ann arbor is overrated.

The Clinton campaign is characterizing Obama’s efforts to draw student voters as “trying to manipulate the Iowa caucuses with out-of-state people” who have no business participating in the election, unlike “people who live here, people who pay taxes here.” Writes John K. Wilson at Inside Higher Ed, “[H]er campaign is skillfully appealing to the most xenophobic prejudice of older Iowa residents: the fear of people from Illinois.” Well, Illino-Iowan relations have never quite recovered after that devastating tollbooth bombing.

Another thing we’ve noticed about some of the Burns Park zoning coverage: language that suggests a certain point of view. “Portions of that neighborhood currently occupied by single-family homes are actually zoned for multiple-family and two-family dwelling units…Homes already used as students [sic] rentals would ‘grandfathered’ under the plan, unaffected until any change in their use.” These are homes. Something must be done before they’re converted into “rentals” and “dwelling units”!

The News leads off with quotes from both sides of the debate in their story on the Lower Burns Park rezoning issue — house owners, who don’t want to live near those icky renters (as ably represented by Mayor Hieftje), and landlords, who worry that the value of their investments may decline if they can’t rent to the icky renters any more. But we can’t help feeling like there’s some group that’s not being represented in the coverage. Maybe it’s the commuters who will have to drive through the neighborhood, or the map makers who will have to redraw their boundaries if the area’s zoning is changed to single family. Hmm, we’re sure it will come to us eventually.

It used to be that neighborhoods had to do a little work to get rezoned as R1D (R1D of the Students and Renters). Put up a website with some plaintive-folk-soundtracked videos about the destruction of the neighborhood, give impassioned speeches to city council about how your high school kids can’t find a place to park their RAV4s on the street — something. But the residents of Lower Burns Park appear to have got their pro-sprawl proposal to appear before council with merely a well-placed word to Councilmember Higgins or Teall. Neighborhood residents, the resolution says, “have requested that portions of the Lower Burns Park Neighborhood area be rezoned from R4C (Multiple-Family Dwelling District) and R2A (Two Family Dwelling District) to R1D (Single-Family Dwelling District) to preserve the existing single-family character of the neighborhood.” Council will vote on the resolution as soon as they make a decision on the Oxbridge neighborhood’s proposed “pony for every household” plan.

“How much do you want to subsidize golf?” asks a consultant studying the city’s money-losing public golf courses. Well, if “you” refers to the citizens of A2, the answer is “a lot”; as Tom Gantert’s story points out, this is a city where a write-in city council candidate almost beat a moderately popular incumbent by running on a one-issue “save the golf courses” platform. The courses are, the consultant argues, “an inferior product that is overpriced in a highly competitive market.” And, as we all know, there’s no room for overpriced, inferior products in Ann Arbor.

According to the consultant, the golf courses suffer from a lack of visibility. “The city should spend $25,000 on marketing for things such as highway billboards and newspaper advertisements … ‘If you don’t know where Leslie Park is, you can’t find it.’” Actually, that would be a great advertising slogan. Leslie Park: not only overpriced and inferior, but also inconvenient and inaccessible except to an elite few! If the city goes with this ad campaign, we predict that the courses start turning a profit in the next couple months.

It’s Anglin and Briere: the First 100 Days! Only — they’re going all reasonable on us? “Newly elected Council Member Sabra Briere, D-1st Ward, cautioned about asking the DDA to spend the money” on the Y building demolition. Caution, eh? (The News, by the way, could save some ink by leaving out all those superfluous D’s.) And Anglin “wanted more time for public input to see if demolition was what the residents wanted. ‘We can knock it down anytime we want,’ he said.” In keeping with his campaign promise to make government less decisive, but still. This election was supposed to be the best thing that ever happened to A2 bloggers; they’d better not let us down now!

What is up with today’s young people putting all their personal information on MySpace and YouTube? asks a letter in the News that includes its writer’s full name and city. “We need to get back to what my generation did in our spare time — walk, talk, play with our friends outside in person and do our homework and chores as soon as we arrived home from school. We never had time to allow for a total takeover of our household by an Xbox, GameCube, PlayStation, YouTube nor MySpace.com because we were too ‘wham’ busy.” Yeah, what the “spell” do these kids think they’re doing?

This A2 nonstory made Gawker — and the explosive breakup of Jakob Lodwick and Julia Allison didn’t? (If you don’t know what we’re talking about, we’d suggest not clicking on that second link; once you’ve become aware of the world of techno-hipster fameballs who tumblr-log their relationships and post videos of “lip dubs,” you can never unsee what you’ve seen and return to a state of relative Midwestern innocence.)

It’s been too long. This has been a rough (stressful, not traumatic) couple of weeks for AAIO (the person, not the blog.)

We will be back on Monday with new content. Mike Anglin is now officially a member of the A2 city council — how could we not be?

ann arborially,
aaio