When a couple knocked on Rack-
ham student Jeffrey Lockhart’s door 
on Nov. 4 asking if he was planning 
on renewing his apartment lease, 
Lockhart knew something wasn’t 
right. 
As a tenant of Oxford Companies, 
a popular Ann Arbor real estate com-
pany, Lockhart said he was surprised 
to find prospective tenants outside 
his home asking about his plans to 
renew so that they can potentially 
take over his lease next year. Lock-
hart said he received an email from 
the leasing company that said “leas-
ing season is upon us.”
“(Oxford Companies) wrote the 
email basically as if the new ordi-
nance had not happened and that 
leasing season was now in early 
October, which it of course is not 
anymore because that is the whole 
point of the new ordinance,” Lock-
hart said.
In September, the city of Ann 
Arbor approved a new leasing ordi-
nance to protect students from being 
forced into signing leases nearly a 
year before the lease was planned 
to start. Multiple stakeholders were 
involved in the development of the 
legislation, including the Graduate 
Employees’ Organization, Central 
Student Government, tenants and 
landlords.
The 
new 
leasing 
ordinance 
ensures landlords are unable to show 
a property to new tenants until 150 
days prior to the expiration of the 
current lease. Previous legislation 
allowed landlords to begin showing 
properties to prospective tenants 70 
days into the current lease. In oppo-
sition to the new ordinance, land-
lords filed a lawsuit in September 

against the city of Ann Arbor.
Now, many tenants are saying 
that landlords are finding loopholes 
in the new ordinance and pressuring 
students in current leases to renew 
their contracts much earlier than the 
accepted time period.
Engineering senior Nathan Nohr 
is currently a resident of Prime 
Student Housing, a local housing 
authority. In a statement to The 
Michigan Daily, Nohr said there is 
a waitlist process for current resi-
dents. According to Nohr, a reserva-
tion requires paying one and a half 
months of rent, which will give resi-
dents priority to sign in March — a 
move Nohr said is unfair.
“Prime Student Housing notified 
current residents in September that 
we would need to resign our lease or 
else they would open up reservations 
for our apartment,” Nohr wrote. 
“This circumvents the ordinance 
and still requires students to renew 
early in the year and now forces 
other prospective residents to make 
a hefty reservation if they want to 
make sure to get a place. If students 
decide not to act on the waitlist res-
ervation they lose the rent reserva-
tion fee.” 
As a GEO member in the union’s 
housing caucus group, Rackham 
student Lucy Peterson said the leg-
islation was widely supported by 
GEO members since many in the 
organization have experienced their 
own issues with housing as graduate 
students. 
“From being graduate students 
living in the city for a while, a lot 
of us have experienced issues with 
early leasing,” Peterson said. “Grad-
uate students have to handle a lot 
of precarity in their work because 
we could be needing to do research 
one semester, we could get a job and 
have to move. So the idea of having to 

sign a lease 10 months in advance is a 
huge burden on graduate students in 
particular.”
Peterson said she believes some 
landlords are using bribes and 
threats to encourage tenants to sign 
the leases early. 
“(Some landlords are) counting on 
tenants being afraid and isolated and 
worried about their housing security 
to get them to renew,” Peterson said. 
“So landlords are free to use pres-
sure, coercion, manipulation, bribes 
and threats in order to get their 
existing tenants to renew or to say 
that they’re not going to renew.”
CSG President Nithya Arun, a 
Public Health senior, said she also 
received an email from University 
Towers — a popular student hous-
ing apartment complex — saying 
they are ready to start signing leases 
for next year. She said that CSG has 
received many complaints from stu-
dents who expressed frustrations 
about their landlords disregarding 
the new ordinance. 
“I immediately thought that the 
leasing period is not supposed to be 
open until March, so that seems like 
a violation,” Arun said. 
Lockhart said there is also a 
power dynamic that exists between 
landlords and tenants, making the 
effort to stand up for tenant rights 
difficult for some renters who do 
not necessarily understand the City 
Council rules.
“If I didn’t follow local city coun-
cil ordinance stuff and if I wasn’t 
paying close attention to this, I’d 
have no idea that I didn’t have to 
make that decision now,” Lockhart 
said. “These are the people that con-
trol whether you have housing, how 
much you pay for housing, they have 
a lot of power and it’s very easy for 
landlords to make people’s lives mis-
erable.” 

