The city of Ann Arbor is in the process of drafting a new Comprehensive Land Use Plan, proposing a potential solution to the city’s housing crisis. If its recommendations are put into law, Ann Arbor could join the growing list of American cities and municipalities that ended single-family zoning. The plan is not legally binding, but it is a policy document required by state law to shape how the city will be developed in the coming decades.
The city hopes to present the plan for public review in summer 2025, with the goal of full adoption by the end of the year. One of the most significant proposals in the plan is to replace the current zoning, which restricts what type of buildings can be built in specific areas of a city or town. Specifically, the new plan would replace single-family zoning with a more expansive low-rise residential category.
In most American cities, the majority of land is reserved for single-family homes, which has received much criticism from housing advocates, who criticize its racist past in separating white families and families of Color. Single-family house zoning has also been criticized for creating environmentally damaging urban sprawl and worsening housing crises by preventing the construction of more dense housing.
As it is currently written, the plan would replace single-family zoning with a low-rise residential zoning category, which would allow for the construction of housing up to townhouses in size, as well as small-scale commercial uses.
The plan also calls for a more dense concentration of housing and businesses in certain areas, such as a mixed-use transition district that would allow for housing such as apartments and mixed-use hub districts that would facilitate a dense downtown-style mix of buildings. The transition zones would be implemented around major roads such as Washtenaw Avenue or Packard Street. Additionally, the hub zones would contain Ann Arbor’s current downtown area and the region around the Briarwood Mall, which the plan hopes to see develop into a second downtown-like area.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Jonathan Levine, professor of urban and regional planning at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, expressed approval of the new plan. Levine said while zoning reform would not single-handedly fix the housing crisis, it is a necessary step in the right direction.
“If a zoning code is adopted according to the current plan, that new zoning code will be much simpler than the current zoning code, that would be a step forward,” Levine said. “If you want to solve a housing crisis, you have to make the good easy, meaning you have to actually make it easy to build, and our current rules do not. Ann Arbor has a reputation for being a place that it’s very hard to develop in, so it’s a significant simplification. Eliminating single-family zoning is a needed step forward.”
According to Levine, a limitation of zoning reform is that new housing developments are often not more affordable than previously existing housing.
Business senior Hunter Heyman, president of U-M Urbanism Club, told The Daily that while new housing developments might not immediately be cheaper, the presence of new developments would relieve price pressures on existing housing.
“The studies that I’ve seen really have shown that filtering is effective,” Heyman said. “Which is the idea that someone who is living in an older property at a higher rent, like they’re a wealthier person, but they could only find a property that was maybe a little bit older. They move into these new units because they’re a little bit wealthier and they can afford it. That opens up the property that they were in for someone who’s maybe a little bit more low-income.”
In the plan, the city also proposes selecting certain areas of Ann Arbor to promote different economic developments to reserve space for local industries, which has received criticisms from housing advocates. These developments would include a complete restriction on housing around South Industrial Highway within the proposed employment non-residential zone. It also proposes a requirement that newly-constructed housing along parts of Washtenaw Avenue include ground-floor retail to promote the commercial development of the area and a multipurpose zone called the Innovation District with housing restrictions to hopefully attract University of Michigan-based startups, labs and office spaces near the North Campus.
Levine expressed disagreement with measures that would restrict housing in large areas of the city in exchange for economic gains that might not materialize. He said setting aside the Innovation District for office space would not guarantee the construction of any offices.
“Zoning actually can’t force anything to happen; it can force things not to happen,” Levine said. “Here’s the problem:office use is really hurting nowadays because of work from home. There’s high office vacancy rates. So what if we create an Innovation Zone and we say alright, we’re reserving this space for offices of high-tech firms? They could be a whole long time in coming. Maybe they’ll never come.”
In an interview with The Daily, Kirk Westphal, director of the Neighborhood Institute, a local pro-housing and urbanism advocacy group, said he hoped the city would focus on the promotion of new housing above other planning concerns.
“If we keep our eye on the prize for housing abundance and housing choice and allowing a variety of housing types to be built, particularly the types that developers are building and want to build, that should be the north star of our plan,” Westphal said. “I think if we discover 10 years from now that hey, we really should allow for something new or different to be built, we can pivot at that point.”
The city has largely been responsive to these criticisms of the proposed plan. In an interview with The Daily, City Planning Manager Brett Lenart said while he personally believed the Innovation District would be a beneficial addition to Ann Arbor, the city’s planning staff would align with the requests of their constituents and focus on increasing available housing.
“Our community decision makers are really very highly focused on housing, and so they have specifically directed us not to provide those limiting factors in that regulatory framework,” Lenart said. “So I still think everything there holds, it’s still a great opportunity, but you won’t see that probably in the draft plan that gets released later this year as an Innovation Zone. Those policymakers are really leaning into the consolidating, consistent labeling of districts.”
A common goal amongst city planners and housing advocates alike was for Ann Arbor residents to be engaged in the process. Westphal said he appreciated the city council’s willingness to listen to students and renters.
“More so than any city council I’ve seen in the past 20 years, there is an enthusiasm to accommodate the needs of students and renters like never before,” Westphal said. “There’s a pretty solid recognition that although renters have a shorter tenure in general in the city as a group they are just as important as homeowners … so it’s really heartening to see students and other renters coming to Planning Commission and advocating for the people who will inevitably come after them.”
Daily Staff Reporter Glenn Hedin can be reached at heglenn@umich.edu.
