Let Them Eat Barbecue: Council Members Plan to Use Homeless at Upcoming Meeting to Show “Strong Support” for Library Lot Sale

by Patricia Lesko

As the saying goes, “In a free-market economy, you get what you give. In a state-run economy, you get what you can bribe a politician to give you.” The Ann Arbor Independent was made aware of allegations that members of Ann Arbor City Council are looking for a bribe of sorts from the area’s homeless individuals and a non-profit group that provides food, shelter and transportation to the homeless. The newspaper contacted representatives of the non-profit group and spoke at length to a current member of M.I.S.S.I.O.N.’s Board of Directors and the Board’s former president Brian Durrance.

Multiple individuals with knowledge of the situation and individuals within the homeless community have alleged that Council members made a variety of political and financial promises to M.I.S.S.I.O.N., a small nonprofit that provides a “voice to the homeless,” according to the nonprofit’s mission statement on its tax returns. The group also provides support and services, such as warming shelter space and bus tokens. A “strong showing” of the homeless individuals whom Mission helps is expected to attend the April 17 Council meeting. At the meeting, the homeless will stage a show of support for the sale of the publicly-owned Library Lot parcel for $10 million to the Core Spaces group, and the construction of a “workforce” housing development project on the site. Half of the purchase price, $5 million, will be deposited into the city’s Affordable Housing Fund.

Durrance said that in exchange for the “show of support for the Core Spaces project” at the April 17 Council meeting, M.I.S.S.I.O.N. hopes to get Council members’ support for a tiny house village for the homeless. The Ann Arbor Independent was unable to reach M.I.S.S.I.O.N. founder Caleb Poirier who is said to have been in discussions with Council members related to the “strong showing” of homeless individuals in exchange for zoning accommodations, among other concessions necessary to clear the way for a tiny houses community for the homeless in Ann Arbor. The Ann Arbor Independent has filed a FOIA request for all communications between Poirier and Council members related to the Core Spaces project and the April 17, 2017 Council meeting.

Brian Durrance said that the area’s homeless would benefit from any portion of the $5 million deposited into the Affordable Housing Fund which might be given to local non-profit Avalon Housing. Avalon is building a $10 million 70-unit low-income housing project on Maple Road. Avalon currently owns and operates 173 units of subsidized housing in 15 buildings scattered around Ann Arbor.

While collecting almost $500,000 in city grants and abatements for the development in 2017, Avalon also collected $700,000 in developer’s fees on the project.

The Ann Arbor Housing Commission operates 360 low-income units. The city Housing Commission’s Section 8 Housing waitlist is closed as is its public housing waitlist.

Core Spaces proposes to build a 17-story tower on the parcel. Of the approximately 320 so-called “workforce” housing units to be built, 9-12 percent of the apartments will be rented at between 120 to 150 percent of fair market rent: $922-$1,276 per month. Renters’ incomes, in order to be eligible for those apartments, would be capped at between $31,000-$64,000 per year. Subsidized housing, unlike workforce housing, pegs rents at 30 percent of a renter’s available income. To qualify for low income housing in Ann Arbor a family of four would generally have to earn less than $44,250.

In order to make the sale of the public land and the proposed 50 year lease of 360 parking garage spaces in the the Library Lot parking garage to Chicago developer Core Spaces less of a bitter pill to swallow for angry downtown business owners, concerned environmentalists and residents who would prefer a central park developed, $5 million from the sale of the parcel would be deposited into Ann Arbor’s Affordable Housing Fund. Brian Durrance returned to this point repeatedly, even as he acknowledged none of the $5 million would directly benefit M.I.S.S.I.O.N. The annual income of nonprofit M.I.S.S.I.O.N. has fallen from a high of $144,000 in 2013 to $66,920 in 2015.

Durrance said: “None of our homeless individuals could afford to live in the Core Spaces apartments,” a development project that critics have dubbed a further expansion of Ann Arbor’s “unaffordable housing” stock.

So why feign support at a public meeting for a housing project homeless individuals won’t be able to afford to rent?

“How does this all make me feel? Filthy. Dirty,” Brian Durrance said. “But that’s politics, right?”

What Durrance leaves unsaid is that using the homeless at a City Council meeting to provide political cover for elected officials who want to vote in favor of a controversial development project is politics in Ann Arbor. It’s political theatre in a political environment that Durrance describes as “very conservative.”

“If we support those Council members, maybe they’ll support us,” said Durrance, but it’s a conspiracy theory to believe we’ve been promised money in exchange for our support at the Council meeting.”

