The city of Ann Arbor's first-ever economic development director, Joe Giant, started work March 17, following the announcement of his hiring in February.
Giant moved to Ann Arbor after serving as community development administrator for the department of redevelopment in Fort Wayne, Ind. He previously worked as a city planner in Fort Wayne and Minneapolis. He earned a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Miami University.
Giant says he and his wife began visiting Ann Arbor while he was still working for Fort Wayne. Giant says he "fell in love" with Ann Arbor after several weekend visits beginning in March, when he was pleasantly surprised to see people being active outside even in cooler weather.
Now that he's had two months to settle into the job, we sat down with Giant to discuss the future of economic development in Ann Arbor.
Q: What brought you to Ann Arbor?
A: While I was working in Fort Wayne and studying city planning, I was learning about cities who were doing it well. Ann Arbor was always on the list for the highest quality of life, and was known as this great, forward-thinking, progressive city. I told my wife Kristin, "It's only two hours away. We should go visit." So, every few months, we'd come up here for the weekend. The first time, it was the coldest day in March, and still people were out walking, biking, playing in parks, eating outside. That really stuck with me. I thought, "This is a really special place."
So we'd come up once or twice a year from then on, and I fell in love with the place because it was so vibrant and everybody is always doing something. I would joke with friends, "I have to stop going up there because one of these times, I'll never come back." Then a job was posted, and they were looking for someone with experience in development review, policy, and deal-making, in my favorite city. It felt like a great fit.
Q: Why is it important that the city of Ann Arbor create this position?
A: Economic development is a field or position that exists in just about any city of any significant size. The fact that they didn't have a department like this made [Ann Arbor] an anomaly. So creating this is doing something so completely expected in other cities. If that wasn't reason enough to create it, what the city was experiencing was that they felt a lack of a cohesive economic development strategy, and that led to issues cropping up. It's harder to develop land in Ann Arbor, and the process is longer than in a lot of other communities. The city wasn't there to help you through the process the way they are in other communities, so they are experiencing a lack of housing being built. Housing prices are skyrocketing.
Of course, you can't expect one person to come in and fix it all. But you have someone coming in with fresh eyes. If there's a bottleneck, I can help unclog those. I can find ways to help so the city can move these along and meet our goals. We've got a lot of really smart, talented people working on projects every day, but until now, it's been no one's job to get them across the finish line. You need someone making sure the project meets zoning codes, someone who can say, "Hey, maybe there's a way to work with state and federal resources to make this happen."
Q: Why do you think the city decided to create the position now?
A: We have a couple of opportunities underway that lend themselves to this position. For instance,
Arbor South, by Briarwood Mall, is a
bigger project than the city has ever undertaken before, and it's a public-private partnership. The city would pay for the parking component of the projects, and the developer would pay for the rest of it. We know we need housing. We need market-rate apartments, not just high-end condos. We know we need housing at all income levels. What's being proposed here is a suburban setting, and a lot of changes need to happen for it to be a walkable environment.
The city identified that area, that project, as something that could advance some of our goals in some of those traditionally transit-oriented, clogged corridors. It felt like an appropriate investment to catalyze some of that growth. Putting that deal together is very complex. It's a multi-phase deal, a couple hundred million dollars. It's important to have somebody wake up thinking about economic development, to be the main point of contact for the community. It absolutely required doing something like that today.
Q: What roadblocks to economic development do you see, and what tools can Ann Arbor use to overcome them?
A: Housing affordability is a roadblock. The administrative process is a roadblock. At the more basic level, when we aren't able to provide affordable, or even attainable, housing for folks, you stop being a city. If your police officers and teachers can't afford to live in the city, at a certain point, it stops having that diversity that gives you pride. I'd really like to get housing developed so we can make sure that if someone wants to live in Ann Arbor, they can.
Another challenge, being an academic community full of such talented, passionate people, is that we sometimes let "perfect" get in the way of progress. We care about things a lot. But I'm here helping prioritize. We're not going to lose projects because they aren't perfect. I'm going to bring the very best projects we can negotiate to the table and get them over the finish line.
The practice of "inclusionary zoning," where you require a developer to include a certain number of affordable units, is not allowed per state law. But we can incentivize, like with tax increment financing. It's hard to get [affordable housing] projects through the planning stage, and even with tax increment financing, a financial gap remains for a lot of these projects. We want affordable housing, but those units pay less rent, so the developer doesn't make as much money, and it's harder to get those over the finish line.
Q: What are some goals you and the city of Ann Arbor would like to work on?
A: I've been in Ann Arbor for two months, so I don't want to come in and implement Joe Giant's plan for economic development. We have a brilliant, participatory community, and that is a rare asset these days. There's so much community discussion, meetings, and discourse about how the community wants to grow. So my biggest sweeping goal is to help implement the good work already being done.
We're in the process of adopting a comprehensive 30- to 40-year plan. We're looking at a lot of policies, taking a lot of direction from what's in that long-term plan about housing. We're also talking about our relationship with the University of Michigan. These are all things I would absolutely want to do anyway, like addressing the fact that thousands of really talented graduates are leaving the university every year. We need to do whatever we can to retain them, and we need housing for them. They're coming out with strong degrees, and we need to make sure we have jobs that suit those degrees. Having a young, talented population makes it an interesting, great place to live.
In addition, because this department hasn't existed in the city, I think we were more reactive than we ought to have been. What I would like to do is get more strategic with redevelopment. That might look like looking at city challenges, acquiring [properties that are difficult to redevelop], demolishing what's there, and absolutely redoing it from the start to get something productive developed. We need to work on increasing our tax base. We need to address deferred maintenance on a lot of the properties in our really great park system. We need to address messaging and the city's actions, making sure we're all singing from the same hymnal on how we want to grow. We need to give the consistent messaging that the city does not just exist to regulate, but to help the city grow and improve.