This one has cleared another hurdle. It's probably the project NIMBYs have fought the hardest, which is funny since this isn't really anyone's "backyard." I'm not one to believe that NIMBYs never have a point are or never right about anything. But boy, the opposition to this one is particularly ridiculous.
Ann Arbor council votes 6-4 to OK agreements with high-rise developer
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ANN ARBOR, MI - The Ann Arbor City Council has approved two more agreements as part a deal to sell the city-owned Library Lot to Chicago developer Core Spaces for $10 million.
Continuing to try to make way for a 17-story high-rise on the Fifth Avenue property, the council voted Monday night, Sept. 17, to approve a workforce housing covenant and a parking agreement for the development known as The Collective on 5th.
Those agreements confirm details previously negotiated between the city and the developer, including the use of hundreds of parking spaces in city-owned public parking facilities downtown and provisions for dozens of workforce housing apartments.
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The Library Lot is the parking lot atop the city's Library Lane underground parking garage next to the downtown library, along the east side of Fifth Avenue between William and Liberty.
As tentatively planned, the development includes retail space on the ground floor, along with a hotel lobby, residential lobby and common area, office space on the second floor, 131 hotel rooms on floors three through six, 360 apartments on floors seven through 17, and a 12,000-square-foot plaza and event space open to the public.
Before voting on more agreements with Core Spaces, Eaton, D-4th Ward, argued the city should wait to see how things go with pending litigation over the $10 million deal and with a citizen-initiated November ballot proposal that asks voters whether the city should keep the Library Lot and transform it into a downtown central park.
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The mayor is trying to move this along, as a new council is seated in November and will be dominated by decidedly anti-development or at least developer-skeptic. To get the development agreement out fo the way would be a big deal, as then all the new council could do is fight over the site plan and such. The funny thing is that the causes of the very tight housing market in the city is the city's lack of review of the it's very tight height and density limits. They could solve a lot of this for the next few years not even by expanding downtown, but simply increasing the height limit and FAR restrictions in the area already zoned downtown.