Note: This piece by Adam Goodman reflects his own views, not those of any group or organization
A recent Guardian article chronicling the rise of leaders and candidates like Zohran Mamdani, Katie Wilson, Janeese Lewis George, and Nithya Raman noted "... the common criticism of Democratic socialism is that its proponents put their ideological interests before matters of effective governance." It has been thrilling to see progressive leaders across the country breaking this mold and focusing instead on getting stuff done. Unfortunately, in Ann Arbor, it appears our DSA-aligned candidates for local office are not among them.
In the last few years, County Commissioner Yousef Rabhi has shown a distinct pattern of reacting with anger and accusation when proposals do not meet his ideological purity tests, regardless of real world consequences. This pattern should give voters pause when considering how he would approach the job of Mayor of Ann Arbor. This piece will discuss three prominent cases that highlight this aspect of Rabhi's approach to governance.
1. The HSHV Contract
On April 19, 2023, after an hour-long discussion, Commissioner Rabhi voted against renewing the county's contract with the Humane Society of Huron Valley (HSHV) to provide animal control services for the county, some of which are mandated by state law. To some extent, Rabhi's consternation was understandable, and shared by other commissioners - HSHV had demanded a major increase in county funding. HSHV stated that the previous amount did not even come close to covering HSHV's costs in providing contracted services. County staff, seemingly finding HSHV's cost analysis credible, had negotiated a one-year contract to give the parties more time to negotiate a longer-term agreement, and/or to enable the county to explore other possibilities besides contracting with HSHV.
Commissioner Rabhi expressed a view that the county should only be paying for state-mandated services, which - according to county staff - would include housing all dogs for 7-10 days, as well as housing animals with abuse/neglect allegations or involved in court cases. State law notably does not mandate any specific services for cats. Rabhi stated:
"... it is my continued opinion that we should be paying for what is mandated as the County to provide in terms of services … if we have to choose between helping the Humane Society to fulfill its Mission as a non-profit, and housing people in our community that are homeless, there's no scenario in which I'm going to … not vote to keep the money and use it for those that are humans that are without homes in our community right now."
This may seem like a reasonable - even laudable - viewpoint. However, Commissioner Rabhi was unwilling to engage with the real-world implications of taking such a stand: that Washtenaw County would abandon its longstanding commitment to no-kill animal sheltering, and instead see dogs routinely euthanized after the required holding period, and cats … likely even sooner.
A frank discussion of these tradeoffs would have been healthy for the Board of Commissioners to entertain, but Rabhi refused to contemplate any negative outcomes that would result from his position. He instead suggested to HSHV that "...what you're doing is great and you should continue to do it…", i.e. by raising private donations to cover the remaining costs. HSHV representatives explained that in spite of their private fundraising efforts, they had recorded a net operating loss of over $1.8 Million in the previous year - an unsustainable situation. Rabhi also commented that "cats can survive in nature" and "there are several communities all across our planet that have very healthy feral cat populations". Finally, it's worth noting that a failure to approve this short-term contract risked leaving the county without any provider for state-mandated animal-control services at all. Commissioner Rabhi voted against it anyway.
On November 15, 2023, county staff brought forward a 4-year proposed contract they'd negotiated with HSHV in the intervening months. Rabhi once again voted against its approval.
2. Veridian
On July 12, 2023, representatives from THRIVE Collaborative and Avalon Housing presented an update to the Board of Commissioners on the Veridian at County Farm mixed-income development. The concept for this project dates back to at least 2016, when Washtenaw County released a Request For Proposals for affordable or mixed-income housing developments on the site of the old juvenile detention facility (discussions about the future of that site began 5+ years earlier). Six proposals were submitted, and out of those the Board of Commissioners ultimately selected the joint proposal from THRIVE and Avalon, to build around 50 affordable and 100 market-rate units. THRIVE is a market-rate housing developer focused on environmental sustainability; Avalon is one of the largest providers of subsidized-affordable housing in the county.
Following the Avalon + THRIVE presentation at the July 12, 2023 meeting, Commissioner Rabhi angrily berated the presenters from THRIVE (the market-rate developer):
"... I'll be honest with you, this was a mistake. It was a mistake for me politically and it was a mistake for me from a policy perspective to have ever gotten behind this project; it should have all been affordable housing if the county was going to basically give this property away... I'm very disappointed that we are here now and that you are building housing for rich people on land that was owned by the taxpayers of this County, on land that used to be the poor farm of Washtenaw County, that is an insult; you owe it to Avalon to financially contribute to their Housing Development to make sure it gets off the ground and to make sure it gets done, and the fact that you've washed your hands of it pisses me off to no end."
