Ann Arbor’s parks and rec department has opened multiple courts at Leslie Park, two at Burns Park, and single courts at several others. Hunt Park is not among them—yet several years ago, pickleball lines appeared on its tennis court.
It was a snowy winter, and Ann Arbor used a lot of road salt to clear its streets: 4,057 tons as of March 19, according to city communications specialist Robert Kellar. That’s 656 tons more than last winter, though still around 1,800 tons shy of the most recent high in the winter of 2021–2022. Along with ice-melter applied by contractors and homeowners, some of it ends up in storm sewers and the Huron River tributaries they feed.
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This year, the U-M saw a 24.5 percent increase in applications from first-generation students; they currently make up 12 percent of the undergraduate population. But the university’s relationship with first-gens hasn’t always been supportive.
If Jackie Malcolm had told her construction-obsessed toddler to stop playing with his breakfast cereal on the living room floor with his toy bulldozer in 2005, children and parents might never have found mealtime peace through the forklift fork.
At risk are dozens of conservation easements, grants, and farm programs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In Michigan, 90 percent of USDA funding is allocated to commodity conservation, leaving new farmers and small agricultural businesses particularly vulnerable.
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At U-M, ICE agents aren’t supposed to enter residence halls or locked class buildings without a warrant, and students are advised to contact the Division of Public Safety & Security if they encounter an agent in a public space. But it’s not clear how much protection the university can provide.
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The Trump administration’s plan to slash payments on research grants has put thousands of U-M jobs at risk. But other local researchers are in even more immediate jeopardy: those who work directly for the federal government, at the EPA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL).
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“We’re dealing with an insane amount of mental health issues and anxiety from our residents,” says Derrick Miller, executive director of the Community Action Network. CAN’s seven community centers provide everything from after-school programs to housing support and emergency food pantries, and its clients are reeling from the Trump administration’s budget cuts.
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In February, Shira Haderlein and a friend took a walk in Mary Beth Doyle Park to decompress. But as they approached the detention pond, they discovered the corpses of dozens of Canada geese.
“I mean, it was just littered,” she says. “It felt apocalyptic.”
The best thing about Liberty St., one could argue, is the Michigan Theater. Along with hundreds of films every year, it hosts concerts, children’s theater, celebrity artists, and dozens of other major events. Its recreated historic sign is a landmark rivaled only by its sister theater a block away, the State. That streetscape—with the U-M’s Burton Tower rising in the background—inspired the Michigan Theater Foundation’s recent rebranding as Marquee Arts.
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I had thought it strange that the phone number for “BT Wings” was an (810) area code instead of Ann Arbor’s (734). That was the first clue, right there. Then I searched the internet for “BT Wings,” and nothing came up. Like, nothing.
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As generative artificial intelligence continues its colonization of the digital world, from search engines to software, concerns are being raised about its energy consumption: the data centers that train and run genAI models are power hogs. A December U.S. Department of Energy report cites genAI as the main reason data centers’ share of U.S. energy consumption more than doubled from 2018 to 2023—and may more than double again by 2030.
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The Trump administration’s drive to disrupt the federal government is already having an outsized effect on Ann Arbor, from social services to climate activism. (For the impact on just one nonprofit, see Doomsday Planning.) But none matches the economic destruction threatened by a February announcement from the National Institutes of Health, which provides $800 million of the U-M’s $2 billion in annual research funding. The edict would set grantees’ “indirect cost” reimbursement at 15 percent.
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On October 7, 2023, as Jon Mallek married first-term state representative Jason Morgan in matching navy suits with teal bowties under a trellis draped with eucalyptus leaves, the thought of running for office himself was the furthest thing from his mind.
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No need to look out the window—just sign up for A2 Fix It, the app and website where residents report problems online. After a mid-January snowfall, most of the complaints were about people who hadn’t cleared their sidewalks.
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Good news for the one in five people who have difficulty processing written words: Michigan now has two strong laws governing how schools screen for dyslexia and train teachers to respond to it. And it has them largely because of Ann Arbor school board member and former special ed teacher Susan Ward Schmidt.
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“I just happened to look back at an invoice from January of 2022, and we were selling eggs for $23 a case,” says Washtenaw Dairy owner Mary Jean Raab. “Yesterday I paid $83 a case.” Another supplier was asking $147.
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It’s been a long haul for the Miami-based developer: Finvarb and several Michigan partners first proposed building a hotel on Glen Ave. between Ann and Catherine streets in 2017. After a Covid delay, construction on the 188-room Vanguard Hotel finally started at the end of 2022.
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In mid-December, when Concordia University Ann Arbor issued a press release announcing the school would consolidate its operations at its North Building on Plymouth Rd. and away from its sprawling, lush campus along Geddes, few were surprised.
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