be pretty reasonable. I certainly don’t agree with him on this issue, but it would be a shame to turn such a disagreement into dislike.
posted by scg on April 7th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Ah Berkeley… I wish we had a Berkeley-Bowl here (exotic, well-stocked produce market that kicks the ass of anything I’ve ever seen, anywhere).

Visited in January and bought some crazy horned melon thing that I had never seen before just to try it.
posted by OFWinsurgent on April 7th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
Hi, Steve!
posted by DaveCahill on April 8th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Wait, the idea of “town not city” completly conflicts with the long held Ann Arbor idea that Ypsilanti is just Ann Arbor’s ghetto. Don’t you need to be a full sized city in order to have a ghetto?
posted by Ypsi Transplant on April 9th, 2006 at 3:42 am
About

“the idea of “town not city” completly conflicts with the long held Ann Arbor idea that Ypsilanti is just Ann Arbor’s ghetto”;

like A2 doesn’t have it’s own scabs.
posted by Anonymous on April 9th, 2006 at 9:25 am
its, not it’s
posted by peter honeyman on April 9th, 2006 at 10:24 am
My mother is a Cahill (though no relation to Dave I don’t think).

This comes from a long-time Ann Arborite now living in “Old” Europe with no plans to come back, and addresses some of the previous comments as well as the spat on arbor update.

It’s nothing new, and I’ve said it all before.

Population density in the city centers here (whether we’re talking about Paris or Berlin or Metz or Trèvés/Trier in Germany, where I live — a city of roughly 120,000) is accomplished with buildings of between 4 and 6 stories.

The ground floor is usually commercial or retail, but the MAIN thing is that the rents in the city center (with the exception of Paris, of course) aren’t astronomical.

I live 5 minutes walk from the city center and for a two-bedroom, 1-bath apartment with a big kitchen and a modest living room and a washing machine, I pay 650 Euros (approx. $780.00 U.S.) per month, including telephone and all utilities.

And the apartments on the upper levels in and near the city center here tend to have a ceiling-hight of just over 13 feet (4 meters) on average, especially if they date from before the 2nd WW, which most of them do. So in terms of outer building hight, you’re looking at 5 to 8 American stories (assuming roughly 10 feet per story).

Yes, here in the inner part of the city, we (the idle café sitters) offen complain bitterly that, with all these 80-foot buildings, even in summer you don’t get more than 3-5 hours of direct sunlight in most cafés, but we also know that if we really want sunlight, we can go to one of the city parks and sit outside there, just as you can in Ann Arbor.

So you don’t need new buildings or parking structures in Ann Arbor.

You need better buses (and also, to begin to view the busses as for everyone, not just those who can’t afford cars), you need strategic rent control, you need more people willing to live together who aren’t related or in a relationship (in otherwords, start to de-emphasize having your OWN property), and you need to ask yourselves what the f**k is going on with all that 2nd and 3rd story space on State, Main, Liberty and other such streets and who is renting it and for how much and why.

Also, granted Republicans are evil, but why has Ann Arbor let just one party run their city council (and run their city into the ground) over the past 20 years? Where are the Greens? Where are the moderate Republicans?

Back when I was just finishing with college, the rooms which made up the apartment over what was then the Lovin’ Spoonful were for rent, I think for about $1,000 per month. We almost went in on those rooms, 3 of us, but in the end we didn’t. Now, you have to go out to Ellsworth and Stone School to find prices like that.
posted by Daniel O'Connell on April 9th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
you need more people willing to live together who aren’t related or in a relationship (in otherwords, start to de-emphasize having your OWN property)

Well, you actually need more people willing to allow zoning in their neighborhoods so that people who aren’t related can live together. Not likely.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on April 9th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
The all-Democratic council is a brand new thing. Republicans held the majoity on the city council as recently as 1990.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on April 9th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
…in otherwords, start to de-emphasize having your OWN property

I thought Trier was in the western edge of Germany - this looks like East German talk to me.

I’m kidding, of course. Seriously, so long as there are tales and evidence of the horrors of renting there is going to be emphasis on OWNING property.
posted by FAA on April 9th, 2006 at 11:18 pm
“So you don’t need new buildings or parking structures in Ann Arbor.”

You’ve forgotten something important. In order to get the density to the levels that you’re loosely describing, you’ll have to talk the UMich Regents into allowing private contractors to build on State owned land, replacing open spaces or other small buildings that aren’t 4 story mixed use buildings.

Then you’ll have to take all the 2 story homes in the 10+ historic districs (the “historic districts” that you are used to in Europe likely started at 4 stories from the word “boo”), as well as all those lovely neighborhoods in and around downtown, LEVEL ALL THE HOMES, and build brand new 4 story mixed use buildings throughout Ann Arbor’s ‘city center’.

