Yellow: new law school building to be constructed in place of surface parking. Blue: student commons to be renovated. Monroe Street is the road just north of the new law school building. (Click image for larger view.)

Glimpsing through the door of room 116 of Hutchins Hall at UM Law School on Tuesday evening, The Chronicle could see what seemed like a late-evening class in session. Not sure of the room number we wanted, it was with some caution that we nosed further into the room. Ah. The familiar faces of Tony Derezinski, newly elected Ann Arbor city council representative of Ward 2, and Dave DeVarti, until recently a DDA board member, confirmed we were in the right place. It was a meeting hosted by UM to discuss with interested neighbors UM’s interest in a permanent closure of a section of Monroe Street. Representatives from the UM were Sue Gott, university planner, and Jim Kosteva, director of community relations. The section in question is between Oakland on the east and State Street on the west.

The idea is that the area would become a pedestrian zone, but still accessible to emergency vehicles. It would serve to connect “physically and psychologically” the new law school building to be constructed on the south side of Monroe between State and Oakland and the buildings to the north of Monroe.

Having arrived after Gott’s presentation of the project details, The Chronicle pieced together those bits from the 7 or 8 citizens’ comments and questions, which were already well under way. DeVarti was recalling a demonstration some two years ago in connection with some event at the Ford School involving Alan Haber and some other left-thinking folks. DeVarti said that UM police had told the demonstrators they could not stand with their signs on the sidewalk on the UM side of State Street. The demonstrators had complied with the UM police request to leave, DeVarti said, adding that he himself would have been inclined to allow himself to be arrested on the basis that it was a public sidewalk.

Just when The Chronicle was beginning to question if we were actually in the right room, DeVarti connected the dots to the proposed street closure: What guarantees the continued right to freely express dissent in Monroe Street if control of the public right of way is turned over to UM? In the ensuing discussion, it became apparent that this was a key component of the UM proposal: the city of Ann Arbor would cede the public right of way to control by UM. Philosophically, DeVarti said he had a problem with substituting UM police – who have an “insulated process of accountability” via the UM Regents, who are elected in statewide elections for 8-year terms – for city of Ann Arbor police officers, who are overseen more directly via democratically-elected city council members.

Local attorney Jonathan Rose pressed the point of DeVarti’s demonstrators who were asked to leave. He asked both Kosteva and Gott: “Do you believe there’s a risk that this [ceding of the public ROW] will have a negative effect on the freedom to express dissent?” Gott wanted nothing to do with the topic. “I can’t speak to that,” she said. Kosteva, for his part, handled the question by suggesting that he and Rose disagreed about their perceptions of UM. Kosteva said that he saw the UM campus as a place that is open and conducive to dissent. He allowed that there were thresholds that couldn’t be crossed – for example, setting up booths, stands or tabletops without a permit. He also outlined a step-by-step protocol for managing disruption of speakers on campus.

But Kosteva eventually granted part of Rose’s point: that the overall ambiance resulting from a street closure so that the area became more clearly a part of campus could have an effect of making that area less conducive to the expression of dissent.

Rose then asked what other reason there might be for UM to want control of the public ROW other than to be able to curb expression of dissent, perhaps even against itself: “I haven’t heard a reason why it matters for traffic, safety, ambiance, whether UM controls it or the city of Ann Arbor controls it. Is there any reason?” Gott offered that if UM controlled it, then access for snow removal and care of plantings would be easier. DeVarti countered that there’s a requirement for property owners to keep sidewalks clear.

In addition to the philosophical, the meeting covered numerous nuts and bolts issues: transportation strategies, bump-ins, lane additions, parking management strategies. And Rose wrapped up the meeting by saying that he was “impressed in a positive way with the astuteness that parking has been analyzed: it should be optimal and not maximal.” But hammering home the philosophical point, he concluded: “This astuteness does not equate to turning over public right of way to the university. Come up with something else. Turning over the rights of who comes and goes to the administration of the University of Michigan is wrong.”

One of the nuts and bolts issues raised by one property owner in the area was possible compensation to the city of Ann Arbor for the land acquisition that the UM was proposing. Kosteva said that UM was not currently contemplating any quid pro quo and portrayed any such arrangement in a historical context where there had not been such arrangements. Kosteva stressed that there were extensive financial arrangements with the city – including compensation – for a variety of projects: the Forest parking structure, park and ride lots on Green Road and South State, re-surfacing of streets adjacent to campus. He mentioned the high-capacity transit connector, for which a study is currently being undertaken, as an example of a project where the city, the DDA, and AATA were partnering with equal financial contributions. Kosteva also pointed out that there are UM roads on north campus that it allows people to use as a public thoroughfare, but there is no accounting for that. Said Kosteva, “Some may and some may not keep a tally.”

