When Ann Arbor resident Anne 
Hiller first moved to ‘Tree City’ 
from the San Francisco Bay Area 
in 2004, she was looking forward 
to settling in the Wildwood Park 
subdivision, a scenic suburban 
neighborhood 
surrounded 
by 
nature on the city’s west side. Before 
she was about to close the deal on 
her house, however, Hiller noticed 
that her deed contained an archaic 
clause — a racially restrictive 
covenant that read “No portion of 
the land herein described should be 
occupied by persons other than the 
Caucasian race, except as servants 
or guests.” 
Though Hiller does not identify 
as a person of Color, she wrote in 
an email to The Michigan Daily 
that seeing the covenant appalled 
her. When she asked for the line to 
be removed from the deed, Hiller 
claimed she was told that wouldn’t 
be possible because it would require 
a large majority of homeowners 
across the neighborhood to vote 
to eliminate the covenant from all 
deeds in the subdivision. She would 
have to either sign the document as 

it was or pass on the house.
“(I) 
asked 
to 
strike 
the 
sentence during the actual closing 
appointment,” Hiller wrote. “The 
title company officer explained 
the deed covenants and why it 
wasn’t possible, and then said ‘but 
it’s okay because the language 
isn’t enforceable.’ It was a stain on 
the day. I didn’t like signing my 
name to that language, but my only 
alternative was to walk away from 
the house.”
An effort led by a small but 
mighty coalition of advocates, 
“Welcoming Neighborhood,” has 
recently changed that. By the end 
of 2022, Welcoming Neighborhood 
helped Wildwood Park pass an 
amendment eliminating the racially 
restrictive 
covenants 
in 
their 
neighborhood. Hiller, who ended 
up joining the coalition, personally 
worked to collect and verify resident 
signatures so that the covenants 
could be permanently eliminated. 
Hiller told The Daily that 
any changes to the Wildwood 
Park 
deed 
required 
approval 
from homeowners representing 
two-thirds 
of 
the 
property 
values 
comprising 
the 
entire 
neighborhood. Though collecting 
the signatures was a challenge, 

Hiller said it paid off with the 
eventual 
repealment 
of 
the 
covenants. 
“Right out of the gate, we 
attained 60% of the (signature) 
threshold during a 2-hour ‘cider 
and donuts kick-off,’” Hiller wrote. 
“(We) exceeded the two-thirds 
threshold in just 6 weeks.”
Wildwood Park was one of 13 
neighborhoods developed in the 
1910s and 1920s on the west side of 
Ann Arbor that instituted racially 
restrictive policies. During that 
time, Catherine Street and Miller 
Avenue became a demographic fault 
line 
separating 
predominantly-
white 
neighborhoods 
like 
Arborview and Wildwood from 
neighborhoods like Waterhill and 
Kerrytown, which were historically 
the heart of the Black community in 
Ann Arbor.
While restrictive policies were 
deemed unenforceable across the 
nation by the U.S. Supreme Court 
in 1948, the restrictive covenants 
and discrimination in home sales 
continued to plague the Ann Arbor 
housing market until the city 
passed a fair housing ordinance 
in 1963. While the ordinance 
barred new development from 
instituting 
racially 
restrictive 

policies it did not provide a way to 
remove existing racially restrictive 
language from existing deeds. 
That’s why the covenants, though 
unenforceable, still exist in housing 
deeds like Hiller’s in more than 120 
neighborhoods across Washtenaw 
County, according to research 
conducted by Justice InDeed, a 
University 
of 
Michigan-based 
collaborative project aiming to map 
where the covenants still exist in 
the county.
Ann Arbor’s Hannah subdivision 
became the first neighborhood 
in the state of Michigan to repeal 
the racially restrictive language 
in all of the deeds to properties 
in the neighborhood in February 
2022. In an interview with The 
Daily, Tom Crawford, a resident of 
Wildwood Park, which is located 
right next to Hannah subdivision, 
said the work of Justice InDeed 
educated him about the remnants 
of 
racial 
discrimination 
in 
Wildwood deeds and motivated 
him to organize community events 
to advocate for the repealment of 
racially restrictive covenants in his 
neighborhood.