What M.I.S.S.I.O.N.’s Board wants is a tiny house community for the homeless.

“These tiny house communities are popping up all over, but you know Ann Arbor,” said Durrance. He points to the fact that eight years after 100 units of low-income housing in the old Y were demolished, those units have yet to be replaced. “I know, right, in ‘progressive’ Ann Arbor?”

Between 2005 and 2009, under former mayor John Hieftje, 30 units of affordable housing were built in Ann Arbor. According to a 2015 HUD analysis of Ann Arbor’s housing market, between 2013 and 2015 1,060 new units of housing were built downtown, 75 percent of which were student luxury apartments. During the same period, in Berkeley, California that city built 500 units of affordable housing annually, a goal set by its City Council and mayor.

In 2009, a year after the 100 units of low-come housing were torn downtown to make way for an empty lot and then a parking lot on the site of the old YMCA on Fifth Ave, across from the Downtown Library, Hiefje and former Ward 1 Council member Sabra Briere announced their commitment to have 60 more units of affordable housing built. The 60 units were not built and local political pundits such as Mark Maynard accuse Ann Arbor City Council of adopting housing strategies that “dump Ann Arbor’s poor in Ypsilanti.”

Tiny Houses for the Homeless on City Land

In 2015, then Ann Arbor City Council Member Stephen Kunselman (D-Ward 3) brought forward a resolution for a tiny house village near downtown on city-owned property at 415 W. Washington St. Embracing a strategy of “Housing First“—the idea that addressing homelessness starts with giving folks a place to live—U.S. cities like Dallas, Detroit, and Portland already have micro home communities for the homeless up and running. There are 10 tiny house villages for homeless individuals in cities across the U.S. including Detroit, Dallas, Nashville, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Fresno and Portland.

Kunselman’s opponent in the August 2015 Democratic primary election, a 21-year-old U-M student named Zach Ackerman (D-Ward 3), opposed the tiny houses for the homeless project.

“Many people see these houses as a solution to the problem of affordable housing, not only for homeless people but for single people and aging adults — people who don’t need all of the amenities a large house offers,” Durrance told The Michigan Daily in 2015. “I think a lot of the technical issues are being worked out across the country in different conversations, and those discussions are now occurring as well here in Ann Arbor.”

Ackerman argued that it would be “dangerous to have people living in 80-square-foot homes in a flood zone.” The U-M student went on to defeat the long-time incumbent Kunselman by a handful of votes in August 2015. (Stephen Kunselman plans to run again for City Council in the August 2017 Democratic primary election.)

Mayor Christopher Taylor, who endorsed Ackerman in the primary, criticized Kunselman’s 2015 proposal to house the homeless and said in June 2015 he didn’t think 415 W. Washington was “the proper location for such an experiment.” Taylor went on to say, “The location of a tiny homes project should be the subject of a careful and deliberative process.”

Taylor told The Michigan Daily in 2015, “There are zoning and building code obstacles in respect to tiny homes. If they can prove to be legally available within the boundaries of state law, we, in Ann Arbor, would be interested in exploring how we could incorporate tiny homes into our affordable housing portfolio.”

M.I.S.S.I.O.N. Board member Sheri Wander says, “What is needed is for City Council and other government officials to be willing to change zoning laws and other things as necessary in order to create these opportunities, and that conversation is just beginning.” Wander went on to say, “I would like to think Ann Arbor could take the models that are out there and expand on them, make them better, and fit our particular community. I think that’s a conversation that should involve many voices both at the political level with politicians and city council, but also, and very importantly, with the people who will benefit most from having another alternative for affordable housing.”

After Kunselman lost his Council seat in 2015, any “careful deliberative process” related to finding a site for a tiny homes community for the homeless in Ann Arbor ended.

Brian Durrance hopes playing politics will reignite the “deliberative process.” It’s a gamble.

$5 Million to “Affordable” Housing in Exchange for “Workforce Housing”

Should City Council sell the Library Lot parcel for $10 million to Core Spaces, half of the purchase price is slated to be deposited into the city’s Affordable Housing Fund. A Housing Commission official said, “A part of that $5 million is expected to be used to improve the city’s present low-income and affordable housing.”

It’s this money for the Affordable Housing Fund that Council member Zach Ackerman and others on Council focus on when arguing in favor of the Core Spaces proposal. While Ackerman has said the $5 million could be used “to support more affordable housing developments in the city,” there are others on Council who would see $4.2 million of the money used to repurchase the vacant Y Lot next to the Blake Transit Center. There, Ackerman has suggested another 100 units of workforce housing could be built.