To this the resident said that he loved the university and that no one could argue the massive benefit the institution brought to the community. But as a property owner, he said, he was increasingly concerned that as property taxes rose the financial burden on individual property owners grew, while the university, which does not pay property taxes, was free of the financial burden of taxation as well as the need to comply with any of the city codes.

Another nuts and bolts issue had to do with the impact on traffic from closing Monroe. Gott presented maps indicating various levels of traffic flow for intersections in the area, which were mostly in the A and B range. The measures of traffic flow are “service levels” in traffic engineering jargon, and are graded based on a scale roughly like grades in school. The three maps that Gott displayed  showed current and projected levels of service. It is the fact that Monroe is very lightly traveled by motor traffic that has convinced university planners it’s feasible to close it completely to traffic. DeVarti noted that one intersection (from The Chronicle’s seat, it appeared to be Oakland & Hill) showed improvement from D to C, instead of the slight worsening of service shown by other intersections “How do you explain that?” asked DeVarti. Other than to confirm that a change from D to C represented an improvement, Gott was not able to offer an explanation. DeVarti joked that maybe we should just put a letter B there, because that would be an even greater improvement.

To the question of whether there were any other properties coveted by the university for acquisition in a similar fashion, Kosteva and Gott said they did not know of any. But DeVarti pointed to Buffalo Street, which is the city-owned parking lot north of gate 9 of the Michigan Stadium. “The university wants that!” said DeVarti. There may be even more recent history, but The Chronicle found a resolution from the year 2000 which Ann Arbor’s city council passed on the matter:

RESOLVED, That the City reject the idea to vacate Buffalo Street, for the third time in six years;

RESOLVED, That the City develop a plan to maximize continuing income from the property through parking permits, special events parking, and/or leasing of the site to a private/public entity;

RESOLVED, That the City evaluate the site for affordable housing, and other uses that would help the City meet its goals and objectives;

RESOLVED, That the City not entertain the idea of vacating Buffalo Street to the University of Michigan until a final use of the property by the University is made public and the University and City provides for public review of the project and impact it may have on the surrounding neighborhoods;

A further nuts and bolts issue that DeVarti said needed to be better explained is the motivation for closing the street, especially in light of the fact that UM acknowledges that it does not require the closure for its space needs – the buildings could still be built in exactly the same way without the pedestrian area between them. “Does the dean not want to cross the street? Have students said in a survey that they don’t like to cross the dangerous Monroe Street?” joked DeVarti. Gott said that there was an interest in the physical and psychological connection and continuity of campus. The Chronicle found this idea expressed in a report from consulting firm Johnson, Johnson & Roylinc.

In addition, the vacation of Monroe Street between Oakland and State and East Madison Street between Packard and Thompson [Chronicle note: cf. discussion above of other streets possibly of interest to UM] would help to re-enforce the pedestrian orientation of the core of the campus without detracting from the ability of vehicles to move about the campus in an effective manner. The University should be prepared to work with the City toward the improvement of certain intersections which are essential to an effective circulation pattern in the Central Campus area. In particular, the State/Hill/Packard area and the Packard/Division area could benefit from simplification and improvements to existing traffic flow patterns. Finally, the sense of arrival and entrance at the campus boundaries needs to be strengthened visually so that visitors arriving on the campus will realize that they have in fact arrived at The University of Michigan Central Campus and then can proceed to their desired destination. Detailed information on campus destinations and circulation systems should be provided at these entry ways and at the point where visitors change mode of transportation from the vehicular to the pedestrian mode. In some cases where the entrance to the campus is primarily by pedestrians, such as the corners of State and North University and East University and South University, specific design approaches incorporating ideas such as low seat walls, special pavement patterns or even sculpture could be used to signify entrance to the campus itself.

The date on the report is 1987. DeVarti said that he thought that a key difference between the UM campus and the MSU campus in Lansing was the degree of integration with the surrounding community at UM. Integration, he said, was something that he’d heard time and again as something that was valued about the UM campus. He said that he thought the two values of coherence of campus and integration with the community were both important and it was a matter of balancing them.

The meeting resulted in a couple of specific suggestions that Gott and Kosteva said they would look into: (i) the suggestion for a bump-in on State Street at the end of Monroe for loading and unloading and student drop off, (ii) the suggestion to pursue at least a temporary arrangement for UM to use the Pfizer parking structure.

Editor’s note: Chronicle readers who see a clear connection between this story and the discussion of the Quickie Burger liquor license transfer get bonus points for reading previous Chronicle articles really closely.

City of Ann Arbor systems planner Wendy Rampson responds to a question from Ed Walsh, a citizen who attended Monday's A2D2 briefing in city council chambers.

