falling property values

The following note comes from a reader by the name of Rotus Jackson.

I’ve seen a couple of times in the past few months assertions by your commenters that Ypsi’s property values are dropping at a rate faster than anywhere else in the area. I kinda thought this was an exaggeration, but I did expect we’d be leading the drop by a little bit.

But – apparently not.

The average decline in property values in Ypsi City proper is slightly above what it is in the County, on par with Pittsfield Twp and Ypsi Twp, behind Saline City and Northfield Twp, and, holy cow, Ann Arbor Twp, which includes Barton Hills, the snobbiest of Ann Arbor snobsdivisions. Barton Hills saw a drop more than half again what Ypsi did.

Of course, A2 Twp probably had by far the fastest increase in assessments over the past decade, so they’ve probably got plenty of Prop A padding built up.

OK, I have one question. And it might be super dumb… As assessors calculate taxable value based on the purchase price of homes changing hands in a neighborhood, wouldn’t an area with no sales show no change in taxable value, even if several houses had been on the market for years? In other words, could our taxable value not be dropping as quickly due to the fact that houses just aren’t selling here? I’d prefer to think that our homes are retaining their value more than those in Ann Arbor Township, and that people are perhaps moving away from sprawling McMansion developments, but I’m dubious.

Posted in Observations | 9 Comments

i guess someone in the xerox marketing department didn’t get the goatse memo

My friend Eric just sent this in. Xerox apparently sent it to him this morning. If I understand his note correctly, he thinks that Xerox did it intentionally to build online buzz for their “mouth watering” new model of color copier. I don’t doubt it was intentional, but I suspect it wasn’t something that came down from the company brass. I think it’s more likely that a few folks at the ad agency thought that it was about time that Xerox officially paid its respects to the art form know as Goatse… A lot of people don’t know this, but the photocopier was invented in order to facilitate the sharing of Goatse images.

Posted in Pop Culture | 7 Comments

guess the state, guess the decade

OK, tonight I’m going to roll out a new feature here at MM.com. It’s called “Guess the State, Guess the Decade.” Here’s how it works. I post a newspaper headline from somewhere in the United States and you guess the state it came from and the decade in which it was published. This first one comes by way of my friend Kerri.

“Ex-Homecoming Queen Beats Sister With Fake Leg In Trailer”

Any guesses?

And don’t google it. If you google it, and I find out, I’ll make you get one of these.

Posted in Media | 12 Comments

the brick boner of ypsilanti

I’ve just discovered that someone out there on the internet has appropriated our beloved water tower to signify a giant, engorged boner. I’d never made the connection before now, but it didn’t take me very long to figure out what the author of the post was going for. There was just a link to a photo of a topless Lindsay Lohan in a blonde wig (reminiscent of that other sexy, full-figured MM, Marilyn Monroe), and a photo of Ypsilanti’s historic water tower… I didn’t actually have a chance to work it out on my own. Linette walked by me as I was puzzling over it, and made the universal boner sound effect. I would have figured it out on my own eventually, though.

Anyway, I’m not sure what recourse we have, but I thought that I should make you aware so that you can talk frankly with your children about boners, reroute your daily commute, start putting together a vigilante crew to demolish the tower, etc.

Seriously, was anyone else aware that people saw our water tower in this way? The thought of it fills me with shame.

Posted in Ypsilanti | 19 Comments

just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse

In case you didn’t catch it in the “Washington Post,” it looks like the government is trying to suppress a report concerning the toxicity of the entire Great Lakes region. Here’s a clip:

The lead author and peer reviewers of a government report raising the possibility of public health threats from industrial contamination throughout the Great Lakes region are charging that the report is being suppressed because of the questions it raises….

Posted in Environment | 4 Comments

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