ANN ARBOR, MI — For longtime Black residents in Ann Arbor, a six-story affordable housing development proposed in the city’s historically Black business district is more than a building.
It’s a chance to honor the Kerrytown area’s Black history — signs of which they say have all but been vanished — while addressing economic disparities.
“It does not fall lightly on me that, 60 years ago, the majority of Black people in this area owned their homes and their businesses, and that today we’re talking about a housing development that will support people who are experiencing the horrific impacts of being unhoused,” said Yodit Mesfin Johnson, a consultant whose work focuses on diversity and social justice.
“This work is not going to repair centuries of economic violence, but it is a step,” she said of the mixed-use building the city’s Housing Commission and Avalon Housing have planned for the city-owned parking lot at the northwest corner of Catherine Street and Fourth Avenue downtown.
As for how the project should pay homage to Kerrytown’s past as a hub of life for Black community members, Johnson has been hired to help the city and its nonprofit co-developer facilitate a community-engagement process that’s ongoing, working with a 12-member Community Leadership Council that includes Black community members with intergenerational ties to the area.
Officials previously indicated the ground floor would include an art gallery and small-business incubator supporting BIPOC business entrepreneurship and incorporate art and design honoring the historically Black neighborhood.
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Those plans have yet to be finalized, but what’s driving them was a focus as officials gave an overview of the project during a virtual Zoom meeting last week, showing a video featuring Black community members supporting the project.
“We are losing our Black history and I want an avenue where we can hang onto it and talk about it and let other people in Ann Arbor that are either coming or going understand there is a history here,” Shirley Beckley said in the video.
Housing Commission Executive Director Jennifer Hall said she consulted with the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County before putting out a request for proposals. Avalon was the only developer that proposed a first-floor space supporting Black community members.
The latest development plans call for 66 apartments, including nine efficiency units, 55 one-bedroom units and two two-bedroom units for people earning up to 60% of the area median income. As tentatively planned, half the units would be for people who need supportive-housing services, including people exiting homelessness, and half would be affordable housing for artists.
“Right now in our community, we have close to 400 people experiencing homelessness,” said Aubrey Patino, Avalon’s executive director, adding over 2,500 people per year experience homelessness in Washtenaw County and an additional 850-plus units of supportive housing are needed.
“The top cause of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing,” she said, citing racism as a factor. “We’ve long known that people of color are disproportionately affected by homelessness. So in our community, we know that while only 12% of folks living in Washtenaw County identify as Black or African American, 61% of people accessing the homeless-response sector for assistance are identifying as Black or African American.”
The artist-preference aspect for half of the apartments is not yet set in stone, but the thinking is it would benefit the entire community to house artists who also are being displaced by rising housing costs, Patino said.
“We think that this intentional mixing of creative artists and supportive-housing residents will lend itself to greater social bridging and make for a dynamic community,” she said.
Johnson said she grew up in Detroit and came to Ann Arbor as a high schooler. As a teenager, she longed for the sense of cultural and community connection she felt in Detroit, she said, but many of the places in Ann Arbor where that could be found, including Black-owned businesses, disappeared over time.
Kerrytown’s past as a hub of life for Black residents included the Black-owned businesses that once lined Ann Street, the Dunbar Community Center and Colored Welfare League on Fourth Avenue and Jones Elementary School, which anchored the neighborhood where many Black residents lived during the era of racial segregation and discriminatory housing practices.
Johnson agrees there’s a history to honor in the Kerrytown area, which has drastically changed as real estate prices and taxes have increased and the Black population has dwindled.
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“Despite the promise of a community for all that Ann Arbor offers us and that we tout as America’s most-educated city and as the best place to live, so says Forbes, the near erasure of Black people in this neighborhood, for me, is a loss for all of us, not just some of us,” Johnson said.
“Whole swaths of our neighbors — folks we can work to build a vibrant city with — are missing the opportunity to thrive and to return to prosperity,” she added.
Mentioning Black residents whose families go back generations in Ann Arbor, Johnson said it’s important to bring them near to the project because of the near-irreparable harm done by the historical denial of wealth-building opportunities.
