At my home there’s no car, Internet, TV, or stereo. I like to party like it’s 1899.
And I like Ann Arbor. A walk through my neighborhood reveals the care with which residents tend their gardens. How they nod as you pass. How my neighbor stops to let me pet his dog each time we meet. Branches that touch each other in the middle of the street. Parks everywhere. The downtown festivals, Ferris Bueller on Ingalls Mall. An outdoor Olympic-sized pool. A public library that lets you check out theremins. The Michigan, the State. Real butter on your popcorn.
But some of my friends feel differently. We are Master of Fine Arts students at the University of Michigan who hail mainly from the East Coast and West Coast, and in my case, Traverse City. Their complaints range from lack of diversity to the flat Midwest to boring food.
I hear them. The population appears homogeneous. There are no mountains, and a lot of American food.
But I’ve seen great tolerance and appreciation of our differences here–in some ways more than I’ve found in cities, with New York winning for the most times I’ve heard Jew used as a verb. In Ann Arbor, the neighbor with the dog is a man in a loving marriage with another man. I attend community meetings and religious services where I find varied races, disabilities, ages, gender expressions and sexual orientations. I got chills listening to Mozart’s Requiem performed live in a packed Hill Auditorium. Ann Arbor’s response to the atrocity in Orlando was organized in just forty-eight hours, and I was proud to witness this show of support.
As for the “flat” Midwest, I took a friend who’s been comparing Ann Arbor to a pancake for a bike ride through Barton Hills. At the driving range, red in the face and short of breath, he conceded, “Well, maybe it’s a ridge.”
Then there’s the food. True, on a student budget I cannot afford the Earle. And $17 for a sandwich at Zingerman’s? Be serious. But I can occasionally afford the Jamaican Jerk Pit and the Syrian deli, Exotic Bakeries, whose food is truly inspired and delectable. And I know of no other American city with a higher per capita bi bim bab than Ann Arbor.
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So I have found myself impatient with my friends. Then I gave it more thought. The Achilles’ heel of Ann Arbor is its unaffordable housing. So many of us share a similar story, with the bottom line being we pay way too much for what we get. I remember moving into my first Ann Arbor apartment near S. Seventh on W. Madison, not knowing it already had tenants: fleas. It also had a sonic boom each time the toilet upstairs flushed, water leaking through light fixtures, no locks on single-pane windows so thin you could hear entire conversations on the other side, even when they were caked with ice on the inside.
My apartment had originally been a two-bedroom, but before I moved in the property management company sectioned off the second bedroom to use as its office. Problem was they hadn’t changed the utilities, nor did they bother to tell me. Why would they when they could power their office on my dime? When I spoke with the housing attorney at Student Legal Services, she said the amount of money I would reclaim would not be worth the fight. What I heard was she had bigger fish to fry. Having listened to far worse horror stories from other Ann Arbor tenants, I don’t doubt this is true. I’ve since moved.
At forty-four I’m older than the average Michigan student. I’ve lived for the last twenty-five years in such places as Boulder, Colorado; Portland, Oregon; and upstate New York. Even when inflation is taken into account, I have never paid this much and gotten so little for my money. In Leelanau County good rentals are scarce and pricey but often come with beautiful beaches just a short distance away. In Boulder I paid less than I do here for a double studio with a view of the Flatirons and within walking distance of downtown and a major university.
Maybe what my friends are saying is only half the story. There is not as much diversity in Ann Arbor as in other locations with similar rents. According to the Census Bureau, the 2010-2014 median gross rent in Ann Arbor was $1,042. Most places that expensive come with mountains or large bodies of water. And one Cuban restaurant does not make us Miami, yet up go more big city penthouses with big city price tags. Before moving here I’d heard about the zaniness of football Saturdays, of the smugness this town can emanate. But nothing prepared me for the lack of clean, safe, affordable housing.
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I am not sure many Ann Arborites realize the extent of the problem. When I rented that lackluster apartment, a neighbor guessed I might own one of the Old Walnut Heights condos across the street–the ones that look like an up north ski resort. Maybe we only notice what we can easily relate to. Because the acceptance rate for my program hovers around 2 percent, and because I’m funded through a combination of teaching and fellowships, I’ve been told by faculty I’m “just lucky to be here,” with one professor adding: “You’ll have more money than you’ll know what to do with.”
