Live from Michigan: A Conversation with the Mayors of Flint, Ann Arbor, and Grand Rapids

Three Michigan mayors—Sheldon Neeley of Flint, Christopher Taylor of Ann Arbor, and David LaGrand of Grand Rapids—appeared at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Detroit in April, on a panel moderated by Anthony Flint, author of Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems.

Their conversation, which followed similar mayors’ panel sessions at APA’s national conferences in Denver and Minneapolis, highlighted the challenges municipal leaders face on issues including housing affordability, the property tax, and an evolving relationship with the federal government. These highlights from the discussion have been edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Flint: What is it like to run a city at this current time, in this political environment, and what impact has the role of the federal government had, especially as it has changed?

Mayor Sheldon Neeley: One of the things I find is that it’s the intersection of crises. It’s like any intersection, you have … to make sure you don’t run into catastrophic accidents. My engagement has been on the financial crisis, water crisis, civil unrest, and also a global pandemic. I call it prayer, planning, partnership … we looked for our partners to be able to get through that. We needed all parts of government to play a part to serve the various residents across the state of Michigan. Also, I have a great relationship with the state government as a former legislator, and also have one of the greatest state legislators in the state, [who] happens to be my wife.

Mayor Christopher Taylor: With the current climate, we have a combination of certainties and uncertainties as we grapple at the global level. We know that if we are trying to protect our community members, we need to be welcoming…. That’s going to be complicated, at best, frustrated, at worst, by the administration. We also know that some of our primary quality-of-life initiatives with respect to housing and climate action are at odds with the federal policy and with the process of the administration. We have been doing a lot of work on climate action. [The federal policies], at the very best, complicate and slow down the exciting work that we’re doing.… On housing, crucially, with all those cuts in HUD, those are going to hit our residents.

Mayor David LaGrand: The level of chaos that’s been injected at the federal level has been really problematic, because a lot of people want me to come and do something about Donald Trump. I can’t change his mind on tariffs. I can’t change his mind on a lot of things. We’re the closest people to [yell at], so we get a lot of frustration. Maybe we’re about to revert to city-state models rather than a federal one. The federal government’s been around for a couple hundred years. Cities have been around for 9,000 years. They’re very durable. They have lots of structural advantages, and there are reasons why the cities are going to be fine.

Then the question is, [do] we just forget about the federal government and the state government? The long-term question is, post–Great Society, if we made this deal … to put most of our money up to the federal level and it was going to come back in the form of grants and programming … if that bargain has been falsified, then why am I sending my federal taxes off to the federal government anymore?

If we want to do housing, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. We have to figure out what the resources are. If we want to do environmental work, we have to figure out what’s city level. We just have to be honest and break out of [the approach of saying] gee, there’s a grant somewhere we should apply for.

AF: The next question is about local action. I’m going to ask three questions, one for each of you. I’ll start with Mayor Taylor. Can you tell us about the clean energy public utility you’ve started in Ann Arbor and how that fits in with your local climate action plans?

Mayor Christopher Taylor: We have, in our liberal town, no surprise, we’ve had a climate action plan for quite some time. We were able to, through some work at the county level, find a million dollars a year starting in about 2017, which enabled us to staff up our Office of Sustainability and Innovation. In the state of Michigan, we have a franchise with a regulated provider. That franchise for electric is perpetual. That means if we wanted to run our own utility, seizing [its] assets and utilizing them, not only would we have to pay for capital, we’d also have to pay for the profit interest going forward perpetually.

We decided to start the Sustainable Energy Utility, [which] overlays the existing utility. It is an opt-in utility. It enables residents who wish to sign up to get from the city, from the public utility, 100 percent renewable, reliable, sustainable, resilient, and just-at-market, if not a little bit below, energy. We are getting this underway. We have hired some staff. We’re allocating some budget. We’re going to try to hit 100 homes this year. We’re going to try to hit 1,000 homes next year. We’re going to work … on batteries and solar panels, and we’re focusing on one of our lowest-income areas in the city. The residents are signing up for it. It’s something that gives us a lot of drive, a lot of excitement. It’s something I think that lots of jurisdictions could take a look at.

AF: Mayor Neeley, I know that the … water crisis was traumatic and this is in the rearview mirror, but we’d like an update on how the resolution is going. Importantly, this is ultimately about infrastructure and investment in the city. What can you tell other cities about your experience?

Mayor Neeley: When people find out that I’m the mayor of Flint, Michigan, they ask, how’s the water? I reply, the water’s fine. We’re doing very well. We’ve invested more than $20 million into our infrastructure repair programs [plus $100 million in federal matching funds] … to get us to this point. All of you have been watching over the last decade or so. I want to thank you for your prayers and your wishes. We’re still providing water for the poor families inside the city of Flint, while we’re trying to build … trust. It’s a confidence thing that we have to build back.

AF: I want to turn now to affordability and start with you, Mayor LaGrand. You’ve got your own special circumstances in terms of your local economy, which I’d like you to talk about, but what have you found in terms of the strategies for promoting affordable housing? I’m going to follow up with each of you about your particular strategy, and that is something we’re interested in, which is promoting the use of government-owned land for housing.

Mayor LaGrand: First of all, I’ve just got to acknowledge that I think jealousy is an under-respected emotion. I am jealous of the work that Ann Arbor is doing on the electric utility work, [which] we’re watching very carefully. It’s incredibly exciting.

