Ann Arbor Comprehensive Plan FAQs
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.
A draft of the plan is available from https://engage.a2gov.org/comprehensive-land-use-plan. It’s not a difficult technical document; it's highly readable and includes a lot of good background explanation.
The goals and strategies of the plan are laid out in Chapter 4 and summarized in three slides on the engage website.
For many of us, the most important goal is right there in the Plan’s title: “Ann Arbor for All.”
Ann Arbor has a severe housing shortage. People with the lowest incomes feel this the most, but a lot of middle-income people are priced out now, too. Many of the people who have made Ann Arbor an interesting place to live–-people responsible for our art, our culture, our food, our schools--are finding it increasingly difficult to stay.
We believe that everyone who works here, studies here, has friends or family here, or otherwise has a reason to want to live here, should have that choice.
Michigan requires cities to revisit their comprehensive plan every five years, but doesn’t require actual updates. Our last major land use plan was completed in 2009, 16 years ago.
Given the length of time that has passed, and the challenge of our housing shortage, it is time for a real update.
Ann Arbor has about 94,000 workers and 53,000 students competing for 53,000 homes. About 76,000 people commute into the city for work. (Sources: UM fall 2024 enrollment statistics and 2021 onthemap.com numbers.) The result is higher–and higher rents and prices. This 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 a 100 people in your audience; population on its own is not a good measure of demand. Some have misinterpreted the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) data with regard to the housing vacancy rate. According to SEMCOG, “When determining the share of housing stock available for new renters and owners, only homes that are ‘for rent’ and ‘for sale’ can be occupied by new renters and owners. So while 3,808 of homes were vacant in Ann Arbor in 2023, only 26.3% of these homes were vacant and for rent, and 4.7% were vacant and for sale. 15.8% of all vacant homes were for seasonal use, in which the home is unoccupied most of the year.” The SEMCOG data clearly shows the proportion of the total vacant homes that are actually available is much smaller.
According to Michigan State law (Michigan legislature section 125.3843, the Michigan Planning Enabling Act of 2008): “Before approving a proposed Master Plan [sic], a Planning Commission shall hold not less than one public hearing on the proposed plan.” https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/mcl/pdf/mcl-Act-33-of-2008.pdf
Ann Arbor has opted for a much more extensive multi-year process of public engagement. We hope you join the conversation about how you’d like Ann Arbor to be in 25 years!
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
The University of Michigan is a state institution, and nothing that the City of Ann Arbor can do, through zoning or otherwise, can influence university admissions. All we can do is make it easier or harder for university employees and students to find housing near campus. The University does build housing for students. 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 (like the newer student-oriented high-rises), these buildings contribute a significant amount of property tax revenue that supports our roads, water system, transit, Affordable Housing fund, and other services.
No.
A Comprehensive Plan is a land use policy document that expresses intent for how to coordinate development across the City. It is not an enforceable document and is not law. (https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/difference_between_a_zoning_ordinance_and_a_master_plan)
By Michigan law, a Zoning Ordinance—which is law—must be based upon a plan. Therefore, planners do all the necessary research to write a Comp Plan that provides recommendations for how to update the Zoning Ordinance so that the two documents align. One way a Comp Plan makes recommendations is through its Future Land Use Map, which provides a visual guide for the preferred development pattern. This map is often confused with a Zoning Map. It is not the same. A Future Land Use Map does not rezone your property. It becomes the map that the Zoning Ordinance uses as a basis for the recommended changes. (From https://hdp-us-prod-app-aagov-engage-files.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/7617/4345/0702/FAQ_Updated_3.31.25.pdf)
What are the next steps?
May – June: Hold engagement sessions at the four library branches to share the draft and collect input from the public.
June 17: The planning team plans to attend the Planning Commission meeting to discuss the plan’s changes. This is the last regularly scheduled meeting to emphasize changes the Planning Commission wants to make to the draft.
End of June: The planning team will send the Planning Commission’s comments to the consultants, Interface Studio, for another round of edits.
July 14: The planning team will send the third version of the draft to the Planning Commission for further review. At this meeting, the Planning Commission will consider a request to forward the Plan to City Council to start the legislatively prescribed review process.
August 18: The Planning Commission forwards the request to the City Council. The City Council will then consider action to distribute the plan to start the formal review process. This is the process outlined by state statute that opens the draft plan for a 63-day public review period. The draft will have already been shared with the public, but this action fulfills the required review period from the Michigan Planning Enabling Act.
If approved, the 63-day review period officially begins. A round of notifications will be sent out to alert the community that the plan is open for public review.
August – October (63-day review period): The planning team will continue to collect community input.
October 21: The Planning Commission will hold a public hearing. Notices for a public hearing will be sent out. To approve the plan, the Planning Commission would pass a resolution with six affirmative votes.
November 17: City Council will approve or reject the Comprehensive Land Use Plan.
You can follow the process and sign up for updates here: a2compplan-a2-mi.hub.arcgis.com/pages/engage
No.
And it wouldn’t be possible for a comprehensive plan to do that.
Zoning doesn’t determine who owns property. It only controls what owners are allowed to do with the property they already own—how tall a building they can build, how many living units they can divide it up into, etc.
Also, zoning generally can’t prevent established uses. Even if we were to try to prohibit single-family detached homes—something nobody has proposed—existing uses would still be allowed. This is why, for example, Jefferson Market can still operate in a zone that disallows retail–it was already in operation when those rules were imposed.
The Comprehensive Plan doesn’t itself change zoning at all–it’s just a high-level vision for what we might want to do with future zoning. But the draft suggests allowing detached single-family homes in every zoning district in the city.
