The Michigan Daily sat down with Joe Giant, Ann Arbor’s new director of economic development to discuss housing affordability, the city’s development priorities and economic relationship with the University of Michigan. Giant began the position March 17 after previously working as the community development administrator for the Redevelopment Department of Fort Wayne, Ind. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Michigan Daily: What drew you to Ann Arbor?
Joe Giant: When you’re studying city planning, you’re learning about all these cities that are doing it right with progressive, best practices, and Ann Arbor is always on those lists: number one quality of life, best place to raise family, most educated. So we just drove up. It was the middle of March, the longest, most disappointing month. But there were so many people out: people running, walking, eating outside, drinking coffee outside, just being active, being so vibrant. And it just had this energy that I had just never experienced anywhere that I had been, especially in making the most of an otherwise disappointing season.
So it just felt serendipitous. I felt like I had to apply for it. I’m really excited and happy about the stuff that I get to do on a day-to-day basis, but to be able to live in a city that I had for a long time really admired and grown to love was a dream come true.
TMD: What does the role of Ann Arbor’s economic development director entail, and what does a typical week look like for you?
JG: Over the last few years, we’ve experienced some city challenges: It’s an expensive place to live. We are kind of struggling to provide some basic city services, like maintaining our parks and getting our roads paved and everything. So city staff created this office and charged me with trying to facilitate housing development, helping to build our tax base and place-making. So, making sure that the development that we have helps to continue forward our wonderful, exciting, vibrant quality of life.
A lot of it is being the first point of contact for a lot of developers that are coming to town, the first point of contact for businesses that are thinking about opening up here. When projects start to become a little bit more real, it might be negotiating with them to figure out if the city is going to be involved in the project, whether it’s infrastructure or it’s tax increment financing, trying to put together deals, working with other city agencies — like utilities and like transportation — to make sure that our infrastructure is keeping up with the growth that we want to see.
TMD: What are your top priorities for Ann Arbor’s economic development?
JG: It’s not “Joe Giant’s plan for Ann Arbor,” it’s the residents’ and community’s plan for their community. The city is commendable in a lot of ways, but one of them is definitely that the people that live here really, really care about it, and they care actively about it. Right now the city is undergoing an amendment to our Comprehensive Plan, where we’re looking at areas that we want to grow. And so what I would do is look at the policies that are in that plan and say, “How do we take those just from a sentence that’s pretty open-ended to actual activity on the ground?” It’s making that connection between what our policies and goals are to how that affects the built environment, how that affects the economy.
If you look at our Comprehensive Plan draft, it is very focused on making sure that there is housing for people that want to be here. Right now, there are wonderful communities here. There’s places to live, but it’s challenging when the people that make a city a city can’t afford to live there; teachers and police officers, firefighters and nurses have to commute in. So, that shows up in the plan a lot. That’s something that definitely is important to people that work at Larcom City Hall, making sure that we have housing options for not just for professors, doctors and lawyers, but also the people that on a day-to-day basis make this a wonderful place to live.
TMD: Are there any early wins or projects from your first six months you’d like to highlight?
JG: We have a couple of city-owned properties. One of them is called the Kline’s Lot. It’s right behind Main Street on Ashley Street, a real high-profile site. I’d say it’s probably one of the best development sites in Michigan, if not the Midwest. And then another site around the corner across from our YMCA. We talked to City Council, tried to get their priorities, tried to figure out what our policy said about how those lots can be developed and we selected developers for those sites. And we’re negotiating with those now, which doesn’t sound like a huge win, but knowing that we have at least some preliminary buy-in from a couple world-class developers for these sites, I’m gonna take the W … The vision that these two companies put forward for these respective sites is really exciting and ambitious, and I am thrilled to see where it goes.
TMD: What development projects are you currently prioritizing?
JG: In our Comprehensive Plan draft that I mentioned, we identified some areas of the city where we think we could thicken it up, grow a little bit, add some higher density housing. One of those is South State Street just north of I-94, there’s this tall building, 17 acres of surface parking, an old parking structure, and there’s a gas station. We have proposals to redevelop 17 acres into 1,000 units of housing, including 200 affordable units, 100,000 square feet of commercial units, streets, blocks, open space — essentially just about six blocks of a downtown feel. I think it’s something like a $600 million development. It would be one of the largest projects in Ann Arbor’s history, probably the largest public-private partnership where the city is taking an active role in the development of it. It’s called Arbor South. It’s on the agenda for the Nov. 6 City Council meeting, and we’re really excited to present it to the community.
TMD: What emerging trends in Ann Arbor’s economy present the biggest opportunities — or concerns — for the city?
JG: Our downtown is a regional destination. It’s an amazing place. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, I think that we’ve heard that a lot of businesses have seen a change in what their day-to-day experience is like: not as many people around during the day, more people around nights and weekends. So if we’re going to have a smaller daytime workforce population, we’re going to have second, third floors of businesses that are not really great spots for offices anymore. What are we going to do with those? We’re thinking about how to maybe repurpose those for housing or some other uses that might work great in downtown but are a little bit different than we previously contemplated. Another part of that is trying to increase our downtown-resident population. One way to support Main Street businesses is to have more people there, just on a day-to-day basis.
TMD: How do you approach economic development in a city that’s both a traditional municipality and a college town? Do you collaborate directly with the University on projects?
JG: It’s an interesting push and pull: Ann Arbor would not be the wonderful place that it is without the University, and I would argue that the University would not be the wonderful place that it is without Ann Arbor. I think one of the coolest things about this community is the way that the University just bleeds into the city. We have regular meetings with University leadership where we’re learning about what they’re doing, we’re telling them about what we’re doing. We collaborate on big infrastructure projects. For instance, the University of Michigan is building these beautiful residence halls north of the Big House, and when you add that many units there’s an impact on the infrastructure, and they’re helping us fund huge sewer expansion.
TMD: Housing affordability is a major issue in Ann Arbor. What role does economic development play in addressing this, and what should the future of housing look like here?
JG: We have an affordable Housing Commission here. We partner with them on projects. It just depends on the project as to how we’re going to get involved, but just figuring out ways to, one, close that financial gap, and two, trying to move projects a little bit more efficiently through the permitting process. It’s more expensive to develop here than it is in a lot of other communities. Some of that is because land is expensive, but some of it is because we require a lot more information in the application phase than a lot of other communities do, and that introduces a whole lot of risk to developers. Over time, that can make it more of a challenging development environment. So from a financial feasibility standpoint and a permitting standpoint, we try to get projects moving.
TMD: How does sustainability factor into your economic development strategy for Ann Arbor?
JG: One of the cool things about Ann Arbor is that I think we have a brand, and sustainability is obviously a big part of that brand. So in the first contact, the first few sentences that I would ever even say to somebody that wants to do a project here, is that, “Look, you’re going to develop Ann Arbor? It’s going to need to be a fairly sustainable project.” There’s an expectation — it’s not a law, but it’s kind of an understanding. There is a kind of a dissonance between economic development and sustainability, but I don’t ever want us to think that sustainability has to equate with longer processes and more difficult approvals. I want something that we’re communicating just early enough that developers can incorporate these things into their project in a way that meets our values, but doesn’t necessarily need to slow down an approval process.
Daily Staff Reporter Grace Schuur can be reached at gschuur@umich.edu.
