The worry I hear from my neighbors isn't more density. It's displacement. And when they ask genuine questions about it, they get labeled NIMBY, which is how a real concern gets shut down instead of answered, leaving us divided when we actually have more in common than not.
So let me be clear about what I am. I'm a community health nurse practitioner and a single parent of two kids in the Ann Arbor public schools. I make a good professional salary. I support the Comprehensive Land Use Plan, I support the upzoning that follows from it, and I want density, downtown, near transit, and in my own neighborhood. I've looked into adding an accessory dwelling unit, and into what it would take to tear down and rebuild at the maximum density my lot allows, multi-unit, the exact thing we say we want more of. I didn't get far, not because I lost interest, but because the barriers and the costs here made it a non-starter before I'd really begun.
And here's the part worth sitting with. I'm close to the person this city says it most wants to keep, the nurse, the parent, the longtime resident on a solid income. If I can't make the math work, the problem isn't me.
That's the thing. I'm not the person in the doorway saying "not here." I'm the person who looked at saying yes and found the door priced shut.
IThe wall isn't zoning. It's capital.
I bought in 2011. A century-old house, centrally located, zoned R4C. I'm taxed on $169,000 of a home now assessed at roughly half a million. To add the density I'd actually like to add, I'd have to take on debt I'm not qualified for and couldn't service if I were.
So it comes down to two options, and both are bad: debt I can't carry, or displacement. Borrow my way into building and the financing breaks me. Sell and I'm priced out of my own neighborhood. The zoning says yes. The capital says no.
Permission to build is not the same as a home getting built, or a home staying affordable.
And I'm not unusual. Of Ann Arbor's roughly 22,000 owner-occupied homes, thousands are held by long-tenure owners in this exact spot: not wealthy, on lots we'd love to see hold more homes, wanting to stay, with no realistic way to build the density or reach the value without leaving. That's not an obstacle to density. That's the coalition density needs, sitting on the sidelines because no one built them a way in.
IIEven the pro-supply research says permission isn't enough.
This is where the debate usually gets flattened into "you're either for building or against it." But the evidence on upzoning is more honest than either camp's slogans, and it points somewhere specific.
We legalized accessory dwelling units back in 2018. The city gets a small handful of permit requests a year. Legal was never the only barrier. The barrier moved to financing and cost.
The research backs this up, including the research the supply side cites. Yonah Freemark's study of Chicago's transit upzonings found that property values rose with no additional new construction over five years, value captured, supply not delivered, at least in the near term. His own later review is careful and fair about it: upzoning's effects on housing production are "mixed," and depend on market demand, local context, housing type, and timing, with effects that grow over a longer horizon and work best where the market is already hot. The most recent Urban Institute synthesis lands in the same place and draws the operative conclusion plainly: complementary investments have to run in parallel.
That's the whole point in one line. Upzoning is necessary, and I'm for it. It is also slow, uneven, market-dependent, and insufficient by itself. Which is exactly why you pair it with the tools that make building possible for ordinary people, instead of treating deregulation as the finish line.
III"Build it and they will come" is just trickle-down in a new outfit.
The dominant pitch is supply-first: clear the rules, let the market build, and prices ease for everyone. I understand the appeal, and supply genuinely matters. But deregulation on its own, with no way for existing owners to participate, doesn't lift everyone. It raises the value of the land under everybody, lets a few well-capitalized players cash out, and leaves the rest exposed.
It's the same promise people have been handed for decades: be patient, the wealth comes down to you. And then it doesn't. "The market will sort out affordability" is that pinky promise in a new outfit.
You don't have to take my word for what the speculative market does with our housing. Look at the 520-unit complex on Village Green Boulevard. It has churned through names and owners without a single brick moving: sold in 2017 as part of a $125 million three-property bundle, rebranded, and now held by an anonymous LLC whose management openly states it's "focused on delivering strong returns." Five hundred and twenty households whose homes exist, by the owner's own description, to produce yield. The building is housing the portfolio, not the people. And the developer who assembled that empire watched the whole leveraged thing collapse into foreclosures across the Midwest when interest rates rose, not because he was uniquely reckless, but because the model itself is hostage to rates and investor appetite, things that have nothing to do with whether people need a place to live.
