Ann Arbor land trust asks for three homes on a lot, with a 1,250-square-foot cap

ANN ARBOR — The Ann Arbor Community Land Trust wants the city to allow three homes on a residential lot now, instead of waiting two or three years for the zoning rewrite that would follow a land-use plan adopted in March. Planning commissioners postponed the idea in October and talked it through again at a Nov. 10 work session. Ryan Stanton’s report in MLive says it is due back on the commission’s agenda in December. It is not an adopted ordinance.

Executive Director Sarah Lorenz told the commission in October that an “attainable housing unit” rule could move infill “from homes priced at $1 million or more to homes priced at $500,000 or less.” The draft she described would allow up to two of those units plus a primary house, the same count the city already allows when a lot has a house and an accessory dwelling. A lot could not have both an accessory dwelling and an attainable unit. Three units would be the ceiling.

The size caps in the proposal, as Stanton reported them: a one-story attainable unit at 850 square feet, a two-story unit at 1,250 square feet, unfinished basements not counted. Buildings could sit six feet apart. They could cover half of the rear setback, down to five feet from a lot line. Lorenz said the rear-yard room is what makes a third unit fit on most lots, and that the spacing is tighter than R2A duplex rules but still meets fire code. She also said accessory-dwelling rules count basements, which is why those units cannot have one, and that some family buyers treat a 600- or 800-square-foot unit with no basement as a deal breaker.

The arithmetic she put in front of the commission

Lorenz’s cost sketch, reported by Stanton: land, utilities, city fees and construction run about $500,000 for one Ann Arbor house, about $400,000 each with two on the property, and about $366,000 each with three. Tax breaks and grants could cut that further, she said. The model she wants is a three-bedroom, two-story house of 1,232 square feet, with a porch and a basement. Going from an 800-square-foot, two-bedroom house to that 1,232-square-foot plan costs about $5,000 to $10,000, she said, and “it’s really leaving a lot on the table” not to build the larger one. Norfolk Homes, the trust’s contractor, is building similar houses in Jackson for about $200,000 with that city’s help, she said. The trust was founded in 2024 to sell homes to critical workers below the market.

The trust is already building some Townie Homes and says current rules get in the way. Stanton’s photos locate sites on Scio Church Road and Maple Road. Those addresses are where the trust and Norfolk are building or planning. They are not a list of lots the ordinance would rezone by name. The ordinance, if the commission and council eventually pass it, would be a citywide rule for the unit type, not a map of those two streets.

Who pushed back

City Planning Manager Brett Lenart said there has been a lot of back and forth and no consensus. Commissioner Richard Norton said in October that he supports what the trust wants to build and that the proposal is “just a dramatic change to the landscape that really hasn’t been sufficiently analyzed” and “too underbaked.” Commissioner Sarah Bassiouni said the change can look sweeping and that Ann Arbor’s single-family pattern is a legacy of exclusionary zoning. Lorenz called the ordinance a trial of whether a density bonus and a size cap can produce missing-middle houses without waiting for the full zoning rewrite.

What December has to settle is still open: whether two extra units, an 850- and 1,250-square-foot cap, and building in the rear setback are the rule, or whether the commission wants more study first. The photograph is City Hall. It is not a house on Scio Church Road.

Sources:
MLive, Ryan Stanton, “3 homes per lot in Ann Arbor? ‘Attainable housing’ proposal aims to unlock density,” Nov. 12, 2026, https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2026/11/3-homes-per-lot-in-ann-arbor-attainable-housing-proposal-aims-to-unlock-density.html
Photo: Michael Barera, “Ann Arbor August 2013 13 (City Hall).jpg”, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAnn_Arbor_August_2013_13_%28City_Hall%29.jpg

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Tags: Ann Arbor · Housing · Planning Commission · Zoning