At a work session sometime in January 2009, city council is expected to discuss proposed zoning changes to downtown Ann Arbor, which have emerged from a process involving consultants, staff, and the public over more than two years. But before that, the A2D2 steering committee, which consists of Roger Hewitt (DDA), Marcia Higgins (city council) and Evan Pratt (planning commission), will meet in the Larcom Building’s sixth-floor conference room on Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 6 p.m. to review comments and feedback accumulated to date. (That is a public meeting, but there is no public participation component.) That feedback will have come in response to the numerous briefings of various neighborhood groups and the public at large given by city of Ann Arbor systems planner, Wendy Rampson. Remaining scheduled briefings by Rampson are:

• Wednesday, Nov. 19, 9 a.m. (Council Chamber, City Hall)
• Wednesday, Nov. 19, 6:30 p.m. (County Building, 200 N. Main)
• Thursday, Nov. 20, 3:30 p.m. (County Building, 200 N. Main)

Slides for the briefing and a video replay of the first briefing are available online. The Chronicle attended a noon briefing on Monday in council chambers, where more than a dozen other people showed up, including: Carsten Hohnke, a Ward 5 representative to city council; Bob Needham, opinion editor of The Ann Arbor News; Steve Bean, chair of the city’s environmental commission; and Ray Detter, chair of the Downtown Area Citizens Advisory Council. Developer Peter Allen briefly poked his head in the door.

Rampson began with a historical overview of downtown development dating from 1963, when there was support for building high-rise development, followed by a negative reaction to the high-rises that were built, which resulted in a study commissioned from the firm JJR (then a relatively new company). Two principles from that study, which still play a key role in planning for downtown Ann Arbor, are (i) the use of floor area ratio (FAR) to manage density – as opposed to height limits, and (ii) exemption of downtown development from parking requirements.

One key feature of the proposed new zoning for downtown is to replace the patchwork of C2A and C2A-R areas with two new zoning districts: D1 and D2. [map in .pdf format] The label for the process, A2D2, works as a mnemonic device for the two Ds in the proposed rezoning plan as well as the name of the process. But as Rampson clarified in a follow-up phone conversation, the A2D2 process was not initiated with the two Ds in mind. The D2 of A2D2 stands for “Discovering Downtown.”

D1 and D2 areas. D1 is darker. This image is linked to the full resolution .pdf file.

D1 covers core downtown, while D2 is conceived as a transition area from the core to the purely residential neighborhoods. The majority of the D2 area is located to the west of downtown in the Allen Creek floodplain along First Street. First Street is also a label given to one of eight character districts, which are overlayed on top of the D1 and D2 zoning districts. Those districts are: South University, State Street, Liberty/Division, East Huron, Midtown, Main Street, Kerrytown, and First Street. Rampson acknowledged that there was some dissatisfaction among various constituencies with the fact that the South University area had not been buffered with a D2 area, but said that the small size of the South University area precluded incorporation of a transition zone in addition to a core zone. Not expressed explicitly at the briefing on Monday, but voiced occasionally through the A2D2 process by members of the public, is the idea that if only one zoning designation is possible in the South University area, then that designation should be D2 as opposed to D1.

Though it is proposed to be D1, South University does have something in common with D2 areas that is not a general feature of D1 zones: the inclusion of a height limit (120 feet). That height limit is greater than the 60-foot limit proposed for D2.

Density of development is the key distinction between D1 and D2.

D1 – Core
• 400% FAR by right
• 700% FAR with premiums
• 900% FAR with on-site affordable housing
• No height limit (except in South University district)

D2 – Interface
• 200% FAR by right
• 400% FAR with premiums
• 60 ft height limit
• 80% lot coverage limit

Some of the comments and discussion at Monday’s briefing centered on the nature of the FAR computation. The FAR is calculated as the ratio of (total floor area of the building) to (area of the lot). Ray Detter asked Rampson to clarify whether the total floor area was meant to include elevator shafts, citing the Metro 202 project as an example where elevator shafts had not been included. Rampson said that the intent was to craft language for the new zoning that would make clear that it’s wall-to-wall gross floor area (i.e., elevator shafts included) that’s at issue.

Proposed character districts. This image is linked to the full resolution .pdf file.

A member of the audience at Monday’s briefing pointed out that many people might erroneously apply a rule of thumb something like “N% FAR means an N-story building.” Rampson confirmed that this was an erroneous interpretation and said that this was one of the challenges she was trying to meet during her briefings. She pointed to an example on one of the slides designed to illustrate an accurate interpretation, which shows a one-story building constructed with a footprint exactly half of the lot: 50% FAR.

