December

Yikes, it's been a long November! This semester's wrapping up, though. One more and I'll be a real bona fide Urban Planner, just waiting for someone to employ my skillful self.

This thing is happening in Ann Arbor where people are starting to realize that homeless folks live here! And that it's really cold in Michigan. And that one underresourced warming center can't take care of them all.

It is BLOWING their MINDS.


Reading live tweets of the A2 council meetings always makes me angry in a really unproductive way, so I try not to read them. Besides, it's like being nerdy but not being nerdy enough to actually be out there and be cool and live tweet things myself. Well, I learned about investment analysis all day and now I have two kittens sleeping on top of me, so I'm not going anywhere.

Turning artists into beggars (ft. Aladdin)

Gwyddion Storm is an enterprising guy I used to chat with while walking past Borders. You can read the Ann Arbor News story about his "professional beggar"days from back in 2011. After a while he switched from panhandling to selling jewelry made of beautiful stones wrapped in copper wire.

I got this one a while ago for my mom

But apparently somebody has complained about him selling his stuff. Must have been some regulation-obsessed cat lady/dude, since Gwyddion doesn't bother anybody and is very careful to not obstruct foot traffic.

Xenophobia and Liberty Plaza

I've said this before, but the A2 city council meeting last night, well-documented by the politically active twitter denizens of the city, has brought it to my attention yet again.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a park to be safe. I enjoy safety. I'm actually a bit of a worry-wort, so I try to avoid scary situations. And of course, a city government has a responsibility to keep its public spaces high-quality and secure.

It's the way the conversation about Liberty Plaza goes that gets my goat. As reported by the Ann Arbor News, it's a place where "homeless people congregate." Oh, God forbid that homeless people exist in Ann Arbor,

Adventures of a one-car cross-county household

Life gets a lot cheaper when you move in with somebody, and Alex and I recently took our Ann Arbor and Detroit habitations and merged them into one big beautiful Ypsilanti. Besides sharing rent, cooking, and bunnies, we decided to junk his clunker and rely solely on my decade-old Ford Focus, which has belonged to every member of my family and traversed the country twice.

Bunny numero uno

It's not like we have ten children, or any other small mammals in our care besides the furry type. But still, with our wildly regional schooling and employment patterns, there are days in which we have to be...creative.

Snow creatures of Ann Arbor (part 1)

Winner of Most Classic Snowman, complete with charcoal eyes and a carrot nose. On the Broadway hill.

The Great Bursley-Baits Bungle

This is a photograph from my latest excursion on the Bursley-Baits bus. I'm not sure it captures the gross discomfort of the situation. I stood with my spine squished against a rail and griped to myself about how I'm too old for this kind of thing. Around me, people sweated and yawned and complained about their chemistry tests.

The reordering rules of snow

Winner: best use of vegetables and protective headgear

I'm not very accustomed to driving in the snow, because all my winters for the past seven years I've spent in Ann Arbor, blissfully avoiding contact with the automobile type and shuffling frozenly from one point to the next. This year, though, I own a car, and over Christmas break I had the need to use it. The lack of traction unnerves me, the same pit of stomach slipperiness that comes with ice skating. I make a turn onto the main road, the monster I supposedly control does not respond to me, its back and then its front swerve into snowy ruts on the curb. I am a person who likes having control over things, and this gas-fueled beast knows it can now get the best of me.

A plea for UM students to vote local

I, too, retained my home address in Redford Township throughout undergrad. It's useful, because your bills and tax refunds then go safely to your parents instead of that weird kid who subleased your room for the summer. Changing it requires effort and a trip to a poorly constructed Secretary of State site (and it you're from out of state, you're still searching hopelessly for the DMV). And if you're from almost any Detroit suburb or anywhere else non-urban, you probably maintain the old excuse: "They need me more over there!"

Nope! Sorry. I know there's something heroic about imagining yourself offsetting the closeminded old white people in your hometown, casting the vote that tips the district, the state, and indeed the country for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Way cooler than joining the hundred thousand other liberal sheep in Ann Arbor, in a county that hasn't gone red since 1984 (apparently Washtenawites had a thing for Reagan).

MANN ARBOR - choosing a new mayor

It's fall break, and this means I have time to write stuff.

The mayor of Ann Arbor, John Hieftje, has announced that he won't be seeking reelection. Well, you know, nobody can be mayor forever, and while I've agreed with him on some issues (cough countywide transit), I've disagreed with him on others (cough...RTA obviously...).

Somos vegetarianas

Folks, this doesn't really have to do with cities or Michigan, but it's an old thing I wrote two years ago when I lived in Spain, and I think it deserves another go. Enjoy!

