“I’ve never been an advocate of stuffing anything down a neighborhood’s throat and saying ‘You’re going to accept this, darn it.’ I don’t think we’ll ever do that. I think we continue to listen throughout the whole process, and we’ll always continue to listen to the neighborhood’s concerns,” Hieftje said.

Marks said another problem is that when affordable housing goes into a neighborhood it brings the values of all properties down. She added that when another developer is looking to build affordable housing, they choose the same location where the property values are lower. As a result, one area ends up getting a majority of affordable housing.

“What happens is that more and more affordable housing keeps coming, and the risk is that you could just create a ghetto of some sort,” Marks said.

Jean Carlberg, a member of the City Council and its planning commission, said the mentality that adding affordable housing to a neighborhood will decrease property value is unfounded because Ann Arbor is such a desirable place to live.

“It’s almost impossible to build anything that will lower the value of property in Ann Arbor,” Carlberg said.

According to the National Review of Real Estate Markets online report, the average house in the United States sold for $179,500 in 2001 . The 2001 average selling price in Ann Arbor was between $200,000 and $250,000.

Marks said while it’s not a problem for her, some of the people in her neighborhood are concerned about the problems they believe are associated with people of lower economic status who often move into affordable housing.

“They’re all afraid of crime, but I don’t know if that’s a reality,” Marks said. “It’s a different lifestyle — really poor people live differently than professors do. They have a lot of different stresses. It might be a culture gap that people are afraid of.”

While Marks acknowledges there is a need for more affordable housing in Ann Arbor, she believes that it should be balanced throughout the community.

“We’re not saying ‘Not in our backyard,’ but we’re saying let’s share it. In Burns Park the property values are quite high, so those people may be a little more snooty, and I think they should also share the burden. I think some affordable housing should be mixed into that area,” Marks said.

Rapundalo doesn’t agree. He protested against the city’s efforts to allow people in his neighborhood to add accessory dwelling units to their homes. An accessory dwelling unit is a room in a house that is set aside for the purpose of renting it to interested individuals.

“Everyone who bought a house here in the neighborhood bought it with the knowledge that this was zoned for single family dwellings,” Rapundalo said. “That’s the kind of neighborhood environment we wanted to live in, and if the city was going to allow anybody and everybody to erect accessory-dwelling units, that would not only change the character of the neighborhood, but also it would violate the zoning we bought into.”

Grinding through the solutions

Rapundalo said his solution to the problem is to stop trying to put more affordable housing in the neighborhoods and to focus mostly on creating more housing and more density in Ann Arbor’s downtown.

“(The City Council) needs to follow through on their commitment to increase the density downtown. I think that’s probably an easier option than trying to put large numbers of affordable housing units into neighborhoods,” Rapundalo said.

The council actually is trying to put more affordable housing downtown, but has also faced opposition to these efforts.

Part of the city’s plan to increase residential density in the downtown area is to increase the height of new buildings. Douglas Kelbaugh, dean of the University’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, said several different groups have raised concerns that taller buildings will not fit in with the character of the downtown and may cast undesirable shadows on other buildings.

Kelbaugh was a member of the Downtown Residential Task Force that made recommendations to the council on how to create more affordable housing downtown.

Hieftje said he believes the best way to solve the problems between the neighborhood organizations and the City Council is to communicate more.