Rabhi’s invective was grounded in two main objections to the project. First: that the Avalon and THRIVE portions of the project had been separated into separate parcels and buildings, rather than having the affordable housing units mixed into the same buildings and sites as the market-rate units. However, this decision was not made primarily at the behest of THRIVE, but Avalon. In a 2018 letter included in a county Ways and Means Committee packet, Avalon stated:
"We understand that Board members were looking for additional information on why we are not proposing to fully intersperse the Avalon and Thrive units throughout the site. This is primarily due to the challenges of low income housing tax credit [LIHTC] development... Since LIHTC is awarded through a competitive process, it is critical that the design and structuring of the Veridian site is done with an eye toward maximizing our ability to use LIHTC in an attainable and successful manner."
Avalon also attached a more detailed communication from their real estate development attorney, who had raised several concerns about complications arising from the need to create a "site condominium" structure, as well as differing regulatory requirements for low-income vs market-rate housing. Though not stated in the letter, it is also conceivable that Avalon was looking to de-risk themselves from the outcome of THRIVE's development, whose success was not guaranteed - between the two developers, Avalon was by far the more experienced and proven entity. Though THRIVE's proposal was ambitious and exciting, that team had never previously developed anything at this scale.
Rabhi's second objection was that THRIVE had purchased their land from the county at a low cost - around $1M - but was building expensive market-rate housing "for rich people." He stated that in retrospect "... it should have all been affordable housing." In fact, Avalon had offered to do exactly that - they submitted a second response to the 2016 RFP to develop 50 units of affordable housing on their own, and leave the majority of the site undeveloped. This would have yielded exactly the same number of affordable units as the THRIVE + Avalon partnership, but no market-rate units, and none of the other community amenities that will be offered by the THRIVE development. This would have been a strictly worse outcome for the community and the county - more market-rate housing meets a critical local need, and even if the up-front land purchase price was low, the market-rate housing will contribute significant new revenue to local taxing authorities over time. That's to say nothing of the impressive and innovative environmental sustainability features built into the project that serve as a model for future developments.
Of course, like any good politician, Commissioner Rabhi brought up none of these objections at Avalon's ribbon-cutting ceremony for The Grove at Veridian two years later, instead praising the development (and his own stated role in helping usher it along).
3: Broadway Park West
The Broadway Park West project was a major topic of discussion at two consecutive Board of Commissioners meetings last summer. The site for this project - 841 Broadway - had, a century ago, been the home of Ann Arbor's coal gasification plant; coal gasification is a horrifyingly-toxic process that left the riverfront site as perhaps the most polluted in all of Ann Arbor (its early prevalence is also the reason we refer to methane as "natural gas"). Plans to clean up and re-develop this site had been underway since at least 2018, and were initially approved by the city and county in 2019. Commissioner Rabhi had been serving as a State Representative at that time, so he did not directly participate in these deliberations. While the Commissioners' votes last summer were ostensibly on relatively narrow funding issues, Rabhi took those opportunities to excoriate the developer over the fundamental structure of the project.
On August 3, 2025, Commissioners considered a $500,000 grant application to the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) to help fund additional environmental remediation for public recreation areas. Commissioner Rabhi raised two major objections. First, he suggested that DTE should have paid the entire cost for environmental remediation out of its own funds, as the inheritor of corporate responsibility for the site's contamination (through its acquisition of MichCon). While many may agree it's unreasonable that public funds must be spent to clean up after a private corporation, this was simply out of the County's hands - EGLE had already determined to discharge DTE's responsibility for further cleanup.
Second, Rabhi was even more adamantly opposed to the ownership and management structure of the public recreation space, i.e. that it is owned and managed by a nonprofit conservancy rather than the city parks department:
"I am in vehement disagreement with the whole concept that you guys have outlined ... I think the idea of having a developer-controlled private park is antithetical to everything that I believe ... I believe that the public's role in subsidizing this development has been completely out of proportion to what should be contributed in this type of situation. And I have a true belief that a public space of this caliber with so much public funding should be a public park and not a private park ... I am in vehement uh ideological disagreement with the concept that you are presenting."
Developer David Di Rita responded to these criticisms by pointing out that this "conservancy" model is increasingly common in our region (e.g. the Detroit Riverwalk), and further that:
"… the city of Ann Arbor did not want one more publicly-owned public space, and they understood that to get to that public space was going to cost the better part of what we thought … would be something on the order of $20 million. It turned out to be more like $37 [million]."