IVThe local proof: City Place.
If you want to see how the build-it-or-block-it binary actually plays out, look at City Place. This isn't a preservation story, plenty of our old housing stock genuinely should come down. It's an affordability story.
The developer's first plan for that block included affordable units. It got fought, and it failed the vote. So the developer fell back on the as-of-right option, and what got built was a market-rate student dorm with zero affordable units. Same block, same developer. When the choice collapsed to approve-this-project-or-reject-it, with no path to a better-structured deal, the affordable option died and we got the least affordable outcome on the table.
Nobody chose that. The market plus the up-or-down zoning fight chose it for us. That is what "unintended market impacts" actually look like, and we already live with them.
VThere's a cost nobody's naming: the cost of staying.
Every displacement mechanism we usually discuss is about acquiring or adding, a tax reset on sale, the financing wall to build. But there's a quieter one, and it's about simply keeping what you have.
Construction labor is in a severe, structural shortage. That drives up not just the cost of new building but the cost of the ordinary maintenance a hundred-year-old house demands constantly, the roof, the furnace, the foundation.
For a cash-constrained owner, this is a slow-motion displacement. Not a teardown, not a tax spike, just a repair bill you can't finance on a house you can no longer afford to maintain. And here's the link back to deregulation: a building boom bids up the very same scarce labor and materials that keep existing modest homes habitable. We can add new units and quietly price longtime owners out of homes they already own.
This isn't abstract for me. I've already put serious money into simply keeping a century-old house standing, the kind of unglamorous, compounding upkeep these houses demand, and there's more to come. So when people ask why I didn't just build the ADU, that's a big part of the answer: you don't take on new debt to build when you're already borrowing to keep the roof sound. The cost of staying comes first, and for a lot of us it's already most of what we've got.
VIA tale of two cities, and two half-built machines.
People wave off the tools I'm about to describe as unrealistic or coastal. They're not. The clearest illustration is an hour down I-94, and it teaches the whole lesson by showing the opposite failure from ours.
First, a word on "factory-built," because it gets caricatured. I mean modular construction, code-compliant modules built in a factory and assembled on site, not mobile homes. It's a manufacturing method, not a building type, so it scales: duplexes and triplexes on narrow infill lots, mid-rise apartments (a recent Oakland affordable project is six modular stories over a podium), up to forty-story towers in Singapore and a twenty-two-story public housing block Korea just finished. Done deliberately, it's good architecture. The six-floor mid-rise is the proven sweet spot, and the realistic scale for a place like ours.
Now the lesson. In Detroit's North Corktown, a foundation and a neighborhood association built factory-built homes on public Land Bank parcels, sold through a community land trust the neighborhood created, priced for buyers at or below 80% of area median income. That is the financing-and-innovation half of the puzzle, made real: modular, public land, a land trust, real mortgages. It also had a rough rollout, delays, homes sitting empty, complaints about how they look. I wouldn't hold those particular houses up as a design model. But the stumbles are the point, not a refutation.
North Corktown and Ann Arbor are, in a sense, opposite sequencing problems.
The North Corktown homes went up in 2023 and 2024 as a one-off philanthropic pilot, ahead of, and largely disconnected from, the citywide zoning reform Detroit is only now enacting (its "build more housing" by-right missing-middle ordinance and adaptive-reuse rules are moving through council as I write this). A bespoke pilot racing out in front of the framework is part of why it stumbled. Ann Arbor is running the sequence the other way: we adopted the framework first, the CLUP, but without the financing, land-trust, and design-forward modular tools that would let ordinary people actually build well under it. And here's the part that makes this urgent rather than academic: a comprehensive plan is not zoning. The actual rewrite that turns the CLUP's vision into rules you can build under is a separate, district-by-district process that will take years, realistically not finished before the end of the decade. So for the next several years we will have a vision and no new by-right rules anyone can act on. That multi-year rewrite window is not a reason to wait. It is exactly the runway to build the financing and protection tools, so they're ready the day the zoning lands instead of years behind it.
