The fairy doors are spreading westward to Jackson! Well, sort of. This one materialized at a yoga studio in an establishment known as “Pink Heels at Art 634,” which suggests a terrifying possibility: suppose fairy doors are actually ruptures in the space-time continuum that allow little bits of Ann Arbor to spring up all over the state?
“Students get trash tickets,” reports the News. Quoted in this article are: an employee of a church that’s next to a fraternity, an executive director of a fraternity’s national organization, a landlord, a police lieutenant and Mayor Hieftje. As is sometimes the case with these kinds of stories, we have a nagging feeling that talking to a member of some other group — perhaps the one named in the headline — would have made for more complete coverage.
The reporter does, however, deserve kudos for at least trying to investigate the landlord’s claim that city trash enforcers “are really aggressive. They will come Saturday at 8 a.m. and write you a ticket while you guys are sleeping.” Not surprisingly, “the city would not allow The News to review the tickets to see the times and dates they were written.”
CORRECTION: The reporter, Tom Gantert, did in fact try to talk to the members of one of the fraternities accused of trash violations.
“West side neighbors blast student housing complex,” reports the News. Maybe literally if they don’t get their way! Council decided to reject the Planning Commission-approved apartment building on the west side last night, after intense neighborhood opposition. And we mean intense. One resident, the News reports, “said the group would fight the project being built and occupied. He said they wouldn’t injure employees or destroy equipment, but promised ‘black ops’ and referred to his past military training. ‘Don’t skimp on the security budget…See you on the barricades.’” Now that’s the way to oppose a project! None of this namby-pamby rhetoric about “preserving neighborhood character” and “maintaining the diversity of the area.”
First Lucy Ann Lance was let go from WAAM. Now the “Community Life” section of The Ann Arbor News is being cut as well. It doesn’t look good for the future of local news and reporting in Ann Arbor.
Why should bloggers and blog readers care about the demise of the ossified mainstream media? Because we need them. We’ve always thought of the relationship between bloggers and mainstream media as being roughly analogous to the one between Hercule Poirot and Scotland Yard Chief-Inspector Japp:
[Captain Hastings:] “You could go out and solve this case magnificently if you only would.”
Poirot replied that he preferred to solve it sitting at home.
“But you can’t do that, Poirot.”
“Not entirely, it is true.”
“What I mean is, we are doing nothing! Japp is doing everything.”
“Which suits me admirably.”
“It doesn’t suit me at all. I want you to be doing things.”
“So I am.”
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“Pour que mon chien de chasse me rapporte le gibier,” replied Poirot with a twinkle.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the good Japp. Why keep a dog and bark yourself? Japp brings us here the result of the physical energy you admire so much. He has various means at his disposal which I have not. He will have news for us very soon, I do not doubt.”
Newspapers have various means at their disposal that we don’t: time, resources and job freedom. The blogs-vs.-traditional media debate tends to obscure this. Blog proponents try to argue that we don’t need the traditional media at all. Mainstream media partisans realize that we do, but tend to attribute the need to their own superior writing, analytical skills or editing process.
Bloggers analyze and interpret. The mainstream media analyzes and interprets too, so maybe they don’t need us so much, but we need them; we need the results of the physical energy that Captain Hastings admires so much in order to have things to analyze and interpret. If things keep going the way they’re going, we’ll be practicing our bark.
Tomorrow night Council debates changing the zoning of Golden Avenue to single-family. We thought we’d look through the Planning Commission minutes, which can be found here, to see why this change is bring proposed; much like lower taxes, less development in a neighborhood is something that people rarely call for without having judiciously considered all the implications.
And Golden Avenue residents are nothing if not judicious. Declares one, “the student housing areas were like a war zone with illegal drinking and a wide variety of activities.” A wide variety of activities? We can’t have that on Golden Avenue, where only five activities are on the approved list (a sixth, Parcheesi, will be considered at the next neighborhood association meeting.) Well, at least he didn’t compare student neighborhoods to parking garages!
Another “wondered who would have a greater sense of participation in the community, questioning if it would be a renter, an absentee landlord, or families who lived here, people who walked throughout the neighborhood, people who cared about each other. He thought the Planning Commission should take that into consideration.” Indeed, families do not rent their homes, and single people do not care about their neighbors. Not enough local governments take these facts into consideration when setting public policy.
Finally, “Edward Vielmetti…stated that this neighborhood was characterized by streets that were blocked off in the summer for parties and by people knowing their neighbors…he welcomed the R1D zoning, which was appropriate for the density and character of the neighborhood.” Kind of disappointing.
