You can unmute and address the planning commission for up to three minutes. Go ahead. Hi there. Uh my name is Rob Russell and I I decided I'd pop in at the end here. I live at uh 2004 Crestland Street. Um up until today I've been part of the positive plan group. Um, mainly for my part, the current swath of investment developers making the ginormous multi-unit buildings with numerous beds that can command exorbitant rents. They scared me not just because of the inheritant imbalances that occur because of who can afford them and who can't, but that they eat up purchasable plots in the city in favor of rentals that that uh funny to funnel the local money into bank accounts located who knows where. Um but the the the recent national political situation and the fact that my 401k has tanked as a result. Um I decided to do some some research into mutual funds that are are doing investing in development projects and many of them most of them actually have doubledigit returns even in this economy and I have found several whose perspectus are looking at places like Ann Arbor to pad their pockets.
Uh no. As Jeff said, I did prepare a proposed resolution in the event that the the board wanted to vote tonight and wanted to vote to approve. Um there was a version in the morning that I circulated. Then there was a revised version in the afternoon. That's the one that I think we should be using, the afternoon version that I sent to Karen and to the board members. Uh and uh if there are any further supplements to that, uh we will add it. But otherwise, uh uh and I guess the only other thing is uh we'd be looking to approve the housing element and fair share plan uh as circulated uh to the board, but with the amendments as recommended by Miss Lily through her testimony tonight. Okay. And so, um, in accord with David's recommendation, may I have a motion, please, to approve the May 2025 third round and fourth round housing element and fair share plan that we've been discussing tonight with the amendments that Miss Ley has outlined.
So um I've changed my mind. Uh, please continue with the plan. Get those ugly shoe box looking rentals built. My 401k needs it. Thank you. Thank you, Angela. You can unmute and address the planning commission for up to three minutes. Good evening. Thank you. And uh thank you to the Ann Arbor Planning Commission. As a W3 resident, I live at 1053 Lincoln Avenue and I urge you to pause the comprehensive plan due to major gaps that undermine its effectiveness. The plan does not meet Michigan's planning enabling act requirements for long-term population, economic, and infrastructure projections, nor does it fully integrate existing master plans like the natural features plan or regional transportation strategies. It lacks a dedicated affordable housing plan. It emits a thorough environmental impact assessment and it provides no fiscal analysis of development impacts. This rushed process has resulted in limited public engagement and insufficient data analysis.
Um, and for approval of the resolution as well. I'll make that motion. Thank you, Mrs. Brisbane. Will someone second the motion? I'll second the motion. Thank you, Mr. Turk. Councilman Elliot Cologne, yes. Karen Brisbane, yes. Kevin Callahan, yes. Amber Fernicola, yes. Eric Luben, yes. James Polo, yes. Karen Trainer, yes. Dan Turk, yes. All right. Thank you very much. Um, we're on our agenda. We're going to the next item, which is other business. Does anyone have any other business that they'd like to bring before the planning board this evening? All right. Seeing none, u may I have a motion, please, to adjurnn? I like to make a motion to adjurnn. Thank you, council. Will someone second the motion? Second. Thank you, Miss Fernola. All in favor? I. The next meeting of the board will be Tuesday, June 10th, 2025 at 7 PM at Belal Burough Hall.
Unlike peer cities with clear actionable frameworks, Ann Arbor's draft relies on vague goals and includes problematic proposals like the flex business district which restricts housing without evidence. Without addressing these issues, the plan risks legal challenges and fails to provide a truly con comprehensive equitable vision for the city. Please pause approval until these deficiencies are resolved with increased public awareness, increased public comment, and with robust datadriven revisions. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you.
Caller with the phone number ending with 534, you can unmute and address the planning commission for up to three minutes. Good evening. This is Tom Stalberg. I live at 1202 Traver Street in the heart of lower town Ann Arbor. I've been providing in Ann Arbor for over 30 years now, affordable and workforce housing in gentle density. I started with a triplex that I bought with two friends, a fixer upper. We moved on from there and kept that as a rental. We bought sidebyside duplexes. Getting investors, we bought additional duplexes. We help people owner occupy duplexes. I did that work as a broker. It works. Dental density is a real thing that can work. The homes that we rent out blend in with the neighborhoods in terms of scale. This plan will not be providing that. This plan will risk that. The plan passes a tipping point where dental density will work and where that land becomes more valuable to be torn down to have million dollar condos built there or apartment buildings that are expensive.
