ANN ARBOR, Mich. (WXYZ) — The rental housing market in Ann Arbor has been a hot-button issue for many years. Many people in the community have been very vocal about how expensive it is.
“It’s been eye-opening to say the least,” said Jason Santiago of Ann Arbor.
Santiago moved to Ann Arbor for work about six months ago.
He says he was shocked at how much his rent was for his one-bedroom apartment.
“It’s pretty expensive, I think right now we got it down to $1,500. Before we started getting to negotiations it was $2,400,” said Santiago.
I also caught up with some other renters who shared what their prices look like.
“I live with five other people, there’s a house of six of us up on the north side of town. It’s a little over 1,000 bucks a month, we complain about it a lot,” said Max Hafner of Ann Arbor.
“I paid $1,600 my sophomore year and now I pay $1,100 basically, which is an improvement in comparison but still pretty insane,” said Mia Valiotis of Ann Arbor.
During a recent Ann Arbor City Council meeting, city officials discussed launching a website that will help renters find more housing options.
“This will be a city of Ann Arbor website and will help to aggregate all the different properties, rental properties. And what’s good about that is we have a few landlords in Ann Arbor that are really big, and this will kind of [let] all the mom-and-pop landlords to be featured,” said Councilwoman Ayesha Ghazi Edwin.
Ghazi Edwin is one of the people who proposed launching the website.
She says it will also help connect people to housing resources.
“Like what are your rights as a tenant? How do you potentially file a complaint?” said Ghazi Edwin. “And the data that is collected from people using that website will be generated into reports that’ll be given to the city so that means we’ll have more insight on who is actually getting housing, who isn’t, what kind of racial and ethnic groups are being left out?”
Ghazi Edwin says the website, which doesn’t have a launch date yet, would essentially be a tool to empower renters.
Ann Arbor resident Jason Santiago says the proposed website would’ve been helpful for his apartment search.
“I think if it could help anybody else too then that’ll be great,” said Santiago.
