Question 1

Does eliminating single-family zoning mean banning single-family homes?

Accepted Answer

No. Ending single-family zoning means allowing a wider variety of housing types than just detached homes.

For example, Ann Arbor’s new Comprehensive Land Use Plan includes a Residential category that covers many areas that are currently zoned for only single-family housing. The plan suggests that duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, and neighborhood stores should also be allowed in these areas along with single-family homes.
 
Page 121 of the City’s new Comprehensive Land Use Plan

Question 2

New homes are expensive, so won’t more housing make the city less affordable?

Accepted Answer

It is true that new homes are usually more expensive than old homes, but new homes still help make housing more affordable by removing people from competition for older housing.

For example, several thousand students live in the new expensive high-rises on South University. If those high-rises had never been built, many of these students would be living in older housing near campus, displacing other residents from the city.

Developers destroyed a small number of older, cheaper units to build those high-rises, but the new buildings freed up thousands of older units across the city. If we change our zoning policies to allow for denser housing, we can make this tradeoff more favorable. For every older unit lost, we can free up 5, 10, or 100 units elsewhere.

In contrast, if we continue to limit the density of new housing, old housing will still eventually get renovated or replaced with more expensive housing, but there won’t be any increase in the number of units. We will lose affordable units without gaining any new units in return.

In other cities that have built lots of new housing, rents have fallen in older, cheaper apartments.

Pew Research Center. “New Housing Slows Rent Growth Most for Older, More Affordable Units”

We are beginning to see a similar trend in Ann Arbor. Rents in Class C apartments fell 9.7% in Ann Arbor between October 2024 and 2025. The new high-rises and dorms are creating vacancies in older buildings, and landlords are responding by lowering their rents.

If you are still skeptical, we recommend this video, which explains why blocking new housing is most harmful to the people with the least means, and this research paper, which discusses the topic in depth.

Question 3

Has zoning reform led to lower housing costs in other cities?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Cities that allow for more new housing tend to have lower rents than those that do not.

For example, Austin, Texas recently reformed its zoning policies, and the result was a surge of housing construction that lowered inflation-adjusted rents by 19% between 2021 and 2025. Even ignoring inflation, rents fell 4% in just four years while rents rose in many other cities.

Question 4

I’ve seen a lot of new high-rises go up. Why haven’t costs gone down?

Accepted Answer

For many years, demand in Ann Arbor was increasing faster than supply. A 2018 appraisal prepared for the City of Ann Arbor found that, since 2008, Ann Arbor had added 12 high-rise apartment towers totaling 5,010 beds, while University of Michigan enrollment had increased by 6,469 graduate and undergraduate students over roughly the same period (p. 51).

There is some recent evidence that supply is catching up with demand. RealPage reported that Ann Arbor rents fell at the end of 2025 due to increased vacancies. In February 2026, Ann Arbor had some of the deepest rent cuts in the country.

The new high-rises and dorms seem to finally be outpacing growth in UM enrollment and other sources of demand. If we reform our zoning policies to make it easier to build more housing, we can continue this trend and bring housing costs down further.

Question 5

Why can’t we just build publicly owned affordable housing?

Accepted Answer

Ann Arbor does build publicly owned affordable housing, and the City has a dedicated affordable housing millage to help fund it. Reforming zoning policies to allow more market-rate development will expand the City’s tax base, allowing the City to build more subsidized affordable housing.

In addition to growing the tax base, zoning reform supports subsidized affordable housing in several other ways:

The Ann Arbor Housing Commission’s projects often require zoning changes. For example, the Commission had to file a rezoning request for the 350 S. Fifth project. Proactive zoning reform would allow more affordable housing projects to move forward without case-by-case rezonings.
Private nonprofit housing organizations like the Ann Arbor Community Land Trust and Avalon Housing are constrained by the same zoning rules as for-profit developers. Reforming zoning rules would make it easier for these organizations to build new affordable housing.
The Ann Arbor Housing Commission offers 2,345 rental assistance vouchers that help low-income households pay rent. Because each voucher covers part of a tenant’s rent, the same funding will help more households if market rents stay flat or fall rather than rise.

While publicly owned affordable housing is an important tool, it makes up only a small portion of the total housing market. Ann Arbor has 627 apartments in Housing Commission properties, which constitute only about 1.2% of the city’s 54,387 housing units.

The city is building more subsidized affordable housing, but there is not nearly enough funding to end the housing shortage with publicly subsidized housing alone. Using the roughly $7 million per year affordable housing millage, the City hopes to create about 1,500 affordable units over 20 years, or roughly 75 units per year, which equals only about 0.14% of Ann Arbor’s 54,387 housing units.

For the foreseeable future, the vast majority of residents will have to find their housing on the private market. And even if the city greatly expanded its supply of public housing, many people would still want to own their home or rent an apartment without dealing with a waitlist or means testing.

Publicly owned affordable housing is not a replacement for zoning reform–it’s a complementary strategy.

Question 6

Will denser housing require higher taxes to pay for new infrastructure?

Accepted Answer

On the contrary, compact development tends to provide more tax revenue relative to service costs than low density suburban development. Services and infrastructure are largely land-dependent, so adding more households on the same amount of land spreads infrastructure costs across more payers.

Also, in Michigan, older properties that have been held by a single owner for a long time have assessment caps under Headlee/Proposal A, while new housing is taxed at its current market value. As a result, there is often a big jump in tax revenue when new housing is constructed.