Neither order works alone. Permission without the means to build just upzones the land and waits; means without a framework produces scattered, uneven one-offs. The zoning and the financing were never alternatives. They are two halves of one machine, and good design is what you get when you build the whole thing deliberately instead of cutting a ribbon on a pilot.
VIIWhat I'm actually asking for.
None of this is anti-development. Every piece below already works somewhere, and the strongest examples are towns our size or smaller, not just the big cities people wave away. The city doesn't need to invent anything. It needs to extend the tools it already offers large developers to the rest of us.
- Pair upzoning with financing ordinary people can reach. Make Michigan's brownfield housing tax-increment financing, the same tool our own land trust used for Townie Homes, navigable for individual homeowners and small groups, not just nonprofits and big developers. Add public loans and pre-approved plan sets. Cities from Montpelier to Atlanta already do versions of this.
- Protect the people already here. Offer a capped-resale or land-trust option, where an owner trades part of the future windfall for the ability to add density and stay, without a tax reset, a debt they can't carry, or a sale that prices them out.
- Let the city coordinate for scale. One homeowner ordering a single modular unit gets none of the factory savings. A city that aggregates demand and bulk-purchases captures pricing only big players reach now. San Jose and Cleveland are building exactly this.
- Keep public land public. Treat it as a finite public asset, not inventory to sell to the highest bidder. Public land in is what makes affordability out.
- Build the trades pipeline. Partner with local building trades and run it as paid apprenticeship, the way YouthBuild does nationally, so young people learn a trade by building the housing. The labor shortage is the problem; this is part of the answer.
When this plan was debated, one of the most quoted hopes, in residents' own words at the hearing, was that nurses and teachers should be able to live here instead of commuting in from Canton. I am that nurse. I already live here, I've raised my kids here, and I want to add the housing this city says it wants. The test of whether we mean it isn't whether we say the word "nurse" in a planning document. It's whether someone like me can actually act on it. Right now I can't, and that's the gap I'm asking us to close.
I'm also a community health nurse practitioner and a union leader, and I'll say this as a homeowner speaking only for myself, not on behalf of my union. The nurses I work with ask me how I afford to live here. The honest answer is timing. I bought in 2011, in the wreckage of the market crash, with an FHA loan, low down payment, government-backed. That window closed behind me. The crash isn't an entry strategy anyone can repeat, and a nurse trying to buy here today faces prices that have only climbed since. So when I say the door is priced shut, I mean it shut behind me. I got in on a fluke of timing and a federal loan program, not because the system works for people like us. It doesn't anymore. That's the whole reason I'm writing this.
VIIIWhy I'm not that invested in who wins.
The Ann Arbor mayor chairs a council. It isn't a strong-mayor system. The job is counting votes and building majorities, and the gavel can't force an agenda the council won't pass. If that's true, and I think it mostly is, then the thing we're all fighting about, which personality holds the chair, matters less than we're acting like it does. Either mayor inherits the same council, the same state law, the same budget.
If I'm honest, I lean toward Rabhi, and let me be precise about why, because it isn't a claim that he's the better vote-counter or that his record is spotless. It's narrower than that: he is at least talking about the things I care about, public land, financing access, displacement, the cost of staying, where the dominant frame treats supply as the only lever. His publicly available platform and comments lean toward public ownership and financing at a more structural level, which is at least compatible with what I'm describing, though I haven't seen him spell out a homeowner-infill program either. And I'll correct one thing that keeps getting repeated: nobody owns the word "development." The real disagreement was never whether to build. Both candidates would. It's what kind, on whose land, financed how, and who's protected when it happens.
But I hold even that loosely, because none of what I care about is decided in an August primary. Whether we pair upzoning with reachable financing, whether we protect the people already here, whether public land stays public, whether we build the workforce to do any of it, those are council votes, ordinances, and budgets over the next four years, decided by whoever's in the room. Including us.
I'm less interested in which driver we pick than in where the bus is actually going.
Build the homes, and let the people already here stay. Those were never opposites. Pretending they are is how we keep losing both.