Thesis update: I’m about halfway through a full draft of my planning thesis, which I hope to have done by late October. If I hit that benchmark, I can do a second draft in November and have it ready to turn in at the beginning of December.

This has been a lot of fun, if being a nearly all-consuming project. I’ll share two things now, in order to whet your appetite for the final product. First, I’m going to do a comparison of two blocks in the period 1920-1980, to show how the physical, demographic, economic, and political conditions changed there as a result of changing student housing conditions. When I say “student housing conditions,” I mean more than just the physical condition of the house — I’m making the argument that the real estate market was the proximate cause of these multi-faceted changes in the block, and, by proxy, the city. The two blocks: E. Liberty, Thompson, E. William, S. Division (downtown); and Jefferson, Ashley, Madison, First (in the Old West Side). To this end, Sanborn maps, city aerial photos, and especially old assessor’s cards are unbelievable treasure troves of data and information on these blocks.

Second, I’ve taken a look at the archives of the Old West Side Association, housed at the Bentley Historical Library. I was tipped off to these by an interview on Teeter Talk. Having looked at same documents as the undergrad referenced therein, I think she read way too much into the situation. The founders of the OWSA were neither explicitly nor implicitly racist or trying to exclude blacks from their neighborhood. However, they did exhibit a fundamental conservatism that they wished to express both in the built environment and in the demographics of the neighborhood. The OWS founders opposed a low-income housing development proposed for their neighborhood and advocated that the OWS should remain a single-family neighborhood, even as market forces dictated greater density and more rental units.

One interesting discovery I made fundamentally contradicts the conventional wisdom of the origins of the OWS. Many in the Ann Arbor community relate that the Old West Side and similar preservation initiatives were founded and delineated in response to the replacement of houses with small apartment buildings, disparaged as “cashbox” apartment buildings. In fact, one of the founders, a U-M art professor named Chet LaMore wrote to Councilmember John Hathaway in 1966 and claimed that “there is a genuine desire to preserve the good and replace the less desirable with something better, even though different. For instance the new small apartment buildings are not unwelcome.” Further, the OWS proposed that the city re-plan part of the OWS to promote townhouse residential development, supporting a proposed R-4 zoning area. Finally, members of the OWS advocated more dense development centered around the intersection of Main and Madison, back in 1968.

That’s right — the Old West Side wants density.