But yeah, if you can talk UMich and downtown home owners into that, you’ll be all set, and won’t have to build anything taller than 4 or 5 stories.

I’ve lived in European cities too, and what you are describing is great. The problem is the Urban/Suburban historical context of Ann Arbor is COMPLETELY different from where you are living.
posted by todd on April 10th, 2006 at 1:56 am
And replacing all the beautiful old houses with modern shit-strosities would make Ann Arbor a boring, lousy place to live.
posted by Dave on April 10th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
A lot of the “beautiful old houses” have little windows, low ceilings and are not at all energy efficient. I grew up here, and my nostalgia for a converted 1880’s stable on the OWS for 250K is at an all-time low.
posted by Michael McC. on April 10th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Lucky for you there are lots of ugly, boring modern subdivisions to choose from.
posted by Dave on April 10th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
No, those suck too. My favorite was a big loft next to Farmer’s Market for a hundred bucks a month. While back…
posted by Michael McC. on April 10th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
A hundred bucks a month? I should say more than a while back!
posted by Dave on April 10th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
“A lot of the “beautiful old houses” have little windows, low ceilings and are not at all energy efficient.”

Well, obviously I’d be happy if homeowners would do a little work on their homes…..I’m just pointing out, for the hundredth time, that when people tout European cities and their apparent denseness using only 4 or 5 stories, they (surprise, surprise) neglect the fact that you simply can’t build 4 or 5 story buildings in like 80% of Ann Arbor.
posted by todd on April 10th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
AAIO, do you mean there are actually zoning rules in AA that prohibit, e.g., 5 unrelated people from living in a house together? didn’t know that…

Look the criticisms are well taken, and yes, Trier, though similar in size, is vastly different from Ann Arbor, which has it’s own history and context, yadda yadda yadda… for one thing, Ann Arbor was not occupied by the French after WWII…

What people don’t seem to understand (don’t want to understand) about a town like Trier, however, is that we are really Disney in disguise. A lot of this stuff was rebuilt after the war, and what you see today was built or reconstructed between ‘45 and ‘55.

As for Ann Arbor, there is this mental disease in america, where we think (unless you have a town the size of Dexter) that

(a) we shouldn’t live “downtown,”
(b) where “success” is defined as moving out of your rental that you’ve had since student days on Tappan St. and buying a house out by Scio Church or out by Zeeb Rd or even down on N. First St. and
(c) where everyone HAS to have their own car, even if they work around the corner from where they live.

I just don’t know why that should be. I think it should be questioned.

I wasn’t saying we should build bigger buildings downtown… I just asked what was happening with all that 2nd and 3rd story space there, and no one has, as yet, answered that question directly.

Does anyone actually know?
posted by Daniel on April 11th, 2006 at 10:23 am
” just asked what was happening with all that 2nd and 3rd story space there, and no one has, as yet, answered that question directly”

No one answered because no one understands your question. If you mean “do people live on top of the storefronts?”, the answer is yes.

Is that it?
posted by todd on April 11th, 2006 at 10:30 am
I don’t know exactly how the zoning works everywhere here, but if you watch the zoning board of appeals, you’ll see things like a father being turned down in his request to allow his daughter to share a house he bought with three roommates. And there’s the whole accessory dwelling issue, where you’re not allowed to rent part of your house.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on April 11th, 2006 at 10:30 am
For decades, the upper floors of storefront buildings, pretty much everywhere outside of NYC and Boston, were severely underutilized and usually poorly maintained.

I used to live in the second floor of a 1950-era storefront building in downtown East Lansing. Friends of mine lived nearby in similar places. You might think it would be noisy living above a restaurant or other retail operation, but except for traffic noise, it was surprisingly quiet. These buildings were much more solidly constructed than typical student apartments, due to special “fire district” construction codes that applied only to the downtown.

In most cases the landlords were so focused on the valuable first floor space that they barely even remembered there were apartments upstairs. That was a bad thing when it came to utilities and repairs, but on the other hand, the low rent reflected the absentee owners’ assumption that space above stores was downscale and stigmatized.

A lot of the landlords took it for granted that they would eventually convert the upstairs apartments to office space, even though (1) the office space market was overbuilt and glutted, (2) downtown apartments were hugely in demand, and (3) creating office space would usually require installation of a costly elevator.

Meanwhile, in downtown Lansing, a friend of mine owned a 3-story storefront building (since burned down, alas), where the upper two floors, beautiful high ceilinged spaces only a few blocks from the State Capitol and other major employment sites, had been vacant and falling apart since the 1950s or perhaps earlier.

Just in the last few years in downtown Ann Arbor, upper floors of storefront buildings are suddenly being appreciated and the rents have gone up tremendously.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on April 16th, 2006 at 1:49 am

Do They Come in “Baby Tee” Sizes?

58 Responses to “Do They Come in “Baby Tee” Sizes?”

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