Arun said she and other CSG 
members felt very passionate about 
housing issues since they have also 
experienced issues with leasing 
before. Despite all the effort put 
forth by CSG, GEO and City Council 
to pass this legislation, Arun said the 
same issues are still prevalent. 
“A lot of shareholders spent time 
crafting this piece of legislation and 
making sure students would benefit 
from it and not be pressured to sign 
leases early, and now it almost feels 
like nothing has changed,” Arun said.
Since landlords now have to wait 
longer than they did in previous 
years to sign leases for their prop-
erties, many are offering voluntary 
waitlists for new tenants to join, 
according to Jordan Else, a landlord 
with Wessinger Properties. Else has 
been involved with the Ann Arbor 
housing market as a resident, parent 
of a U-M student and now as a land-
lord with her husband. 
The concept of the voluntary 
waitlist varies with each landlord, 
but the concept allows renters to 
reserve a spot in a certain building 
or unit in advance without officially 
signing a lease since leases cannot be 
signed at this time, Else said. 
Else said she is in support of the 
ordinance and that she feels that 
there is confusion about how the 
ordinance affects leases that begin 
in May versus those that begin in 
September. With the new ordinance, 
she said that new May leases can 
now be signed in early December 
and September leases can be signed 
in March.
“I think part of why all this isn’t 
working great and has historically 
not worked great is there’s an educa-
tion piece that’s missing,” Else said. 

An unknown individual splat-
tered red paint onto the statue of Bo 
Schembechler in front of Schem-
bechler Hall on the University of 
Michigan campus and spray painted 
“Bo knew #HailToTheVictims” at its 
base overnight on Nov. 23.
“Bo knew” references the allega-
tions that the late Schembechler, 
head football coach at Michigan 
from 1969 to 1989 and later athletic 
director, was alerted several times to 
former athletic doctor Robert Ander-
son’s sexual abuse of football players 
and failed to take appropriate action. 
Anderson was the head doctor for the 
football team during much of Schem-
bechler’s tenure.
More than 950 former University 
students have come forward in recent 
years alleging Anderson abused 
them, most typically under the guise 
of medical examinations.
An anonymous local resident 
took responsibility for the action 
in an email sent to local media and 

obtained by The Michigan Daily.
“It is time for the world to know 
that Bo is responsible for the abuse of 
innumerable Michigan football play-
ers,” the resident wrote.
The resident wrote that the action 
was in solidarity with the “Hail to the 
Victims” campaign led by Anderson 
survivors, who have been protest-
ing for the past few months to bring 
attention to the abuse and to hold the 
University accountable. 
Jonathan Vaughn, a former foot-
ball player and Anderson survivor 
who has been protesting outside of 
University President Mark Schlis-
sel’s house since Oct. 8 to ask for the 
University to take responsibility for 
Anderson’s abuse, told The Daily that 
the statue paint was not related to his 
protest.
“Not in anyway!” Vaughn wrote in 
a text message. “I’m out here every-
day fighting for justice why would I 
go and do something unjust?!” [sic]
The University is investigating the 
paint incident, according to Univer-
sity spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald. 
“We understand and appreciate 
the passionate advocacy on behalf of 

those who were abused by the late 
Robert Anderson,” Fitzgerald wrote 
in an email to The Daily. “But the 
vandalism to the University of Michi-
gan statue of Bo Schembechler will 
be investigated fully in order to hold 
those responsible accountable for 
their actions.”
Fitzgerald added that the Uni-
versity is working toward “fair com-
pensation” for Anderson survivors in 
confidential mediation. 
“We are working every day to 
make our campus safer for every 
member of our community,” Fitzger-
ald wrote.
A spokesperson for the Division 
of Public Safety and Security had no 
update to provide on the investiga-
tion. 
A representative for Michigan 
Students Against Sexual Assault, 
a campus organization that has 
advocated for Anderson survivors 
in recent months, did not have any 
information or comment on the paint 
incident. 
The paint incident comes days 
before the Michigan football team 
faces Ohio State, in a rivalry that 

largely defined Schembechler’s lega-
cy before allegations that he knew of 
Anderson’s abuse surfaced last year. 
Since then, many community mem-
bers have called for a reevaluation of 
the place of Schembechler’s image on 
campus.
Though the University has yet to 
comment directly on Schembechler, 
the huge “The Team, The Team, 
The Team” banner, quoting a famous 
Schembechler speech and tradition-
ally unfurled in the student section at 
every home game, has not appeared 
at Michigan Stadium since 2019.
Schlissel 
declined 
to 
answer 
whether he supported removing the 
statue or renaming Schembechler 
Hall, the football team’s main prac-
tice facility, when The Daily asked 
him in August. 
“This Schembechler issue is too 
tied up in the litigation around the 
awful acts of Dr. Anderson to really 
act on right now,” Schlissel said. 
“We’ll see what happens down the 
road.”

Daily News Editor Calder Lewis can 
be reached at calderll@umich.edu.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
2 — Wednesday, December 1, 2021 

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NEWS
Bo Schembechler statue vandalized, painted 
with “Bo Knew #HailToTheVictims”

Unknown individual took responsibility, said “it is time for the world to know”

Associate Editor: Julia Maloney

MADELINE HINKLEY/Daily
Students and fans storm the field after Michigan football beats Ohio State Nov. 27.

PHOTO

Senior Layout Editor: Sophie Grand

CALDER LEWIS
Daily News Editor

Students concerned by practices such as housing reservations, bribes and threats

ANN ARBOR 
Landlords find loopholes to Early Leasing Ordinance

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

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Daily Staff Reporter

