Among the reasons these are unlikely places for comparison is that these central cities exist inside of, and depend upon, metropolitan areas that are MUCH larger – millions of people larger – than the cities themselves. Chicago’s metropolitan population is 8 million people – more than twice the size of Chicago proper. Most “Chicagoans” do not live in Chicago. Is this the model we want for Ann Arbor? (This, i suspect, was what Mr. Eaton saw when he described dense cities as made possible by the sprawl around them. BTW, I thought the idea in Ann Arbor was to capture most of the “suburban” population in the city). People who live near the Chicago lakefront cannot reasonably go to the suburbs to shop; this ain’t the case for people living in Ashley Terrace, who can be at Meijer’s in 15 minutes. This size difference creates a whole different dynamic for the flow of daily life, from commuting to shopping.

Michigan is hungry for a functional central city. In that sense, I can understand the longings of those who wish to turn Ann Arbor into the new half-million to one million population center of Southeast Michigan. It’s not obvious how realistic this dream is – nor how desirable.

What I think Ann Arbor could do would be to create a model for how towns of our size can once again be the places to be in, not the places to be near. Among the elements no one discusses is decorum: when you live cheek-by-jowel, your quality of life is greatly affected by the behavior of your neighbors, and those who pass through your neighborhood. One of the principle reasons people prefer to live in less-dense environments (beyond an impulse to greenery and gardens) is that in those settings, you have a tad more control over the circumstances of your home life. This is a point that The Dense seem never to get, but that may well be the key social dynamic in the urban-surban dynamic. In America, people tend to flee urban settings when they can; an urbane setting, on the other hand, may well be the key to making Town a desirable place to settle. People live in Westchester County, NY or Lake County, IL, because, among other reasons, these are actually more urbane than the cities they are near. In Lake County, your neighbors might or might not be a tad more respectful of their neighbors than in many Chicago neighborhoods, but in any case they and their music are not living in the apartment above you. Decorum and urbanity matter.

Among the ironies of the claims made to want “density” or “walkable neighborhoods and downtown” are that the parts of Ann Arbor that were built “dense” and “walkable”, and which remain that way today, are precisely those targeted for demolition in the name of “transit-oriented development”, and “expanding downtown”. These buzzwords seem, as others here have suggested, to be euphemisms for subsidizing precisely the kind of building that will reduce our urbanity and increase our urbanism.

A great threat to a “dense” yet livable Ann Arbor is the University’s North Campus. The absence of significant student housing there is one of the things that makes central Ann Arbor so unattractive to workers and families. Students drive up the cost of housing, while bringing the kegger lifestyle to wherever they settle. A sufficient mass of attractive housing on North Campus would free up the older, smaller homes of central Ann Arbor for suburban residents to occupy.

Another great barrier to people wanting to live in Ann Arbor is its government. Expensive, obsessed with short-term Planning fads and often focused on issues that are not within its authority, I encounter many, many suburbanites who are frightened of the idea of living inside its maw. Until this problem is fixed, Ann Arbor seems likely to follow in the steps of every other failed central city in America: perhaps a place to live near, but certainly not the place to live in.

Mr. Eaton hit on another key point: it is the city’s intention to place its “transit oriented development” inside of Tax Increment Financing districts. The point of Tax Increment Financing is to ensure that new revenues from development do not make it into the city’s general fund. There will be no new revenues from new development, under this model, to support general city government.

Lastly, I would like to see what “People-Oriented Development” would look like. What ever it is, I bet it looks a lot more sustainable that development oriented around particular technologies.

If Ann Arbor were doing things right, you would see suburban residents clamoring to be annexed. I think the reason we are not seeing this is NOT because people are waiting for Transit Oriented Development Tax Increment Financing Districts to be established.

As long as big box stores have the alternative of locating outside the city where there is room for surface parking, they will not build in locations that require expensive parking structures.

People who use the bus, walk or bike to retail outlets are not dissuaded by large setbacks. The bus rider is more inconvenienced by routing that requires a trip downtown and back to get from one outlying location to another nearby location than by the walk across the parking lot at the end of the bus ride. The pedestrian and the bicyclist are more inconvenienced by the hostile traffic on streets like Stadium than by the walk across the Kmart parking lot. Reducing the setback between road and storefront addresses only a tiny encumbrance for those who might forgo automobiles.

Very few transportation trips are taken by foot, bike or bus. That is unlikely to change anytime soon. Rather than adopting the “if we don’t provide parking they will come by bus” planning, we should work to improve transportation systems. Longer hours of operation, more frequent scheduling, and improved perimeter routing are more likely to decrease car use than any changes to our planning regulations. But instead of improving urban transit, we are about to fund sprawl-encouraging commuter rail.

The population of the city is declining. The city and county have lost substantial numbers of jobs. Planning for growth addresses something other than the reality we face. Building extravagantly sized structures only adds to the amount of vacant property we already have.

