The Ann Arbor City Council considered a motion to prohibit
keeping upholstered furniture outdoors earlier this year.
Regardless of the stated motives for this proposal — such as
fire safety — many students saw the proposal as a ridiculous
move to clean up porches that might look a bit, well, trashy, in an
effort to boost already-inflated property values. The proposed
couch ban caused many students to pay attention to City Council for
the first time, and more students became aware of the apparent
gerrymandering that makes it difficult for students to be elected
to City Council.

The city charter mandates the wards must “have the general
character of a pieshaped segment of the City with the point of such
segment lying near the center of the city.” In practice, this
means that Markley and the other residence halls on the Hill are in
a different ward from North Campus, while iconoclastic East Quad
Residence Hall is in yet another ward. East Madison Street between
State and Thompson Streets serves not just as the front line in the
annual snowball fight between South Quad and West Quad, but also
delineates the fourth and first wards. Add in the off-campus
housing scattered all across the city’s five wards, and it is
little wonder that students feel disenfranchised by the way the
wards are drawn.

In a town of roughly 115,000, with about 38,000 enrolled
students at the University, it would seem that democracy entails a
significant student voice on City Council. The apparently
gerrymandered wards do not present an absolute barrier to students;
Rackham student Elisabeth Daley was on City Council from 1994 to
2000. In general, a student who managed to secure the Democratic
nomination in an even year, when there is more student interest in
the elections and thus greater turnout, would have a good chance in
several wards.

However, the current wards do seem to form a significant
obstacle to a student’s election, and there has never been a
time when students regularly served on City Council. Indeed, an
undergraduate has not been elected since Carol Jones, who became
the youngest member ever when she was elected in April 1973 at the
age of 19, defeating a Republican candidate as well as an opponent
from the Human Rights Party, a former local third party to the left
of the Democrats.

The wards in Ann Arbor, in accordance with federal and state
laws, are redrawn every 10 years after the census and are required
to contain roughly equal numbers of voters. The City Council adopts
a redistricting proposal publicly, and there is no reason why
students could not advocate the creation of a ward with a student
majority. The Associated Students of the University of California
— Berkeley’s equivalent of the Michigan Student
Assembly — made such an effort after the 2000 census.

Indeed, a student-majority ward would arguably pass
constitutional muster. In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed in
Miller v. Johnson that districts may be drawn to represent
“communities defined by actual shared interests.” While
it does not appear that any case in federal court has addressed
whether college students pass this test, the student community does
appear to have “actual shared interests,” even if these
interests might, in some cases, be porch furniture and lax
enforcement of drinking laws.

There are, however, a number of barriers to the creation of a
student-majority ward. Though the first ward could perhaps be
redrawn to include most Central Campus residence halls while
retaining the “pieshaped” nature required by the city
charter, other language in the charter would prevent such a
reapportionment. Modifications are to require the “least
possible change or alteration of existing ward boundaries.”
More troubling, the wards must be “a very rough cross section
of the community population from the center outward.” A
student-majority ward would clearly not pass this test, and Ann
Arbor voters would thus need to approve a change to the city
charter before MSA or other student groups would even have a chance
to fight for a student ward. In addition to the inevitable
opposition such a proposal would face from some permanent Ann Arbor
residents, a student ward might be challenged in court as an
instance of gerrymandering — the very fault it would be meant
to correct.