It’s encouraging that not every non-renter resident of the neighborhood is taking the NIMBY line, though. Says one:
If his property and others in the neighborhood were already zoned R1D, he said, he would not be here. He said he moved into a large three-bedroom apartment house and came to love the diversity and character of the neighborhood, which was why he purchased his home here. He stated that the proposed rezoning would undermine the type of community he would like to see in his neighborhood.
Every member of the Planning Commission except for Ron Emaus voted for the rezoning, so we can’t imagine that it will have a hard time in Council. Almost all of the speakers speaking out against the proposal were landlords; for some reason, no students spoke at the December 18th meeting.
We missed this story in the Daily from last week about the Burns Park zoning changes, and having read it, we still feel like we’re missing a lot of the story. For instance, a business school student says “he thinks people are concerned about property values, not the neighborhood itself. ‘It’s really an issue for the investors,’ he said.” Which “people” are concerned about property values? The landlords or the single-family house owners? We are also told that someone named “Berggren” thinks that “the area already has about as much density as it can stand,” although we are never given her first name or any other identifying information.
Why are the non-student residents of the area proposing such a change? “Maybe it’s the beer cans on their lawns. Or the loud noise late at night. Maybe it’s the lack of community that occurs when your neighbors leave every year or two.” Maybe the Old West Side Association newsletter has infiltrated the Daily. Anti-renter language is in full effect here; “homes” are in danger of being “converted into student rentals,” which might cause “student encroachment.” If the area is zoned for multiple-family, then why aren’t the single-family houses “encroaching”?
Perhaps the best quote in the article: “Susan Johnson-Jaworski, who lives on Golden Avenue with her husband and their three children under the age of seven, said she doesn’t want the neighborhood to be overdeveloped…’[I]f we multiplied the number of people in the neighborhood, it would change the atmosphere.’” (Emphasis ours.)
Like, if there were a sudden increase in the number of households with five people living under the same roof, that might really cause some problems with overpopulation.
If there’s anyone who should be able to dispel the idea that the new Burns Park zoning proposal is based on anti-student demagoguery, it’s an alum from 1970 who grew up in the neighborhood. Writes “Alum 70,” “Having students next door are [sic] a constant problem…The students are for the most part gone in three years at most and also have no intention of being a part of a long term community. The effects of this can be seen all over Ann Arbor.” So, in other words, no one who plans to live in a place for less than some specified number of years — 10? 20? — should be able to live anywhere.
And not only do these students trash the city’s neighborhoods, they’re also responsible for eliminating gas stations near campus (possibly because they don’t want to fill up the cars with which they clog up the streets.) “I assume they didn’t want the low-class types that were employed there to spoil the elitism of the academic environment.” It’s a good thing we have egalitarian populists like Alum 70 to stand up for the common man.
It must be due to this deep love of equality that s/he affirms the Daily’s opposition to the University Village development; the editorial’s arguments about economic stratification must have been quite convincing, because otherwise one might think that such a development would be a good way to get these interlopers out of neighborhoods like Burns Park.
The Daily bypasses the most anti-student arguments against the new 26-story residence on South U and goes for the most sophisticated one in the anti-density arsenal: more housing would be great, but just not this project. University Village “will turn out to be a high-end apartment complex serving the richer students on campus” that will compromise “the University’s ability to provide an equal and diverse atmosphere in which all of its students can interact.” All right, perhaps the wealthiest students will in fact miss out on the wonderful consciousness-raising opportunity that is the current state of rental housing in A2, but can anyone tell us how putting more housing near Central Campus will create a situation where “students who cannot afford the pricey housing near campus are pushed farther out to the margins of campus to find cheaper rent”?
A student Livejournaler regurgitates townie talking points about spoiled, pampered students destroying the character of the city:
So, in the Daily, I read a bit about the proposed 26 story sky rise with four bedroom suites, built-in washers/dryers and all this good stuff. Sounds like a pretty place, I suppose. Especially if you can afford it, seeing as Mom is a lawyer and Dad a doctor. What nice dessert after the BMW you got for your 16th birthday.
The new apartments might take pressure off the rental market, but what’s that compared to the opportunities for self-discovery provided by the current state of A2? “It is in Ann Arbor that I finally awakened after laying dormant for 18 years in a kingdom of upper middle class monotony,” she writes. Wait, sorry, what was that? We’ve been asleep for the last 6 years.
Who and/or what are the Ann Arbor Seven? It looks like it’s somehow related to the destruction of the neighborhoods of A2, which we’re always for, but the details are intriguingly scanty. The following remark does little to elucidate the issue:
Defend the Ann Arbor Seven
as if six were nine, well that means the developments will destroy not six, not nine but all they can
Wait, maybe it has something to do with the Dwarf-landlords in their halls of stone.