A2Politico: Where I Live, They’re Using the “Neighborhood Character” Dogwhistle to Fight ADUs and STRs

by P.D. Lesko

Since Sept. 2021, the Board members of our Homeowners Association have been trying to force us to stop using our city-licensed, owner-occupied short-term rental (STR). These Board members have “concerns.” It bothers them all the “transients” we host. Our guests have had the temerity to park on public streets, use public sidewalks and use an entrance within the HOA to access a public park, the Black Pond Woods. I know, it’s a lot to bear for the cream of Ann Arbor, the rich and the thick.

After obtaining and reviewing past HOA Board’s meeting minutes, I discovered that our HOA Board had bullied the former Principal of the Steiner High School over her faculty driving on our streets and entering Steiner’s property from its own back entrance, off of one of the two streets in the HOA. These Board members cajoled the woman into installing a gate between a public street and her property’s back entrance so that “criminals” did not use the Steiner back entrance to go between Tibbetts Ct. and the Steiner property.

Board meeting minutes we obtained showed that Board members complained to the Steiner principal when two Steiner faculty members (one on a bike commute) cut through the HOA to reach the school.

I wish I had known about this, because I certainly would have objected to such overt idiocy. Then again, in this HOA the members are not invited to the Board’s regular meetings and the Board members don’t post their own meeting votes or evidence of votes by email anywhere for members to see or download.

We live in a very small (34 homeowners) Home Owners Association near Northside STEAM. It’s called Orchard Place. In 2000 we bought our first house near what we knew would be the kids’ elementary school (Northside). The house sits on a 16,000 square foot corner lot. We have been, for most of our time in this subdivision, the only Jews and the only same-same family. Another same-sex family moved in for a few years, and then the women split up and moved out. There was another Jewish family that lived here, but they divorced and moved.

We chose this house because we love the north side of Ann Arbor. We chose this house for its secluded, large lot, for its proximity to the elementary school and the friends we had made during our 10 years renting a small (800 square foot), older house on Traver, near Broadway. We begged our landlord to sell us the house on Traver. He finally relented, but two years after we’d moved out and bought the house in the HOA. We realized our mistake at the first HOA “mixer,” a cook-out, six months after we moved in. Let’s just say people who act as though their “neighborhood” is a gated community to keep out the “undesirables” don’t make the friendliest of neighbors.

We were stunned, but concluded that because of the seclusion of our lot (neighbors on only one side) we would keep to ourselves and take solace in our friends, gardening and walking our boys to school daily. Sometimes, though, we are still reminded of the terrible mistake we made buying a home in this HOA.

At the 2021 Annual Meeting during which we discussed our STR with our neighbors, a U-M doctor suggested that our STR would host “vagrants.” It was a horrifying display of ignorance and classism from a normally kind and open-minded man.

A woman with a Ph.D. in psychology from U-M who is married to a doctor (and who joined the Board) asked at the same meeting: “Does this mean you’ll rent to just anyone?”

I replied: “Do you mean Black people?”

I explained to her and everyone else at the meeting that we had no intention of discriminating against anyone, or violating state and federal Fair Housing laws in hosting guests in our STR.

When I mentioned that City zoning had been changed to permit Accessory Dwelling Units in single-family zoned areas, the same woman replied, speaking regally for everyone present, “We don’t want ADUs here.”

Fortunately, elected officials in the Michigan Legislature don’t agree. We helped craft legislation that is simple: HOA Bylaws have to bow to local ordinance where STRs and ADUs are concerned. Cities would have total control over their own zoning preferences. In Ann Arbor, STRs and ADUs, which are permissible in single-family zoned areas, would be permissible in all HOAs that are zoned single-family. Bring on the density and the affordable housing.

We want to build a small, free-standing ADU to provide affordable housing. In speaking to elected officials, I have reminded them that in Portland, OR homeowners in single-family neighborhoods are permitted up to three ADUs on their property. We have a 16,000 square foot lot and I think Ann Arbor should follow Portland’s example. I also think homeowners who build ADUs and provide low-income and/or affordable housing should get a break on property taxes to encourage ADUs that add to the affordable housing stock.

However, our STR is adversely impacting the “neighborhood character,” we’ve been told. The “character of the neighborhood” is “changing,” according to an email sent out by the Board president last winter.

In March 2021, the HOA Board (without telling the HOA’s members or getting their permission) sued us. They did not apprise the members about the suit until Nov. 2022. Without consulting the members, five Board members have sunk $29,000 in HOA dues, including a recent a $15,000 special assessment, in legal fees to stop us providing housing. The HOA’s annual budget in 2021 was about $16,000.

In 1992, when this site condo HOA was built, the north side was a historically Black part of Ann Arbor. The houses the developer built dwarfed the modest homes around them. Now? The HOA houses are somewhat dowdy, and the developer’s shortcuts are showing, inside and out. The surrounding neighborhood is gentrifying and public records show home values are rising quickly. In this HOA, created only so the land could be developed to the advantage of the developer, thanks to a singular lack of amenities, lack of services, and the Board’s poor upkeep of the few common areas, including the entrance, our property values have risen more slowly than in the surrounding areas.