This plan will hurt the more moderate segments of the market. It will generate a lot of expensive housing. It will not generate moderately priced housing and it will reduce the supply of moderately priced housing because that's what will be targeted for tear down and redevelopment. So the supply in the moderate segments of the market will decrease and the price will increase. So I feel really bad for the people especially the young people who are wanting to get in the market and I'm a buyer broker for first-time home buyers. I know firsthand for my clients that it's tough. But those people have been duped into thinking that this plan will provide for them what they need. It won't. It's going to provide expensive housing. It's been admitted by people on the planning commission, city council members, planning staff that what we're going to do is increase expensive housing and wait for decades for the rate of growth of housing to slow down.
Not to be cheaper, but the rate of growth in prices to slow down. But it's going to slow down in those top segments of the market where we're adding supply. It won't slow down in the moderate segments of the market where we're not adding supply. So supply and does supply and demand does work. If you look at real estate as a segmented market, which is how you must look at it because that's what it is. That's what the market is. That's what developers know it is. We're going to drive people into the townships for the attainably priced housing. So we've lost affordability and we've lost sustainability and there is no equity in this plan at all. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Katie, you have up to three minutes to address the planning commission. Go ahead. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi, my name is Katie. I am a resident of uh Manchester Road and I would like to share my thoughts as a recent um home buyer. We just moved to Ann Arbor 6 months ago. and I am in support of the uh planning commission um just because as has been echoed many times how difficult it is to buy a home um in this city. Um for scale uh we moved from Grand Rapids. We've lived in Grand Rapids for the last 10 years. Um decided we wanted to move to Ann Arbor to be closer to our family. We went to school at U of Aad, me and my husband, and um really just struggled to find a place. We paid 350 for our house in Grand Rapids, and similar homes now are going for 750 and postponed how quickly we wanted to move because we just simply couldn't afford it.
And the neighborhood that we lived in in Grand Rapids was just like what the development is talking about now. Mixed development with separate downtowns, little neighborhoods that have these goofy little shops that Ann Arborites say they want to still have um all of the places that couldn't afford downtown Grand Rapids put up in these little side downtowns where you could walk to get a haircut at a local salon or go have breakfast or go to the candy store, go to a gift shop. all of those really great things that cater to your community with dense single family homes mixed with one to two level apartments and duplexes. It wasn't noisy. There were trees. It was a great place to be and I wanted that in Ann Arbor. I looked at Burns Park. I looked at the old west side to be able to have my son ride his bike in the neighborhood, meet up with friends, go see a movie at a local theater.
And we couldn't have that because it was just too expensive. And it's sad because both me and my husband, we moo our finances and we did it right. Like I um I'm a pharmacist. My husband's a data scientist. But my friends, my friends who want to have kids, who want to have the kids go to the schools here, to have a life here, whose kids we want to be able to grow up here and have their friends here, they just moved to Ipsy Canton. Um, and they they just can't even consider a place like Ann Arbor. And it's sad, you know, hearing some of the oppositions like the one person who said, "Well, just live outside the city." Well, I don't want to live outside the city. I came to Ann Arbor because I love Ann Arbor and I love the walkability and just being able to have an option or more options for local places that cater to us as families.
So, I definitely support this proposition. I love the idea of having a separate downtown um and stayed in Eisenhower where I live. Um it's a dead zone. There's nothing there. There's no trees. It's just parking lots and buildings. So, I highly consider for my generation, for the generation after me to help contribute to the economy and help it grow. Thank you so much for staying to listen to me. Thank you. [Music] No other hands raised. Okay, with that we will close public comment. Thank you. Um and thanks for to everybody that came and spoke. We really appreciate your civic engagement. All right, with that I think um do I have who wants to power through or who wants to take a quick break? Let me just get a break. Break. Okay, we will take a 5m minute break. We will be back at 8:11 p.m.