For urban density to work we would need to replace a significant portion of the existing buildings we have. That would cause a huge problem with the resulting carbon footprint. Conversely, if we do not replace a significant portion of the existing development, we will fail to reach the density levels that are supposed to create all benefits of urban density.

The Area Height and Placement changes do not provide any particular solution to our loss of population and employment. The size and proximity changes do not provide greater environmental benefits than the carbon footprint problems that come from demolition and replacement style development. The AHP changes will only benefit developers who feel constrained by the old regulations.

re: Green Golf Courses -
Yes, a golf course can be green, or at least a lot greener than they have been in the past. In the last 10-15 years, golf course managers have greatly reduced herbicide/pesticide use, changed mowing practices, increased native plantings & rain gardens in sensitive areas, and redesigned courses for better drainage and erosion control,as well as monitoring water purity in streams and ponds. Fox Hills out on North Territorial was the area leader in this in the 1990′s(recognized by both the Audubon Society and NWF as bird & wildlife sanctuaries). Leslie & Huron Hills golf courses both proactively manage their lands along similar stewardship practices, as they cover major acreage in the Huron River watershed. With good management, any open land is by default “greener” than the same acreage covered with impervious surfaces like roads, roofs and parking lots.

Re: Lack of Parking at Whole Foods (and other places)
A growing number of shoppers I’ve met at Whole Foods and Trader Joes particularly, get there by other means to avoid the parking snarl. On my last visit to WF, I met shoppers using grocery carts on the bus, and at least 3 who towed their purchases home on child bike trailers. I always ride my bike to Whole Foods and tote things home in the panniers. More importantly, I’ve seen a big increase in people using the portable carts to shop at Hillers, Busch’s and Krogers – mainline grocery stores where people go much more often. Since the newer AATA busses have no stairs to climb and the “Stroller Spot” where you can wheel your cart out of the aisle and out of everyone’s way, shopping by bus has become much easier, more common and more on the bus drivers’ radar. A big improvement from my experience in 1984, trying to bring my new portable T.V. home from Briarwood on the bus and being told “It’s too big, you can’t bring it on here”.

re: Maple Village

Amen to that! How about also the former Georgetown Mall area on Packard?

Washtenaw County population, by contrast, has increased by 100,000 in the past thirty years. I don’t think 100% of those people would choose apartments or smaller, older homes over larger, more spacious suburban lots, but I do think a lot of them would have. Unfortunately, we haven’t given them much of a choice. Maybe something at Maple Village could be a step towards that goal.

I interpret the Daily article differently, too: “McClary said the demand for student housing has motivated developers to build more high rises and condominiums in the city.” There may be a surplus right now, as students take advantage of new apartments to abandon dilapidated “student ghetto” rentals, but over time, I expect that more of the latter will be rehabilitated by enterprising remodelers or preservationists (although they’ll have to tear out a lot of walls), enabling them to draw back the families who’ve been pushed out of town.

Jack, I entirely agree that merely limiting parking isn’t an effective sustainability strategy. In concert with better transit, pedestrian, and bicycle systems, however, I think it works quite well. To be sure, our practices haven’t yet caught up to our rhetoric on that front, as suggested by the publicly-sponsored parking garages under construction and discussion.

As a history major in undergrad, I’ve got to challenge your argument that walkable communities “are that way because of the surrounding sprawl.” That just isn’t true. Downtown Ann Arbor is walkable because the car didn’t exist when it first got built, and neither did the car-centric 1950s zoning regulations that prohibited anything like it from being built again. NYC, Chicago, and downtown Ann Arbor didn’t suddenly become walkable as they started to sprawl in the mid-20th century; they’d been that way all along.

I agree, too, that new infill shouldn’t all take the form of expensive high-rises. We need a mix of housing types: public housing, affordable rentals, and standard market-rate housing, not just overpriced luxury units, and single-family homes, duplexes, townhomes and mid-rise apartments in addition to high-rises. Given the choice between an exurban $300,000 McMansion and a $200,000 downtown condo, a lot of folks would choose the latter, and you can bet that a lot of students would rather be living in decent high-rise apartments instead of decaying, subdivided flats, freeing up the latter homes for families.

As I noted earlier, Ann Arbor’s population has been stable at 110,000 or so since 1980, even as the county population skyrocketed by 100,000. I call that population growth, and while I’m not sure how sustainable population growth is, I’m quite sure that if some of that population had been able to live in Ann Arbor, where they actually have (admittedly limited) transit service, we’d have a much more sustainable county with a much improved quality of life.

Sprawl isn’t inevitable, nor is it primarily a creature of the market economy. There are a range of deeper causes, but if we look exclusively at direct causes, the two most obvious ones are government policies: transportation spending oriented almost exclusively towards the car, and zoning that mandates a single kind of low-density development.