So what is the “neighborhood character” of this small HOA? It’s an exclusive enclave where a neighbor once confessed to passing out different (smaller) Halloween candy to the Black kids from Arrowwood Cooperative, just up Pontiac Trail. Read that sentence twice. It’s a haven for entitled xenophobes: one HOA member, a doctor’s wife, announced that she didn’t feel her school-aged kids were “safe” on their afternoon walks home from Northside Elementary (half a mile away), until the kids were “in the neighborhood.”

It’s a place where more than one former neighbor let their dog outside daily to crap on other people’s lawns, including ours. When I put one dog’s gift on the hood of the dog owner’s car, the man came screaming out of his house, threatening me. The “neighborhood character” of this place is represented by the habitually snow-covered sidewalks in winter. The “neighborhood character” of the place where I live is truly best represented by the long-time Treasurer of the Board.

This hausfrau can’t produce a year-over-year budget to save her life. Her 2023 budget somehow neglected to account for a $15,000 special assessment. The Board collected the money and it just disappeared. Poof. Board minutes over a series of years show her lobbying against annual audits of the HOA’s corporate finances.

We have an email chain between the Board members where this woman says, “I padded the budget.”

Scott Pletcher, Board President, is a U-M researcher whose applications for federal NIH grants include budgets. He replied via email, “Thanks Suzie. Great work as always.”

What? I was left wondering if Pletcher pads his NIH grant budgets and fights against audits of his use of other people’s money.

Board meeting minutes we obtained also revealed Treasurer Suzie “Great Work” Severson’s delicious secret is anonymously targeting (certain) neighbors whose landscaping bothers her. The minutes reflect whispers at Board meetings that Suzie doesn’t like the weeds in some yard. It would be pathetic, but for the meeting minutes where the discussions between the Board members show Suzie’s targets were threatened and hectored over and over.

This woman obviously missed the memo on beehive collapse, and Roundup’s multi-billion dollar settlement for causing cancer. She also missed the memo where she has a fence visible from the street and that violates the Bylaws.

These examples aside, in actuality, “neighborhood character” is a racist dog whistle.

Tom Basgen in a great essay in “Streets,” wrote: “To me, the ‘neighborhood character’ phrase is a two-bit play to emotion and the vague sense of community that comes along with geographic proximity….When I say I’m trying to ‘preserve the character of the neighborhood,’ I am telling you that I am desperately afraid of change and I can’t make an argument capable of withstanding scrutiny.”

Amen, Bro.

In court recently, the Board’s lawyer, W. Daniel Troyka, stood up and said that STRs impact the “character of neighborhoods.” It was everything I could do to not stand up and protest to Judge Patrick Conlin, Jr. the overt use of an ugly racist dog whistle that has been used to keep POC out of majority-white neighborhoods. Mr. Troyka walked it back, perhaps in response to my muttering, saying that our STR was not, of course, impacting “the character” of our own HOA. He needs to tell the people on the Board that.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the Board members would fall back on the racist “neighborhood character” argument against city-sanctioned STRs.

In reviewing the HOA’s records of Bylaw violations pursued by the Board since the late-90s, I discovered the Board members of this HOA have consistently targeted gays, POC and the disabled when enforcing alleged Bylaw violations. In August 2021, the Board members became so tired of me posting their dirty little secrets on a public Facebook page I made, and attaching the documents to emails to other HOA members, they passed a “special resolution” to illegally strip only us of the right to request HOA documents and records, such as financial records and Board meeting minutes and votes.

In the 23 years we have lived in this HOA, not one Black family has owned any of these site condos.

Take a guess when HOAs became ubiquitous? The 1960s, just years after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law and integration began in earnest.

Jonathan Rothwell is the author of “A Republic of Equals.” He says, “HOAs perpetuate racial and economic segregation by blocking fair participation in housing markets, thus denying wealth-generating opportunities and upward mobility for many Black people and lower-income families.” 

At the 2021 HOA Annual Meeting, a woman who can’t see our house from hers a block away and around a corner, went on a pre-crime, fear mongering tirade about how our one-bedroom STR, off Pontiac Trail next to the Steiner high school, could result in red Solo cups blowing all over on football Saturdays. She went on to suggest that because we have an STR, corporations could swoop in, buy these houses and turn them all into STRs. [City zoning prohibits this.] She was more concerned with us renting to “just anyone,” than the fact that since 2000, two registered sex offenders have lived in “the neighborhood.”

Other neighbors, 60ish white Polish immigrants, leaned into the camera at the 2021 Annual HOA Zoom meeting and pointed out that STR and ADUs are not about providing housing, the discussion was about following the rules of the HOA. Poles and their penchant for just following rules is a touchy topic for Jews.

Despite the push for legislation that makes city zoning the end all and be all where HOAs are concerned, it’s time for Michigan’s Legislature to revise the Michigan Condominium Act. HOAs must be stopped from interfering with city zoning, particularly zoning that seeks to create more housing, more density, and to integrate different kinds of people and housing stock into existing single-family neighborhoods.