Thank you. All right, we are going to resume the meeting. Thank you for your patience. All right. Well, now that we're done with agenda item number five with public comment, we're going to go into agenda number six, which is unfinished business. There are none. And we are going into the agenda number seven with prior to this particular agenda item, we are actually going to offer a time for commissioners to respond to some of the public comment that we heard. Um, and please, if we could uh come to order in the room. Thank you. Um, so I will give some space and some floor to commissioners who would like to respond to some of the specific um, public comment items that they may have heard. So, does anybody would anyone like to say a few words about any comments? Council member Dish. Thank you, Chair Lee.
Um, I like that one of the commenters reminded us that people came here together to pass the affordable housing mill in 2020 and that did bring us together and the sustainability millage as well. And so I think that we know there's cohesion in this community and the plan might not be bringing it out, but that might be because we we aren't all um coming to it with the same facts and some of us have some misconceptions about what's in it. So um one uh commenter um asked for the goals of the plan and how the plan will achieve those goals. And I want to start with a data point. Between 2013 and 2023, Ann Arbor saw meaningful increase uh in population for only one household category and that's households earning $150,000 and over. We added 6,000 of those houses in that decade and we lost 4,000 households at 50% AMI and below.
And I can actually I can actually barely read that because it is unbelievably distressing for me. And I think a goal of the plan is to not go in that direction because if there is one way I don't want to live in New York, it is that way. I don't want to live in a city that has people actually Manhattan actually has people at at the extremes at the highest and the lowest and none in between. So this is even worse. This is going in an even worse direction than that. So one thing is certain from the academic literature to do nothing or to downzone will increase prices. Another thing that's certain in the academic literature as uh Mr. Westfall has already said housing markets do exhibit the logics of supply and demand. And if you add supply at the top over time and it is this is the overtime part that housing will age into affordability.
That's one mechanism. But the other mechanism in that uh me affforementioned upton up John study is that uh when you add uh housing at the top was I writing this down somewhere? Um people will you will uh wealthy people can move into that expensive housing and they will leave a less expensive vacancy behind. And as long as people keep moving in to slightly more expensive housing than they're living in now, they will keep creating vacancies in somewhat less expensive housing. and that um people do move um in that way. That kind of vacancy chain will never reach to the to the uh least advantaged neighborhoods. They will never reach the lowest income desile. And that is why you are lucky to live in Ann Arbor where you have an affordable housing village because you can use that to build housing. Um, I'm puzzled to hear that we are opening up neighborhoods to unregulated and unrestricted growth.
Um, there are regulations in each of the three neighborhood and housing uh um plan categories. The hub, the transition, and the low-rise residential. All of those are neighborhoods. All of them contain housing, and all of them have regulations. Indeed, the low-rise res residential is restricted to three stories because this body accepted a request from city council. Thank you. Uh this body has expressed a feeling that Lockwood the housing of the form of Lockwood wouldn't be a good idea in low-rise residential. It's too too blocky, too inconsistent with what many low-rise residential neighborhoods look like. That's fine, but those are those are restrictions there. Um, so we heard a concern that we would cut down all the trees and just have 20s story buildings and there might be something in between. It seems like the plan has a lot in between there. That seems like it's the point of the plan and that's what we're going to talk about tonight.
Um, there was concern about natural features not being embedded in the plan, but it is embedded in our zoning in our ordinance. So, uh, we just need to say that in the plan and I think we made that edit already. Um, most puzzlingly, we heard that the parks are on the chopping block, which they aren't. But even if they were, you can't chop them without a public vote. So, it isn't within the power of this commission, even if we wanted it, which I don't think we do, to um eliminate parks. So, um, yeah, that's all I Oh, I was going to read a sentence from the Up John study, but I will put it out again in a newsletter totally cited and referenced because that's what I do for a living. Thank you. Would any other commissioners like to respond to any of the comments or on general comments?
Um, yes, sure. Commissioner. Yeah, you know, since March, we've been presented with um a near constant drum beat of demands to delay, suspend, or otherwise halt what we're doing here. Um work that we haven't done in a long time, I think over 16 years, on the basis that some aspect of our process is defective or undemocratic. It's been called top down. Um there a variety of attacks on the legitimacy of the process. And um you know there was one quote from a few weeks ago that we're trying to plate and squeeze out the public which given how long these meetings are going I think we're going about it in a pretty um indirect way. Um we've been listening I think for well over a year um the preparation of the plan this is a guidance document. Um, it's been transparent to the public in a in a way and to a degree that even enormously consequential, complex pieces of hard legislation are not.