During a five-hour meeting of the Ypsilanti 2020 Task Force this afternoon, a fellow Task Force member asked me if I’d ever taken the time to read the Ypsilanti Township master plan. I told her that I hadn’t, and she suggested that I might want to go home and find it online. She said that I’d find the part about the “new downtown Ypsilanti” to be particularly interesting.

For those of you not from around here, the City of Ypsilanti is surrounded by a Township. From what I can tell, there’s always been some hostility between the two. I’m told that there was a time the Township would have gladly agreed to join with the City, creating one entity, but the City was unreceptive. Now, it seems, the shoe is on the other foot. While the City has suffered economically these past several years, the Township appears to have done quite well. With a surplus of undeveloped land, they’ve been able to grow (read “sprawl”) while we in the City been forced to work with what little we have. So, while we’ve been attempting to remediate brownfields on a shoestring, they’ve been putting up subdivisions on virgin land where farms once stood. As a result, their tax base continues to increase as ours drops. It probably also doesn’t hurt that they have few of the costly problems that we, as an urban area, need to address each day.

So, what I heard this afternoon is that the Township has plans to create a “historic downtown” of their own, just a few miles away from our existing downtown. I’ve been reading through the Township master plan for a while now, and I can’t seem to find any specifics, but I did find this one passage:

… Consider the additional commercial zoning in the Huron Street / Whittaker Road corridor between I-94 and Textile Road in order to promote creation of a town center district with a wide variety of goods and services available in a central location…

If this is true, and if it’s gone at all beyond the “let’s consider” phase, I think it’s incredibly perverse. We, as I’m sure some of the braver Township residents must know, already have a real, historic downtown. They don’t need to build cheap replicas of historic buildings, as has been done recently in Canton, Michigan, with the construction of Cherry Hill Village and it’s Ye’ Ole’ Coldstone Creamery. We already have them. Ypsilanti has an authentic downtown. Yes, it might have panhandlers and a strip club, and there might be challenges, but it does exist. And, yes, I suppose it would be easier to just start over again and create a sanitized and Disnified version of our cultural past, but can’t we do better? Don’t we owe it to ourselves and our kids to try to fix what’s broken before just starting over again? Does authentic history have a value, or is it just the appearance that we ultimately care about?