One of the things that I think in the policy space is really important [is] to ground things in economics. The law of supply and demand is a law. You can try ignoring it if you want. Try ignoring gravity and see how well that works for you. Demand is going to give you price pressures. It really boils down to two things. One is the regulatory environment, and the other is how you actually make it. Again, just to geek out for you guys a little bit, one of the weird things about housing is if you look at industries in general, think about a computer, they get more and more efficient, dramatically so, right? We see that all the time. For housing, the construction industry still involves a guy or a woman coming out to a site with a hammer and knocking a bunch of pieces of wood together like it’s 1940. The housing industry hasn’t moved forward very much technologically.

Sheldon and I were deskmates in [the state legislature] in Lansing. There was a good idea of taxing vacant land that Mayor Duggan proposed for Detroit . Those of us with bad developers squatting on land—that’s a problem. I wrote a bill so that cities could have land banks and not just counties. Then when I became mayor, now we have a land bank in Grand Rapids. That’s a way for you to do public investment, and it’s exciting. That gets to your public ownership of land question.

The other thing is [ADUs, or accessory dwelling units]. Let’s say I have 50,000 garages in Grand Rapids. Those garages are all potential one-bedroom or studio apartments, but only if the regulatory environment makes that possible and makes it work. I’ve got bills in Lansing that will drop the cost of construction of an [accessory dwelling unit] about 20 grand a unit because of regulatory things in the state building code. You’ve got to get it fixed at the state level. Then at the city level, you’ve got zoning questions. Is it even allowed? Do you have prebuilt models? How easy is it to get through your zoning department? How easy is it to get financing?

If we increase supply enough, prices will moderate. We saw it happen in Minneapolis. We saw it happen in Boston last year. We see it happen in Austin. The law of supply and demand is a law.

AF: We’re going to have to move into a little bit more lightning-round mode, but I want to ask you about affordability and specifically this idea of making use of government-owned land.

Mayor Taylor: Just a couple of weeks ago [we] passed our comprehensive land use plan, which envisions substantially more housing throughout the city, much more in the downtown, substantially more on transit corridors, and more in established neighborhoods, duplexes, triplexes, ADUs, wherever we can.

There isn’t much vacant land in Ann Arbor. We do have a couple of parking lots downtown that we’re utilizing in different ways. One, we are looking to sell on the open market. We’re going to sell to the highest bidder for as much housing as we can get, [plus] a grocery store on the first floor.

Next, we have a … parking structure that has been a conversation in the city for a number of years. We are transferring the air rights to that parking structure to the next-door library. The library is going to build an awesome library on top …. They’re going to work on having affordable housing, workforce housing, artist housing. Across the street, we’ve got another surface parking lot owned by the City of Ann Arbor. We are going to break ground this season on about 300 units of new permanent housing there. We’re working on it.

AF: Mayor Neeley, have you seen efforts to redevelop underutilized land in the city of Flint?

Mayor Sheldon Neeley: The good news is that if Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor don’t have a home for you … we have land, and we have industrial space, and also residential space. What we’re doing, we’re taking a lot of structures down, and we’re redeveloping that land. It’s affordable. The Real Estate Association says the land value has increased over the last decade by about 332 percent, but it’s still very affordable. Flint, right now, for the first time in 20 years, is actually growing in population, so people are realizing that it’s a good investment to come back there and even start your business.

AF: All around the country, there’s this new property tax revolt just at the time when local governments are counting on that revenue. Just interested in your reflections on that revolt, and then also where you stand on the land value tax.

Mayor David LaGrand: If you want to geek out, the land value tax is called Georgian economics. It’s a great idea. It’s good for everybody incrementally, so I’d like it in general.

Property tax in Michigan is badly broken, but let me tell you middle-class people: It’s broken in your favor. That’s really the conversation we have to have when we [discuss] property tax. It’s money for the local government. It’s revenue. It’s not an inalienable way to tax if you want to do the stuff [that] government does. The question [is] who pays the most.

Mayor Taylor: With respect to property tax, we’ve identified some of the challenges. If you stay in your home, your property taxes tick up with inflation. If you move, they leap up to the assessed value. That is great if you’re in your home. It’s hard if you’re a senior and want to downsize. The way our property tax system operates keeps people in their homes longer when they want to stay there.

Second, and this is a little bit of a particularity with respect to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, a fairly important economic engine in the city, doesn’t pay any taxes. We do have an opportunity to have a city income tax. The way that it’s structured in Michigan, however, in the city of Ann Arbor, would mean that the imposition of an income tax would, on the one hand, be capped at 1 percent for residents, 10 percent for nonresidents, and crucially, would involve an approximately 13 percent property tax cut for people in the city of Ann Arbor.

Mayor Neeley: How many of you guys are thoroughly confused by this whole tax question right now? Let me help you simplify it. Taxation is a necessary thing in order to provide services for residents inside any particular community. Let me give you an example from the city of Flint. We have more than 290 churches, about 23 vacant school buildings [that have] been vacant for more than a decade. We have two major hospitals. We have three university campuses. All our nonprofit entities are not paying property taxes. We talk about a PILOT payment [payments in lieu of taxes]. We need to make sure everybody is able to get their share [of public services when] just one-third of the communities are paying for all the services that they need.

We use a combination of different revenue streams to be able to have a support base. I do operational audits to see how we can provide more services for less without cutting or raising the price. These are dialogues and conversations that we need to have.

We can get industry back in and using land space for redevelopment, housing, or other businesses. If we have hospitals, we need to be able to have a PILOT payment because if they need help with the fire department, police department, those are tax dollars of the residents that are providing that level of service. All these things have to come together .… We need to take a really good look … around the table and be able to have these really engaged conversations. Truth has never been afraid of an audience, and so we need  to be able to speak the truth, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, white, Black, rich, or poor. We need to have that.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand speaks during a session at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Detroit in April. Seated next to him (partially obscured) is Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor, with Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley and Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy completing the panel. Credit: American Planning Association.