ann arbor is overrated.

Todd Leopold has just announced that he and Leopold Brothers are leaving A2 for Denver. Writes Todd:

Our lease expires in the summer, and shockingly (note heavy sarcasm), our landlords asked for an obscene amount per month in rent, so we’re done. This move has zero to do with the economy, or sales levels, as we are coming off of our strongest year of sales at the pub since we’ve been open. We moved here in 1998, and since that time our rent has tripled, and our new landlords want even more….because, of course, that’s what the market will bear.

I hope to run into you all before we leave, and I wish Ann Arbor the best. The business climate isn’t one that we can survive, however.

We used to live more or less across the street from Leopold’s, and it figures in a lot of our best memories of Ann Arbor. Which sounds like the equivalent of saying that something figures in a lot of one’s best experiences at the periodontist, so let’s say that it would have figured in a lot of the best memories of any city we’ve lived in.

“City says: Talk to the neighbors.” AAIO says: Talk to the hand. (Sorry.)

It seems that the reason that all these proposals are passed by the Planning Commission and then rejected by council is that the developers aren’t seeking neighborhood input. Or they’re seeking it, but not doing anything about it, like walking away with their tails between their legs. So under a new Sabra-Briere-sponsored proposal, developers will be required to find out if the neighbors are, say, planning to carry out a terrorist attack if the new project passes. Then they must respond to these concerns, before any public hearing is held. “You involve the neighborhood stakeholders and you get their support, within reason,” says developer Peter Allen. “Stakeholders,” of course, are considered to be only those who live in the neighborhood currently.

At least you rarely hear a Planning Commission meeting speaker start out, “I’m Jane Smith, and I live at 11235 Golden Avenue. Well, I do in the alternate version of the future in which you approve this project, anyway.”

“Facebook could hurt you!” News at 10, after our exclusive on KILLER SUNSCREENS! Actually, this was the topic of a recent faculty talk on “online privacy and boundaries.” Panelists agreed that “it’s naive for students to think that only their friends are looking at their Facebook profiles because often, employers and others are looking at them too” (the one dissenting voice noted in the Daily story was that of School of Information professor Paul Conway, who argued that “in the future, society might have looser standards about what is inappropriate because almost everyone will have an online past.”) Tenured faculty, of course, have academic freedom and do not have to worry about retaliation for what they publish online or anywhere else.

There is no hypocrisy involved in having a tenured faculty position and not believing that every other employee in the world is entitled to exactly the same academic freedom. But at a time when employee protections are being eroded across the board, it would be nice to see something from the academy other than uncritical cheerleading for businesses that seek to monitor and punish the online speech of its graduates.