The Meaning of the $3,100 Campus Studio
As move-in began this August, Vic Village South’s website advertised, “Leasing Now Open for 2025–26!” Social media ads announced, “We have 1, 2, 3, and 4-Bedroom apartments available!”
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Government
Voters Approve Library Proposals
On Tuesday, Ann Arbor voters headed out to the polls to cast their ballots on Proposals A and B for the special 2025 August election. After a heated race marked by lawsuits, lawn signs, and fervent online discourse, early...
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Library Lot Referendum Heats Up
As the increasingly bitter campaign over the future of the downtown library races to a close, both sides are spending the final days before Tuesday’s election making their cases by going door to door, flooding social media, and pushing targeted ads through mail and online platforms.
Read MoreTarget: Medicaid
Mates watched the passage of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” in July with alarm. It will slash Medicaid funding by about $1 trillion over ten years—and the “big juicy target” is support for people with disabilities like her son Corbin.
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Savit’s Run
As a lawyer for the City of Detroit in the 2010s, Savit says, “I saw the ways in which President Trump’s policies had harmed communities—and I also saw the ways in which state attorney generals were uniquely equipped to fight back.” People had been asking him if he planned to run for higher office ever since he was first elected in 2020, and Trump’s return was the tipping point.
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Election Update
One would repeal a 2018 charter amendment that reserves the space above the Library Lane underground parking structure for an urban park and civic-center commons called the Center of the City. The other would transfer the air rights to the Ann Arbor District Library next door for $1. Together, they’d enable construction of a new downtown library in a high-rise spanning both parcels.
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Wage War
The wage war began in 2018, when One Fair Wage, a national coalition of activists, workers and organizations fighting for a higher minimum wage for tipped employees, gathered 370,690 signatures to put the decision up to voters. If the measure had passed, the wage paid to tipped workers, then set at $3.84, would gradually be increased to match the statewide hourly minimum wage—which the same proposal would increase to $12 by 2022 and thereafter index to inflation.
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Small Town / Big City
Supporters argue that the city needs that “densification” to allow more people who work in the city to live here, to bolster the property tax base eroded by the U-M’s expansion, and repair economic and racial inequities caused by past “exclusionary zoning.” Opponents question whether growth on that scale is necessary or even likely. But if it does come to pass, they predict, it will be at the expense of the city’s neighborhoods, as apartments and condos crowd out single-family homes.
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Target: The Arts
Without waiting for Congress to act, his appointees cancelled NEA grants that had already been approved—including $30,000 for the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The 2025 festival was in March, and “I had already submitted our final report and payment request,” says executive director Leslie Raymond.
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Runway Reconsideration
Since city council decided not to expand the primary runway at the Ann Arbor Municipal Airport last December, some are asking questions about the future of the property.
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August Election
City council voted unanimously in March to hold a special election on August 5 to consider two city charter amendments. Together, they’d enable construction of a new downtown library in a high-rise spanning the existing library parcel and the “Library Lot” above the underground parking structure.
Read MoreTarget: DEI
Schools throughout the country responded, some by shuttering diversity programs, some by renaming webpages to make their pursuit of DEI less obvious, and some by resisting.
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Fighting Foreclosures
Yet by April only eleven were actually foreclosed and sold, and all of them were vacant: ten lots and one house.
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The New MRF
On December 1, 2021, Recycle Ann Arbor unveiled Ann Arbor’s revamped materials recovery facility (MRF). Their predecessor, ReCommunity, had trashed it back in 2016, and the upgrades came with a hefty price tag. RAA secured two grants but still had to take out $5.9 million in loans.
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Pickleball NIMBYism
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.
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Salty Streams
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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Target: Farmers
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.
Read MoreTarget: Immigrants
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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Target: Environment
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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Doomsday Planning
“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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