A mathematical and editorial aside

The erroneous rule of thumb “N% FAR means an N-story building” arises from the fact that in the limiting case of a building that is built lot-line-to-lot-line, the rule gives correct results. It’s fairly silly to consider the limiting case in the opposite direction, which would entail a building with no floor area whatever. But it’s worth considering what happens to FAR when buildings are not built lot-line-to-lot-line. As an example, consider a lot size of 10,000 sq.ft. Suppose a developer decides on a building design with a 1,000 sq.ft. footprint. How many stories tall could the developer build “by right” in a D1 area? If h stands for height, then the equation to be solved is:

4 = 1,000h/10,000

In that example, h is 40 stories. That is to say, Chronicle Towers could be built to a height of 40 stories if we built it with a 1,000 sq.ft. footprint on a lot that is 10,000 sq.ft. in area. What will stop us from building the project? Nothing but the doomed economics of a building with that small a footprint built to that height.

Back to the Briefing

Rampson fielded questions and concerns from the audience throughout her presentation as well as at the conclusion. Ray Detter expressed his concern that the design guidelines that are intended to work in concert with the new zoning regulations were being placed “on hold” and not passed as a complete package with the zoning rules. The fact that the historic district guidelines were also being placed on hold added to Detter’s concern – as well as his feeling that one of the three A2D2 steering committee members would prefer to scrap the design guidelines altogether (as yet not clear to The Chronicle which of Pratt, Higgins and Hewitt was intended). Detter stressed that the whole package, including design guidelines, should be passed so that consistency could be achieved, which had been lacking in the past.

Among the proposed zoning concepts for massing of structures that Rampson presented is the notion of streetwall, and the goal of the massing requirements is to mitigate against an unpleasant pedestrian experience for people walking past tall structures by controlling the streetwall. For example, the idea is that a pedestrian could have the feel of walking next to a 4-story building when it was in fact much taller. One audience member asked that consideration be given to the experience of people who live in the vicinity of the taller buildings and not just those who are walking past them.

Although the D1 and D2 areas coincide very closely with DDA boundaries, there are areas where non-DDA areas are included, for example in the Washtenaw Dairy block and Fingerle Lumber property. Rampson stressed that even in those areas that fell outside the DDA boundaries, the current zoning includes commercial and that the proposed new zoning does not affect any areas currently zoned residential. Noting that the DDA boundaries had been set up in order to capture taxes, not necessarily as a planning boundary, Carsten Hohnke asked Rampson if planning staff also found the boundaries useful for planning, and asked if through their process they had followed the example of the Downtown Residential Task Force, which considered an area that extended 1/4 mile beyond the DDA boundary in its previous work. Rampson said that the DDA boundaries were very useful in planning, and that in this planning effort they had not extended the scope of consideration to the 1/4 mile mark.

Much of the conversation – which also evolved among audience members both during and after the briefing – centered on the difficulty in projecting the future market for property downtown. One woman in the audience asked why there was the expectation that there was a potential residential market for recent graduates and empty-nesters downtown. Another gentleman asked why there was a preference for residential units (reflected in FAR bonuses for building them), when the construction of a first-class headquarters building for a major company could reap benefits for downtown and the community as well. The idea of FAR bonuses for offering particular kinds of retail (for example, grocery) was also briefly explored. Rampson said that the strategy was to encourage more residential density and from that might follow the possibility that grocery retailers would recognize the potential market. In response to this, someone suggested it might be more effective to provide efficient transit for getting people to the large full-service grocery stores on the periphery.

Another concern brought up was the possibility that as students are “drained” from the student neighborhoods to student-centered housing developments downtown, a local economy based on landlord-ship could completely change. With respect to student-centered development, Rampson acknowledged the relative lack of flexibility for changing markets in a building with 6-bedroom units as compared to one with 2-bedroom units, but said that unit size was not envisioned as a part of the revised zoning code.

Rampson took copious notes on audience questions, but also urged audience members to convey their concerns in writing by Dec 1. directly to A2D2Feedback@a2gov.org.

After the Briefing: Land Use

Along with the two basic zoning districts and the eight character districts, the proposed revisions to downtown zoning necessarily include a specification of possible land uses inside the districts. When The Chronicle followed up with Rampson by phone after the briefing, she addressed the concern expressed by some citizens that adult entertainment is an allowable use throughout D1. Rampson said that Michigan case law seemed to indicate that some geographic opportunity must exist for categories of use, including adult entertainment. And she is working with Kevin McDonald of the city attorney’s office to determine whether the collection of M1, M1A, and M2 parcels in the city (currently zoned for adult entertainment) together constitute enough area to meet the case law standard for an geographic opportunity. She held open the possibility that adult entertainment could be eliminated from D1 as a possible land use.

The other land use in the proposed new zoning that has generated some discussion community-wide is a convention center as an allowable use. Use as a convention center is proposed to require a special exception, which would come from planning commission. City council would still need to approve the whole project.