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Madrid from my terraza

Nearing the end of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, aware that I’m about six years behind on this (but when you’re in school there’s no time to read), I’ve just reached the point where the witty journalist refutes the logic and morality of vegetarianism. It comes at a relevant time, when this aspect of my personal culture, along with many others, has encountered intense challenges.

Ideology and Art Fair (from the front lines)

Funny things happen when you squish all the ideologues in Ann Arbor into one block in ninety-degree heat and set the mood with an suave, amplified trilingual guitarist. Yes, friends, Art Fair may be a blast or, if you're a townie, a plague upon the city, but I contend that the real place to go for the action is the Walk of the Non-Profits. Stretching between Division and Fifth along Liberty, everybody from the Jesus Made Me Kosher to the Land A Space Rover On Mars to the Republicans/Democrats/ProLife/ProChoice/ProBanana/AntiBanana/ProHappiness/AntiFun - it's all there.

And I was all there, as much as the heat would allow me to be, myself one of these poor do-gooder souls who invested their hearts and sweat into a ten by ten plastic booth, hoping to lure passersby into my den of goodwill.

Rats, shopping carts, and nice people.

 

I was getting a new aquarium for our pet rats, the reason being that our rats had grown a lot since we saved them from being snake food on New Year's Eve, and they felt a little squished within those glass walls. It was a ten minute walk to the shopping area, on a nice paved path along a speedy four-lane road with the bonus feature of pedestrian-activated traffic signals.

America's Next Top Commuter?

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Due to the academic prowess of my homeskillet, who got accepted to med school at Wayne State, and my own choice to start a Master's program in Urban Planning at the University of Michigan in the fall,  I'm faced with choices that extend beyond the range of my heretofore uber-walkable, extremely local existence.

One might ask, Carolyn, how did you ever manage in the metro Motor City for six years without a car? Well, a few answers. My life for nearly four of those years revolved entirely around the city of Ann Arbor, where everything - school, work, friends - was in walking, biking, or bussing distance. The only thing that lured me away was my family back in Redford, and they kindly provided shuttle service whenever we wanted to see each other.

Of public space and peeing

No, the pissing season is never over, not even in the winter. The message was tellingly scrawled on the women's room door in an Ann Arbor park - I imagine because it's pretty easy to open a fly at a distance, but taking off one's pants on the banks of the Huron River is another matter. If you're a woman (or a particularly scrupulous man), you're not in possession of a car, and you don't live nearby as I do, how long do you have to walk from that defunct latrine to find a suitable place to pee?

Ann Arbor to Redford - CARLESS

Everyone knows that I'm a transit nut, and you might know that I started getting into transit issues when I realized that I couldn't easily get from my home in Ann Arbor to my parents' home in Redford (28 miles away) without using a car. This has led to countless instances of my parents driving down M-14 to pick me up, something that's annoying for them and not conducive to me feeling independent.

(Note: the 2 1/2 hour bike ride isn't bad in the summer, but I'm not messing around with that in below freezing temps.)

For a long time I've wanted to do the trip on our incredibly inconvenient, expensive, and roundabout public transit routes, just to see what would happen. A video I needed to complete for a grad school application gave me the push to really do it.

It was an epic journey of 4 1/2 hours door to door, including significant waiting time (we hung around 50 minutes at the State Fairground Transit Center waiting on the 8 Mile bus). It cost $14.25 one way and covered around 60 miles. There are a few other combinations of public transit we could have used, and some might have been slightly shorter, but you get the point.

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I can't thank Dan Cox enough for accompanying me, despite his academic business. He is a top-notch friend.

My dad, Paul Lusch, let me use his awesome song, appropriately entitled "Driven," and I'm very thankful for that! He and my ever-supportive mom, Ann Lusch, drove us back to Ann Arbor - because nine hours of commuting is a little much for one day.

My home skillet Alex Janke helped me navigate the bewildering functions of Windows Movie Maker, even when it tore him away from all those infectious diseases he studies.

A Detroit School of Urban Studies?

Ooh, sounds cool, what is it?

A week ago I attended a forum at the University of Michigan on the question of whether it makes sense to establish a Detroit School of urban studies. First of all, that’s pretty damn fancy. Second, everybody in that room was geeking out over cities, which I found delightful.

photo by Carolyn Lusch--that's me

One panel member made the theoretical case for the new School—planning has traditionally been seen as managing growth, but Detroit is not growing. How does one use planning to manage shrinking or decline?

Another panelist added that Detroit is not on a path of returning the past; rather, the creation of something completely new. We all know that manufacturing in Detroit will never be what it was. Thus, revitalizing is not an appropriate word.

Ok, I’m with you for all that.

But what about…?