Half my money goes to rent. What remains goes toward utilities, food, transportation, and as I transition from grad student to fellow, health insurance. In short, I know what to do with it: pay my water bill.
Many of you know the drill. In order to afford Ann Arbor, you make sacrifices. You sell your car. You don’t frequent bars or shows. You shop at Kiwanis, whose much adored store may close, leaving zero thrifty options for downtown shoppers. You shop at T.J. Maxx, where the employees, mostly women, earn $9 an hour. You don’t upgrade your electronics. I finished my master’s thesis on a hand-me-down black MacBook with non-working P, parentheses, colon, apostrophe, and quotation mark keys. It is the same laptop on which I am typing this. There is a lot of “Insert–>Symbol” going on.
I don’t mind the frugal living, for now. I’ve got it pretty good to have a grand to throw away on rent every month. What I mind are the attitudes, the lack of understanding, and lack of exploring better ways of doing things–exactly what irked me when my friends said this town is so white, flat, with nothing interesting to eat. Now when I hear their words, I recognize a need to feel included, to feel at home. How can one feel a sense of belonging when one cannot afford, literally, to belong?
I am not calling for more public housing. I am calling for more housing to meet the needs of the public. The gap between Avalon Housing’s new Pauline Apartments and the new South Main apartments is too wide. The few affordable housing units the luxury condo and apartment buildings are required to offer are problematic for myriad reasons. There also needs to be more policing when it comes to high rents made higher each year, with landlords demanding tenants decide shortly after taking up residence whether or not they’ll renew. The Early Leasing Ordinance makes landlords wait 70 days before showing the unit–your home–to prospective tenants. In two months and ten days can you adequately assess the unit, the neighborhood, the commute, and the real cost of utilities? Is it enough time to vet the management? Do they respond to maintenance requests in a timely fashion? Do they respond at all?
No rental market I’ve experienced in the last twenty-five years behaved this way. The answer tenants get to why our rent is climbing $20, $30 or $80 a month is “Market. It’s the market.” When one tenant protested the rent hike, the landlady said she’d easily fill the space with someone else. Translation: you’re just lucky to be here.
What artists bring to a community cannot be replaced. But Ann Arbor will be forced to find replacements when new housing means paying $2,150 for a one-bedroom apartment. Adding insult to injury, a seventy-five-foot-tall luxury apartment building is slated to replace South Main Market, where By the Pound sells economical bulk dried goods. Sometimes I walk there just to get out of my un-air-conditioned apartment, listen to classical music, and chat with the employees. They shake their heads at these kit high-rises made to look industrial. “They’re killing the Old West Side,” one employee states. Ironically, these warehouse wannabes are distant cousins of the types of buildings penniless squatters–artists, mostly–call home.
It’s not just artists suffering from the housing problem. MLive reported: “The target population [for that new complex] is young professionals, empty nesters and graduate students.” Plenty of young professionals are what the housing authorities term “cost burdened,” when more (sometimes substantially more) than one-third of their salaries goes towards rent. Just ask the lecturers on campus. Plenty of empty nesters are on a fixed income, and I am not sure I buy the stereotype of the Michigan student who is comfortably subsidized by wealthy parents. Each semester I’ve taught I’ve had undergrads ask to borrow books because they can’t afford to buy them. If the argument for high rent in Ann Arbor is that the university does not pay property taxes, why is student housing so high? And how many students can fight for better housing when they are only temporary residents, they’ve encountered few if any other rental markets, and they’re overwhelmed with the demands of school? They have better things to do than fight what feels like a useless battle.
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Artists I know have left Ann Arbor for Ypsi and Detroit. I would like to stay here. I refer to Ann Arbor as my home. But the cost of housing is not sustainable. A prudent reserve, a retirement fund, travel expenses to visit family–especially aging parents–require money that now goes to the necessities. Oh, and a bike. I’d like a new used commuter bike. Because of the whole got-rid-of-my-car thing.
Maybe we value art but not the artist in Ann Arbor. Maybe we are not as welcoming as I thought we were in the Midwest. Maybe deep down we desire to be surrounded only by others like ourselves. I don’t want to believe it. I’ve seen you rally for good causes, Ann Arbor. I’ve seen your collective strength, felt your genuine welcome, and witnessed your consideration for others like and unlike yourselves. On this housing issue, please prove me wrong. Please prove me right.
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Schenck is a fellow at the University of Michigan.