I have been unable to find any specific statement by the City of Ann Arbor that it "did not want" new parkland, but it would have been entirely rational for the city to take that position. The maintenance and capital improvement budget for Ann Arbor's park system is severely underfunded. The city cannot afford to maintain its existing parks assets in a good state of repair, much less take on the burden of a new signature facility. Back in 2019, Ann Arbor City Planning Commissioners had also expressed some concern about the conservancy model, but ultimately recognized the upside - that it would create and provide sustaining funding for a new public amenity, without placing any ongoing burden on the city's taxpayers.
Commissioner Rabhi responded in part:
"It's a vomit inducing concept that shouldn't have ever been approved by city council or any other government body... Shame on every elected official that participated in helping to make that project happen, because that should be a public park."
And after making clear he "won't be setting foot in that park" he ended with:
"I will just close by saying that this model that you guys have proposed is frankly dystopian. It makes me feel like uh we're already in some dystopian novel of the future where corporations control everything."
Rabhi voted against submitting the grant application, a move that would effectively reject "free money" from the state for a project in his own district.
Next month, on September 5, 2025, commissioners deliberated over an update to Broadway Park West's brownfield tax-increment financing plan. Commissioner Rabhi reiterated some of his previous objections, and also objected to the use of the brownfield TIF to fund "non-environmental" activities (even if those activities are eligible for such funding under state law). Rabhi suggested that approving the brownfield plan would deprive local taxing authorities of significant revenue - a frequently recurring, but incorrect, narrative about the TIF mechanism.
Tax Increment Financing can be difficult to wrap one's head around, but the crux of it is that a TIF plan will "capture" only net-new tax revenue (the "increment") that is enabled by the TIF plan itself. That is, the owner of a property with a newly-implemented brownfield plan will continue paying the same taxes as before, but - for a limited period of time - newly increased tax revenue attributed to new development will be diverted toward refunding environmental cleanup and other eligible activities. After that period expires, all such tax revenue will again go to local governments and taxing authorities.
The typical standard of approval for a brownfield TIF plan is that a developer must prove their development could not possibly succeed "but for" the TIF, meaning that if local officials deny such a TIF, the theoretical new tax revenue won't exist. (Commissioner Rabhi replied "I don't buy the but-for argument" without any specific analysis or evidence). Approving a brownfield TIF plan can essentially be a matter of playing the long game when it comes to city/county finances - local taxing authorities won't see immediate fiscal benefit from a development, but eventually, the benefit could be very, very significant.
Rabhi voted against approving Broadway Park West's revised brownfield plan.
Broadway Park West is a transformational upgrade for Ann Arbor's riverfront; repairing almost a century of blight, adding key non-motorized transportation connections, creating new public recreational amenities, and adding badly-need housing (both market-rate and affordable). Some of these improvements are already open and accessible to the public, and seeing the development fully built will be even more exciting. But if other Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County leaders had taken the same approach to this project that Commissioner Rabhi has, 841 Broadway would likely have remained fallow and toxic to this day.
What about Mayor Taylor?
If I am guilty of having a catch-phrase, it is probably this: "don't make the perfect the enemy of the good". By now it should be clear that - all too often - Yousef Rabhi does exactly that. I consider myself a progressive in a very literal way; I want to see progress. Privileging ideological purity over other concerns is the opposite of that; whether intended or not, the effect of that approach to politics is nothing but a strident defense of the status quo.
But "don't make the perfect the enemy of the good" is also my advice to the voters in this election. Because Ann Arbor under Mayor Christopher Taylor, and the rest of the current City Council, is definitely not perfect. In a way, Mayor Taylor is the opposite of Yousef Rabhi; he is pragmatic to a fault. I often wish he would take bolder and more aggressive stances toward addressing the city's core challenges; instead, as my friend Scott wrote, he is often "the epitome of leading from behind". That's not always a bad thing, though - Ann Arbor has a "weak mayor" system, so quietly building consensus can be one of the more-effective ways to get things done. Still, I have been openly critical of the city's failure to achieve its Vision Zero goal, and disappointed at actions Taylor and (a majority of) Council took to water down the Comprehensive Land Use Plan.
However, we are seeing progress. Rents have declined from their peak, with real estate analysts pointing to new supply as the cause of this market "softness". The city is undertaking a new round of ambitious planning to curb serious and fatal crashes - indeed, while early 2025 was a very bad time for serious crashes in the city, preliminary data suggests we may finally be "bending the curve" there too. Ann Arbor's groundbreaking Sustainable Energy Utility is starting operations. And of course, innovative and transformative projects like Veridian and Broadway Park West are getting built!
In this election, I choose progress. Even when frustratingly slow, forward progress is far better than the alternative. So please join me in voting to re-elect Mayor Christopher Taylor on or before August 4.