One of the 12 members of the Community Leadership Council is Christina Dennis, a former minister at Ann Arbor’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her roots in the area run deep, she said, noting she was the third generation of her family to grow up in the same house her family still owns 80 years later.
“Our neighborhood was indeed a rich, vibrant neighborhood, a very connected neighborhood in that we were more like family instead of just neighbors,” she said.
Her mother had to attend Jones School during segregation because she was Black, even though Mack School was closer to their home, she said, noting her mother eventually was among the first children to integrate Mack School.
“In terms of this project, I was really drawn to it because I was blessed to grow up, as did my mother, in an Ann Arbor that valued diversity — not just racial diversity, but economic diversity as well,” she said, adding people of different backgrounds learned from each other and much of that seems lost today.
Dennis moved away for 12 years and came back in 2017 to an Ann Arbor she almost didn’t recognize, she said.
“So, I definitely wanted to represent those ancestors of mine, those persons that came to Ann Arbor even before the turn of the last century,” she said. “I view myself and my friends — we’re the connector generation. We’re the ones who stand in the gap between what once was, what is today, and what shall come.”
Dennis said she has always appreciated Avalon Housing. At a point in life when she otherwise couldn’t have afforded to live in the neighborhood where she grew up, she was able to live in an Avalon duplex on Summit Street and raise her children two blocks from her grandparents’ house and one block from the house her mother once owned, she said.
“And there are a lot of people, as you talk about the history of our neighborhood, that will highlight some of the challenges that we’ve had, but I’m just here to let you know we grew up and we became doctors and attorneys and engineers and nurses and bus drivers and real estate agents, pro sports figures,” she said, mentioning some of the successes. “I mean, we had a vibrant neighborhood and all the love in the community that was poured into us became evident.”
But for those in poverty and struggling with homelessness, supportive housing allows moving out of survival mode into a place where they can thrive, and there’s a real transformation with people seeing improvements in health, wellbeing, income and employment as a result, Patino said, adding they also get a sense of social and community connection.
On any given day, Avalon works with over 800 people and the model works, with 96% staying housed, Patino said.
The ground-floor spaces envisioned for the project include community space and fitness space for tenants along Fourth Avenue and a larger space along Catherine Street with about 2,100 square feet that could be oriented toward cultural, community or retail activity.
That larger space is still “to be defined,” said Jack Schroeder, project architect with Landon Bone Baker Architects.
Plans show the northern half of the ground level would remain a public parking lot with 18 spaces for cars, with the building partly rising over it. There also would be bicycle parking.
“The building is pretty tight to the street on Fourth Avenue, but pulls back a bit on Catherine,” Schroeder said, noting the wider sidewalk in front of building entry points.
It’s planned as an all-electric building with rooftop solar and electric vehicle chargers in line with the city’s carbon-neutrality goals. In addition to a roof deck area, there’s talk of potentially blending a green roof with the rooftop solar.
Avalon plans to submit a project site plan to the city in November and have it go before Planning Commission for approval in January, then spend 2023 seeking funding to start construction in 2024 and be complete by fall 2025.
The city’s new affordable housing millage helps make the project possible by providing gap financing to leverage other funding such as low-income housing tax credits, Hall said. The millage is intended to help build housing with affordable rents for people with incomes up to 60% of the area median income.
That means incomes up to $49,500 for a single person, $56,580 for a two-person household, $63,660 for a three-person household, $70,680 for a four-person household and $76,380 for a five-person household.
While those are the caps, the city wants to provide housing for people who have much lower incomes, Hall said.
A housing needs assessment in 2020 found demand for up to about 1,400 affordable housing units in the downtown area for people with incomes up to 30% of AMI, and for up to 850-plus units for people with incomes up to 60% of AMI.
The city has looked at about a dozen city-owned sites and Hall estimates the city can build 1,500 to 2,000 new units.
Instead of just letting the free market drive growth in market-rate housing for higher-income households, the city aims to take an active role in building affordable housing downtown.
“This millage is the key component in enabling us to probably developed all of these sites and more,” Hall said.
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