Yet, even the promise of $5 million for the city’s Affordable Housing Fund has not stopped hundreds of local business owners, the Main Street and State Street Area Associations, environmental activists and local elected officials from publicly criticizing the Core Space proposal. Over 5,000 registered voters in Ann Arbor signed a ballot proposal petition aimed at forcing Council members to bring the question of a sale of the Library Lot parcel to a public vote. The petition came up a few hundred signatures short of the number needed to put the question of the sale of the publicly-owned land to the city’s voters. A majority of Council members refused to put the question to voters.

Ward 1 Council member Sumi Kailasapathy (D) has called the Core Spaces proposal Ann Arbor’s “very own Trump Tower.”

Stephen Kunselman, who spoke before Council on Mar. 16 about the Core Spaces project said, “And now, if you really want to fund the affordable housing trust fund, then pass an ordinance requiring the city administrator to budget 10 percent of all parking revenues received by the city to the affordable housing trust fund.”

Ward 3 Council member Zach Ackerman (D), has repeatedly claimed adding 300 more units of high-rent, workforce apartment housing downtown will drive down rents. “We live in a supply-and-demand world, and by increasing supply to match that demand, you create competition,” said Zach Ackerman at a recent Council meeting. “Competition drives prices down.”

Ann Arbor resident Will Hathaway says Ackerman’s economic assertions “that adding 300 more units of housing for the wealthy will help to make housing more affordable is a harmful myth.”

Former County Commissioner Vivienne Armentrout is equally critical of the young Council member: “I wish Zach Ackerman would spend some more time studying the economics and financial tools for affordable housing before he makes these pronouncements.”

Let Them Eat Ribs

As the debate rages over the April 17 Council vote on whether to sell the Library Lot parcel, Brian Durrance said that homeless individuals affiliated with M.I.S.S.I.O.N. will attend a barbecue at City Hall scheduled for the afternoon of Monday April 17. After the free meal, which is being paid for by M.I.S.S.I.O.N. Board member Margaret (Peggy) Lynch, those same homeless individuals “will go into the City Council meeting and be present for the vote,” said Durrance.

In order to persuade M.I.S.S.I.O.N.’s Board members to agree to allow Council members to use homeless women and men as political pawns, Durrance said that M.I.S.S.I.O.N. leaders had a private sit-down with Ann Arbor CFO Tom Crawford about the Core Spaces proposal.

“In our private meeting, the CFO explained what the rents in the Library Lot development would be,” said Durrance.

When asked how Crawford could guarantee what the rents in the Core Spaces development would be since he works for the City of Ann Arbor and not the developer, Durrance admitted, “no one really knows what the rents will be.”

It’s no secret which City Council members support selling the library lot to Chicago developer Core Spaces for $10 million, and leasing the company 360 parking spaces in the Library lot underground parking garage for the next 50 years. To move forward with the sale requires the votes of eight City Council members and the votes are there: Frenzel (D-Ward 1), Westphal (D-Ward 2), Ackerman, Grand (D Ward 3), Krapohl (D-Ward 4), Smith (D-Ward 5), Warpehoski (D-Ward 5).

City Council members are open about their desire to spend the estimated $2 million in tax revenue the completed tower would bring into city coffers.

“We could get a few more cops with that money,” said Council member Jack Eaton (D-Ward 4). Be that as it may, Eaton points to the 50-year lease of hundreds of parking spaces in the Library Lot garage to Core Spaces as the deal breaker for him.

Conversely, Ward 3 Council member Julie Grand has called the Core Spaces project one “that can offer a lot of benefit without bringing cost to us as citizens.”

Grand’s suppositions may be true unless, of course, you happen to be a homeless citizen in Ann Arbor. For those homeless citizens who will stand silently in Council chambers on April 17 in an effort to deceive the public into believing even “the homeless” support the votes of the eight Council members who want to sell the Library Lot parcel and add to the stock of “unaffordable” workforce housing downtown, the cost of the Core Spaces project may just be their dignity.

The April 17 vote is only the first step in what will be a long process. Should Chris Taylor lose Zach Ackerman and Chip Smith’s votes (both of whom are opposed in the upcoming August 2017 primary election), Core Spaces may find itself without the necessary Council support to build anything atop the land they’d purchased. This is precisely what happened to local developer Dennis Dahlmann after he purchased the old Y lot for $5 million in 2014.