Rackham student Tahir Noronha, former president of The Urban Planning Student Association, spoke with about 200 to 300 University of Michigan student renters last year as part of two renters workshops he hosted to get feedback to help revise Ann Arbor’s Comprehensive Master Plan. The city is in the process of updating the plan, which guides city decisions.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Noronha said something he’s heard consistently from student renters, even those from areas with a higher cost of living, is they feel Ann Arbor’s rent is too expensive.
“I don’t think I’ll find a student who agrees that Ann Arbor’s affordable,” Noronha said. “I spoke to students who have come from notoriously unaffordable cities like New York and San Francisco during these events and even they felt that Ann Arbor was crazy expensive.”
Ann Arbor’s rental rates are driven by a variety of factors, including the number of potential tenants looking for a place to live and rental units available on the market. The Daily talked to local activists and experts and looked at data on renting in the city to better understand some of the factors affecting the city’s rental market.
A January report by Rent. found rent increases in Michigan are the third highest of any state in the U.S. Jon Leckie, a former researcher at Rent. told Bridge Michigan in September 2023 that rent increases in the state are partially due to renters moving from more expensive cities in the Northeast and West to more affordable ones in the Midwest.
Kit McCullough, U-M lecturer in architecture and urban planning, said this shift has altered the demographics of people living in Ann Arbor.
“What the pandemic did was it shifted demographics quite a bit,” McCullough said. “I actually know a number of people that moved to Ann Arbor during the pandemic. They could work remotely. They suddenly wanted more space for less money and it’s hard to think that Ann Arbor is more affordable, but it is more affordable compared to the cities that they were moving from, and so they could get more space.”
McCullough described increases in rent as a result of increasing demand — in part due to increasing enrollment at the University — without an increase in supply to keep up.
“If we look specifically at Ann Arbor, the University, the city, the region, has been adding jobs,” McCullough said. “The University’s been adding students. There’s more demand to live in Ann Arbor, but very little supply has been added. And you know, specifically if we’re talking about rental supply, that’s often driven by students. The student population has been growing, but the supply of apartments hasn’t.”
The graph below indicates that the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Ann Arbor has increased by about $350 since 2014, and remained above the rent in both East Lansing and the state of Michigan as a whole during that time.
Average rent increases in Ann Arbor do not necessarily reflect the experiences of individual renters. Rackham student Claire Arneson, chair of the Graduate Employees’ Organization Housing Caucus, told The Daily in an interview Ann Arbor tenants repeatedly say they find rent increases to be unpredictable from year to year.
“Rent is increasing a lot, but also rent is increasing in very unpredictable ways,” Arneson said. “We often run into students who say, ‘I’ve lived in this house for two, three years. Rent has gone up by $50 for the whole house every year and this year, the landlord is raising it by $200.’”
Arneson said she experienced this herself when her landlord raised the rent for her apartment.
“For myself, I can say the first two years I lived in my apartment, rent went up $50 a month across me and my one roommate, and then the next year, the rent increase was $250 at the first offer before we negotiated it down,” Arneson said.
McCullough said a general expectation for students to find housing off-campus has put a strain on the city’s housing market. She also said the University’s plans to build more student housing could help address this issue.
“The University has comparatively little on-campus housing for students, compared to other systems or universities, as a proportion of the student body,” McCullough said. “There’s a greater expectation for students to live off-campus, which then puts more pressure on the supply of off-campus apartments. But in recent years, and with (University President Santa Ono’s) new effort to do master planning for the campus, the University is really talking very openly about building student housing.”
Arneson said many renters in the city are students who are only in Ann Arbor for a limited amount of time, which can make it difficult for tenants to build relationships with other renters in their building and pass knowledge along to each other.
“When you have a large population of student renters, they’re probably only going to be here for four to six years depending on their degree program,” Arneson said. “You have a really rotating cast of tenants so you don’t build the same type of community between tenants living in the building who have been there for 15 years. You aren’t able to pass on the institutional knowledge of the ways that one landlord has mistreated you as a renter.”
In Ann Arbor, many kinds of new construction developments — including residential buildings with over five dwelling units, or that are not in residential districts — have to go through the city’s site plan review and approval process. This process involves meeting with city staff and submitting an application to the city. McCullough said the process for approving new developments slows the building of new housing and makes it difficult for smaller developers to build in the city.
“The bar to develop is so high,” McCullough said. “The politics are difficult. It’s extremely risky. The zoning and development process is pretty onerous. And so the only developers that can go through this process are large, national corporations.”
Within the city, areas downtown and near the U-M campus consistently have higher rent than areas in other parts of the city, as indicated in the graph below.
According to Noronha, walkability is a priority for the student renters he talked to during the renters workshops.
“Students value walkability a lot,” Noronha said. “Like they really, really, really like walkable areas. In fact, students like downtown, students like Kerrytown, and it’s quite clear why. They really like that they can walk to the University, walk to a bar, and not have to worry about getting their car in and out of these areas.”
He said he also found that the students he talked to generally preferred midsized housing in smaller apartment buildings as opposed to high rises or traditional houses, which he said is useful feedback to be able to relay to the city.
“We got students who felt like, ‘Yeah, something in the middle is nice,’ because many students when they look at a tower, they do think that ‘Oh, it’s luxury. It’s expensive. It’s fancy,’ right?” Noronha said. “So that missing, we call it the ‘missing middle’ in housing, which is really like grounded, two floors, or townhouses — many homes that share common walls.”
McCullough said altering the city codes to allow for smaller developments within and around single-family housing units could help make housing more affordable in Ann Arbor.
“These large apartment buildings that are being built are very expensive to build, very expensive to develop, and so they can only be built to charge very high rents,” McCullough said. “If we want a more affordable product, I think this smaller scale, allowing and encouraging the smaller scale in the development is a way to add housing without, you know, completely remaking Ann Arbor into high rises.”
Daily News Editor Abigail VanderMolen can be reached at vabigail@umich.edu.