Up-front utility costs are covered by capital cost recovery charges, which are one-time fees paid when new developments connect to the water and sewer system.

Question 7

What if I don’t want my neighborhood to change?

Accepted Answer

We love our neighborhoods too. Ann Arbor is a delightful place to live.

Whether or not we change our zoning policies, Ann Arbor will continue to change. We believe that allowing smaller homes in compact arrangements will lead to positive changes, like lower housing costs, while continuing to forbid these homes will cause negative changes, like higher costs and more commuter traffic.

Currently, there is nothing stopping a property owner from demolishing their single-family home and replacing it with a much larger "bigfoot" home, still designed for just one family. In much of Ann Arbor, a detached house for a single family is the only type of home allowed by the zoning code.

Ann Arbor’s new Comprehensive Land Use Plan proposes allowing someone to build a duplex or a triplex, or maybe a couple of smaller homes, instead. These smaller homes are more affordable and sustainable than a bigger home–and they allow several families to enjoy the neighborhood instead of just one! Allowing more people to enjoy our neighborhoods is a win-win.

Question 8

Will zoning reform allow private equity firms to buy up all our homes?

Accepted Answer

Zoning regulates use, not ownership, so there is nothing stopping private equity companies from buying up homes in Ann Arbor now. If there are more homes, it will be harder for any company to buy a large percentage of them.

As this article explains, real estate investment companies actually prefer markets with restrictive zoning, because abundant housing threatens their profits.

Invitation Homes said in a February regulatory filing it could be "adversely affected" by a rebound in home construction or high residential vacancy rates, as both could lift home supply and "reduce occupancy and rental rates." In a separate filing, the company said it prefers operating in markets that "exhibit constrained levels of new home construction." That means more construction would be good for homebuyers — and bad for business.

Question 9

Why can't we just make the University of Michigan build housing for its students?

Accepted Answer

The University of Michigan is its own independent entity under the State Constitution, and the City of Ann Arbor cannot force it to do anything. However, we can make it easier or harder for university employees and students to find housing near campus.

It’s important to note that when the UM builds housing, that housing doesn’t contribute to the City’s tax base. When private developers build housing–even for students–these buildings contribute a significant amount of property tax revenue that supports our roads, transit, Affordable Housing Fund, and other services.

Question 10

How do we know Ann Arbor has a housing shortage?

Accepted Answer

Ann Arbor has 122,914 residents, and about 80,000 workers commute into Ann Arbor each day (2021 Inflow/Outflow job counts from the U.S. Census). Not counting the 10,000 students housed on campus by the University of Michigan, there are at least 193,000 people who already live in Ann Arbor or regularly need access to it, but only 54,387 housing units.

The result is high housing costs, which is no surprise to anyone who has tried to buy or rent a home in Ann Arbor recently.

A few have tried to argue that we don’t need new housing because our population isn’t increasing very quickly. It’s true that our population has been relatively flat. But that’s a bit like arguing that your 100-seat theater doesn’t need new seats because you’ve never had more than 100 people in your audience; population on its own is not a good measure of demand.

Question 11

What percentage of Ann Arborites are renters?

Accepted Answer

According to 2021 American Community Survey (ACS) data, 54.5% of the population of Ann Arbor are renters. https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2023/02/these-31-michigan-cities-have-more-renters-than-homeowners.html

Question 12

What is the Comprehensive Land Use Plan?

Accepted Answer

The Comprehensive Plan is a high-level policy document, required by State law, that shapes the city's future vision and priorities to guide development up to the year 2050. The plan includes decisions on land use policy and spending priorities for public projects over a 20- to 30-year horizon.

The plan was passed in March, 2026 and is available at https://engage.a2gov.org/comprehensive-land-use-plan. It is easy to read and includes a lot of good background information.

Question 13

Are there any well-known politicians who support zoning reform?

Accepted Answer

Yes, there are many. Here are a few of the most famous:

Barack Obama: “We need to build more units, and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it harder to build homes for working people in this country.” (DNC prepared remarks, Aug. 20, 2024)

Bernie Sanders: “End exclusionary and restrictive zoning ordinances and replace them with zoning that encourages racial, economic, and disability integration that makes housing more affordable.” (Housing for All plan, Oct. 19, 2019)

Gretchen Whitmer: “Let’s make it easier to build in-law suites and multifamily homes. Let’s modernize lot sizes, setback rules, and parking requirements.” (CBS Detroit transcript, Feb. 25, 2026)

Zohran Mamdani: Asked for an issue he had changed his mind about, Mamdani said:

“The role of the private market in housing construction…I clearly recognize now that there is a very important role to be played, and one that city government must facilitate through the increasing of density around mass transit hubs, the ending of the requirement to build parking lots, as well as the need to up-zone neighborhoods that have historically not contributed to affordable housing production — namely, wealthier neighborhoods.” (New York Times interview archive, June 10, 2025)

Elizabeth Warren: “There’s another driver of expensive housing costs: some state and local zoning rules needlessly drive up the cost of construction. These aren’t necessary rules that protect the environment or ensure that homes meet safety codes. These are rules like minimum lot sizes or mandatory parking requirements. These kinds of rules raise the costs of building new housing and keep families from moving into areas with better career and school choices. (Safe and Affordable Housing, March 16, 2019)

Question 14

How can I join More Neighbors?

Accepted Answer

We'd love to meet you! To get involved, you can:

Subscribe to our newsletter.
Come to a monthly meeting or event.
Host a yard or window sign.

Ann Arbor Comprehensive Plan FAQs