It also suggests allowing higher densities. So it is likely that it will become legal for you to build a duplex, for example, on a lot where previously only a single detached home was legal.
But that will not result in duplexes popping up everywhere tomorrow. First, we have to finish the comprehensive plan. Then the zoning code itself will have to be debated and updated. Then, finally, someone who wants to build a duplex will have to find a willing seller.
Most single-family homes are owned by people who live there and intend to continue living there for many years, and even when they do change hands, many will continue to be used in the same way by the new owners.
No.
In theory, a new zoning map could *allow* those things to happen over time. (It could not, however, force them to happen; somebody still has to be willing to build the high-rise on their property.) The draft Comprehensive Land Use Plan, which is currently in draft form, recommends that neighborhoods currently zoned for residential housing allow “missing middle housing,” which is generally a similar scale to the housing that already exists. Under our current zoning, residential neighborhoods allow up to three stories. The Planning Commission and City Council have decided that the Comprehensive Plan will limit residential neighborhoods to allow three stories by right.
Currently, high rises are permitted only in the downtown and along major roads (parts of Plymouth, Washtenaw, Stadium, State, etc.). Smaller buildings like duplexes, triplexes or townhomes are currently not allowed in most of our residential neighborhoods.
The Comprehensive Land Use Plan suggests continuing to allow high-rise buildings in downtown and arterials as well as in parts of a new "Transition" district that surrounds the downtown.
This means that over the next 20-25 years, we can allow more people to be able to buy or rent a home in Ann Arbor.
Land use change is incremental. For example, the City legalized ADUs in 2018, and now that they are legal, Planning reports that there have been 5-7 requests for ADU permits each year. The ADU experience is a good illustration of how allowing a building type does not mean that the City will experience a lot of change all at once.
Sometimes people will say things like "Ann Arbor doesn't need new housing, it needs new *affordable* housing!" But that's not the way things work. We need both. The good news is that the City has an affordable housing millage, which supports building subsidized housing for our most vulnerable residents! New market-rate housing contributes significantly to the affordable housing fund by paying the affordable housing millage. Ann Arbor is making progress towards building affordable (what the government calls “means-tested”) housing. We should do a lot more. But government-subsidized housing is only a piece of the puzzle. The vast majority of affordable housing units in the country are actually unsubsidized homes that became more affordable as they aged. When we don't allow enough new housing to be built today, we stop creating the affordable housing of tomorrow. There's no reason we have to choose only market-rate or only subsidized! We should do as much of both as we can.
It always costs more to live in new construction. The new housing will be expensive. But that's okay--it still increases the number of homes, which frees up older housing units for everyone else. Research has repeatedly shown that new housing supply — even expensive new housing — makes other homes more affordable because it soaks up the new demand. And smaller units (duplexes, townhomes, cottage courts, etc.) are less expensive than large single-family homes and house more people in the same amount of space.
Although this is happening, it’s not happening in Ann Arbor at the same scale as it is in other areas, in large part because our housing costs are just so high. Private equity firms buy houses that are attractive to first-time and lower-income buyers, and there just aren’t many homes like that here. That said, even the rise of private equity buying up single family homes is often misunderstood. A recent headline (““Investors Now Own 30% of metro Atlanta’s single-family rental housing” ) about single family homes in the Atlanta area caused a lot of panic. But when you look closer, though still worrisome, it’s not disastrous. Many read this headline as suggesting 30% of single family homes are owned by private equity, when in fact it's 30% of single family rentals. In total that’s about 70k units in the Atlanta area, which is a lot. But to put that in perspective there are 2.5 million housing units in metro Atlanta so the total number of houses we’re talking about make up under 3% of total housing units in the metro area. It’s a worrisome trend but still a very small portion of the overall housing market there. When we compare the Atlanta metro area to Ann Arbor, the differences in the market that make Ann Arbor less attractive to private equity become clearer. For example, the median home price in Ann Arbor is more than $100k higher than in the Atlanta metro area AND is rising almost twice as fast—1.3% vs. 2.4% annually. According to the Private Equity Risk Index, a project by the Private Equity Stakeholders Project, Michigan as a state has a risk level of 27 for private equity’s impact on housing. In contrast, Georgia has a risk level of 100). Is there a chance this could happen? Yes, but it’s unlikely because of the very same reasons that are causing our housing crisis.
We love our neighborhoods, too. Ann Arbor is a delightful place to live.
Cities and neighborhoods aren't static -- they never have been. Our neighborhoods are always changing, and that's part of the beauty of living in them. The Comprehensive Land Use Plan is an opportunity to think about what a thriving Ann Arbor might look like 20 or 25 years from now.
Currently, when people replace a single-family home in many of our neighborhoods, it's often replaced with a larger "bigfoot" home — still designed for just one family. The 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 it allows several families to enjoy the neighborhood instead of just one! Allowing more people to enjoy our neighborhoods is a win-win.
Buildings come and go. We believe that it's our neighbors who make up the neighborhood character.
No. The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) population forecasts are not measures of demand. They take into account each municipality's capacity and willingness to accept new residents. SEMCOG's forecast assumes that 200 housing units will be added in Ann Arbor each year, because that's about the rate that it has been for a long time. But more recently, we have been adding 650 units per year. 650 units per year also isn't a measure of demand. For example, we know that new towers have gone all the way up to the maximum height limits in our zoning code. In short, restrictive zoning (among other things) tamps down housing production. Limited housing availability tamps down population growth. SEMCOG then makes population forecasts based on that data.