The AHP changes are no panacea. Even cities that have made progress towards sustainability by similar means have been limited by the persistence of enormous institutional supports for sprawl (like highway-centric federal transportation policy). But I believe progress is possible, not to mention necessary, given the fact of climate change. And the AHP changes represent, to my mind, a big step forward, for Ann Arbor’s sustainability and our quality of life.

Am I to understand that you believe that sustainable building requires us to abandon our practice of providing large parking lots? The idea that if we do not provide parking, customers will find other means of transportation to our retail sites seems inherent to the density goal. The Whole Foods on Washtenaw was built without sufficient parking and there is no evidence that its customers have resorted to other means of transportation.

Similarly, the mixed use development at Green and Plymouth was designed with reduced parking as an integral aspect of its design. The developer returned to the Planning Commission late last year and sought permission to replace a planed restaurant with more parking – in part because of a lack of financing for the restaurant and in part because he was losing potential retail tenants because there was not enough parking.

We can pretend that failing to provide adequate parking will result in more walking, biking and mass transit use. Unfortunately, it will just encourage developers to place retail outlets outside of town, like Costco did. What if we plan a city based on an assumption that car use will decline dramatically but instead find that alternate fuel and hyper-efficient vehicles allow individuals to continue using cars? Will it be sustainable to go back and try to supply sufficient parking?

There may be types of development that are more sustainable than big box stores. Nonetheless, there are companies like Best Buy, CVS and Target that will insist on single story, big box stores, so long as that is a possibility. No zoning requirement will change that. If we don’t allow that kind of development in the city, it will be built in the surrounding townships — so much for avoiding sprawl.

Places that are densely populated enough to provide walkable communities — like Chicago or New York — are that way because of the surrounding sprawl. The lack of area to spread into causes the central density. Clearly, the density in those cities did not prevent sprawl. Unless surrounding communities, like Scio, Whitmore Lake and Saline, give up their desire to grow, no zoning changes in Ann Arbor will stop, or even slow, sprawl. There is a limited demographic who will choose a $300,000, two-bedroom condo in a tower at Huron and Ashley over a $300,000 3-bedroom home with a yard and attached garage locally or in a nearby community.

With the loss of population in Michigan, including Ann Arbor, we should not be planning for growth. The loss of population will mean high vacancy rates that will make newly constructed high-density homes less affordable than existing homes. We need to stop planning for population growth and start planning for an improved quality of our community.

The idea that projected job growth in Ann Arbor is reason to push high density development is equally flawed. We have yet to replace the Pfizer jobs the city lost. We have considerable housing stock that is vacant and available. There is little reason to believe that those hired into the mythic new jobs will be able to afford the high prices of new development.

The AHP proposal does not address any problem we currently experience. It also does not address our environmental concerns. The carbon footprint from demolition undermines any walkability/LEEDS gains. The development of expensive new high-rises does not offer a real alternative to suburban life.

Are the people in Chelsea, Saline and Pittsfield willing to move to apartments, condos or other dense housing, or will they hang on to the favorite ideal of a big backyard? Hard to say.

Now if anyone wants to take up the sea of concrete at Maple Village with interesting new developments, you will receive my blessings.

Great that we still have a chance to weigh in on AHP. It has been going on for a while now.

Demolition is entirely possible under existing zoning. Unfortunately, new structures that support sustainable living are not. Our 1950s-era zoning regulations require giant parking lots and huge crabgrass monocultures (due to building setbacks, etc.). That’s not sustainable. The regulations also ensured that if the number of jobs in Ann Arbor increases – as it has over the past several decades – increasing numbers of people won’t be able to find housing in town, since little new housing can be built. Instead, they’re forced to drive from Chelsea, Saline or Pittsfield, and park at new, expensive parking garages. That’s neither sustainable nor fair.

Unless we have a command-and-control economy, we aren’t faced with a choice between growth and no growth. We can only decide whether growth happens in existing cities, or whether it gets pushed onto surrounding farmland. New construction will generate carbon emissions – there’s no question of that. But there’s also no question that new infill development is far more sustainable than sprawl.

I’ve lived in Ann Arbor most of my life, and I believe 100% that the AHP changes will benefit the community (and the planet). In fact, if I could risk just a little hyperbole, I think that over the long term I think they may benefit us more than just about anything else that’s come before Council in recent memory.

The AHP proposal seems particularly ill-conceived from a sustainability point of view. It encourages demolition and replacement of existing structures to achieve “transit friendly” developments. Demolition and replacement creates a huge carbon footprint. We need policies that encourage restoration and retro-fitting. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

LiberalNimby, new construction does not guarantee additional tax revenue. If we add to our already substantial surplus of housing and commercial real estate, it will drive property values and property tax revenues down. Moreover, the large, multi-use developments that the City seeks to encourage with the AHP proposal usually come with exotic TIF schemes that drain off any new property tax revenue. The AHP changes will provide short term benefits to developers, but will not benefit the community.