MAY 1, 2026 OPINION GROUNDCOVER NEWS Pallet home proposal shows Ann Arbor doesn't have the language to address the rent crisis, and that's intentional JAY COOPER Groundcover contributor At the December 8, 2025 planning session, Ann Arbor City Council heard a report from the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation on the rent crisis. The report (aaacf.org/ news/housing-study) doesn't call the situation a rent crisis, they call it a "problem" of "affordability" and referred to "the clear shortage of rental units for higher-income renters" as the reason "an unusually large number of units came online in 2024.” When reports on housing use language like this, when they claim “Single mother families in particular tend to have incomes that create significant affordability challenges," they are redirecting the blame of the rent crisis away from landlords. There is one reason for homelessness, and that is rent. So long as rent exists, there is homelessness, and without it, homelessness disappears. To say that "affordability challenges" are created by people's incomes is to wildly twist reality. At the very same December 8 planning session, City Council heard a proposal for building a village of shacks. Hank Kelley, the City’s deputy planning manager, and Supportive Connections director Johnathan Laye made the presentation. Supportive Connections is the City of Ann Arbor's social support program. They don't call them shacks, they call them "pallet homes.” According to a December 2025 MLive article on the pallets, Kelley said, "Even pets are welcome," as if that's some kind of bonus and not an inherent feature of housing since the dawn of humanity that's only recently been put behind a paywall by landlords. A village of shacks in Ann Arbor, if we're entertaining the idea they'd ever build such a thing, would be better than the tents (or worse conditions) people are currently living in, but it does not solve homelessness because homelessness is created by rent, and it doesn't address rent. Shacks aren't meant to address homelessness. They didn't propose a location for the shack village. If they had, history gives us the data to predict that scene: the gentrifiers crying over property values, their unsubstantiated fearmongering about capital flight and crime, as the project gets pushed into less and less viable locations, compromises shave away value, activists get distracted fighting a losing battle over scraps of a project that was never meant to succeed. Proposing a village of shacks to address homelessness is an insult. There are plenty of vacant homes to house people. The reason the city won't put people up in those homes is because it breaks the illusion that rent is valid. They don't want people who aren't paying ungodly high rent to live in those homes. Those homes are not for people, they are landlord investments meant to generate billions. Those homes are especially not for the class of people they're trying to exterminate. Those homes are to attract "higher-income renters" for the next wave of rent ratcheting. This is settler colonialism. You and your ilk are not desired on this land. In November, Johnathan Laye and police chief Andre Anderson proposed SPROUT, a joint unarmed response project between Supportive Connections and police. "Unarmed response" is corrupted language. The people did not ask for unarmed response, they asked for "unarmed, non-police response." Just as "opensource" deliberately subverts the politics of free software to co-opt its benefits for the wealthy, just as free breakfast was perverted into meanstested "free and reduced lunch options," just as guaranteed pensions were replaced with fickle 401(k)s, every real proposal for positive change is perverted, corrupted, stripped of its value. It is then resold to you as a means-tested, bureaucratically crippled neoliberal half-measure that masks the source of the problem and serves the wealthy (the source of the problem). Anyone coordinating, collaborating, cooperating with police is not working to solve homelessness as police are the landlord's legbreakers. When rent is past due, it's the police that landlords send to your home with guns to get you off the land. When the bank forecloses on you, it’s the police they send with guns to get you off the land. Abolishing rent is the solution to homelessness. Saying so scares some people, people who don't pay rent, or people who have been convinced that abolishing rent will somehow hurt their prospects, but be not afraid of abolishing rent, because you have no prospects. Statistically speaking, you will never own a home; any money you think you can squirrel away will be taken from you by ever-ratcheting rents and stagnant wages, as well as wartime gas prices, inflation, shrinkflation, automation, high-speed stock gambling, the coming AI bubble crash, and/or when the firehose of vibe-coded malware "pwns" your bank. Billionaire landlords are insulated from these things. They own a diverse range of capital that feeds them income, your income, which they reinvest into more parasitic capital investments that steal more income. Have you asked your boss to raise wages? How did they respond? If you haven't, how do you expect they would respond? Lackluster income does not create "affordability challenges." You are kept underpaid to keep profits up. Your rent will increase until you are priced out, then you will be replaced by a slightly wealthier class of people, who will suffer the exact same exploitation just with another zero on the check, and so on, as robber barons eat the city alive. Understandably most people are afraid of confronting the real villains creating the rent crisis. After all, when your name and face are on your facebook account, naming and shaming your landlord could get you evicted; police might show up at your door and kick you out of your home, then where would you be? Maybe then you'd be homeless. The only proven method of taking on landlords to get tenant protections is the same as the only proven method of taking on employers for worker protections, unity and solidarity en masse. You alone will never have more sway over your government than billionaire landlords. You alone will never have the power to stop a team of armed police from kicking you out of your home. You alone will never convince your employer to pay you a living wage. If you want housing security, if you want a world without homelessness, you must organize with fellow tenants to protect each other, and eventually, to abolish rent. 5
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