Illustration by Tabitha Walters
The U-M’s $631 million dorm complex on the old Elbel Field isn’t even finished, and Evan Pratt is already worried about its future. That’s because Allen Creek flows underground beside the property—and with Ann Arbor getting wetter, the county’s outgoing water resources commissioner says, it’s getting harder to keep it there.
“I just feel like investing and building a building in a floodplain—whether you’ve got a technicality saying it’s not the kind of floodplain that’s a problem or not—doesn’t seem wise,” says Pratt. “In 2021 and 2023, in parts of the county, we got the most rain ever recorded since we started recording rainfall in the 1880s.”
“They put a bunch of pipes under [the dorm site] to allow water to pass from Hoover to Hill,” he says. While that maximizes the buildable area, it’s contrary to best practices in water management, which call for retaining as much stormwater as possible on-site rather than dumping it all downstream. And “this is not like the Rite Aid that’s built to last twenty-five or thirty years,” he points out. Other U-M dorms “are hundred-year-old buildings.”
“I know people who work at the university,” Pratt says, “and Canham [Natatorium] has flooded multiple times, the records building on Madison has flooded multiple times.”
The county has no power over the university, so “we don’t have any ability to force U of M to forecast into the future,” Pratt admits. “But I think they should have …
“I can’t believe there isn’t going to be water in that building before the end of the century—and the building will still be there.”
Related: Storm Over the U-M