2 — Wednesday, February 22, 2023
News

FEATURE PHOTO

Wildwood Park community eliminates racially 
restrictive covenants

Over 120 communities in Ann Arbor still have racially exclusive language in deeds

ANN ARBOR

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

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EMMA MATI/Daily
LSA senior Rayven Brantley serves food at “An Exploration of African American Cuisine” hosted by Organizational Studies and the Department of Sociology at the LSA Building 
Friday afternoon.

University 
of 
Michigan 
researchers 
published 
a 
sustainability-focused 
study 
in 
January 
2023, 
comparing 
the 
environmental impacts of reusable 
plastic containers to single-use 
containers. The researchers studied 
a program launched by the non-
profit Live Zero Waste in Ann 
Arbor where customers can request 
a reusable carryout food container 
from 
a 
participating 
business. 
Customers then have to clean the 
container after use and return it back 
to the business whenever they have 
time. Several local restaurants such 
as Zingerman’s Next Door Café, El 
Harissa, Ginger Deli and Cinnaholic 
participate in the program.
The 
researchers 
evaluated 
elements of the program such 
as cost, water use and consumer 
behavior to determine whether 
using a reusable container was more 
sustainable than single-use takeout 
boxes. Their results determined that 
on the surface, reusable containers 
have lower environmental impacts 
than their single-use counterparts. 
The study flagged that the emissions 
from the transportation required to 
return the reusable containers might 
make them less sustainable than they 
seem.
According to Samuel McMullen, 
the executive director and co-founder 

of Live Zero Waste, Zingerman’s 
initially came up with the idea of 
offering reusable takeout containers 
in 2021 to support Ann Arbor’s 
commitment to carbon neutrality. 
Because of the city’s previous 
environmental 
and 
recycling 
initiatives, 
McMullen 
said 
he 
believed Ann Arbor was the perfect 
place to pioneer the program. The 
nonprofit Recycle Ann Arbor collects 
curbside recycling throughout the 
city and strongly encourages citizens 
to reuse materials when possible. 
McMullen said Live Zero Waste was 
able to work with Recycle Ann Arbor 
to pilot their program.
“We 
have 
a 
really 
unique 
opportunity in Ann Arbor to work 
with the recycler, which opens up 
just so many logistics opportunities,” 
McMullen said. “They already have 
trucks. We could, in (the future), 
collect recycling and returnable 
containers on the same routes. It’s a 
huge opportunity that very few other 
places in the country have the ability 
to test.”
McMullen said businesses that 
have regular customers are ideal 
candidates for the program because 
if they make the switch to reusable 
containers once, they may be more 
likely to continue to use them when 
coming back for another meal.
“El Harrisa has been a really high 
performer,” McMullen said. “They 
do north of 50 containers a week. 
They also have good regulars which 
is something that really lends itself 

to a restaurant with a sort of similar 
clientele coming back because they 
can make returning their containers 
part of their habit.” 
The program has been around for 
two years, but until now there hasn’t 
been any research on how much it’s 
actually helping the environment. 
The January study was co-written 
by Environment and Sustainability 
graduate student Christian Hitt 
and Engineering graduate student 
Jacob Douglas under the guidance 
of Gregory Keoleian, Engineering 
and SEAS professor. The researchers 
found that after just five — or in 
some cases, fewer than five — uses, 
the reusable containers had a net 
positive impact on the environment 
over disposable ones.
However, if customers started 
making additional trips to return 
the 
containers 
to 
restaurants, 
the 
program 
could 
harm 
the 
environment more than it helps. The 
researchers found that if even 5% of 
customers made an extra car trip 
to return their takeout containers, 
the program would contribute more 
greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere 
than single-use containers.
Douglas said he believes the 
program would work best in a 
walkable city where customers could 
return their containers without 
creating any additional emissions.
“If you’re in a rural area, and 
people are driving 10 miles just to 
return their container, (reusable 
takeout containers are) going to 

be way worse than just having 
disposable containers,” Douglas said. 
“But if you’re in a city where people 
could walk and return the containers 
then the system can be a little bit 
more flexible.”
Douglas said the research team 
was not able to find out how many 
times containers can be reused before 
they break or become unusable. 
“There’s the potential that they 
can be reused like hundreds of times, 
but in all likelihood, they’re not being 
reused that many times and people 
might steal them or they might 
break them,” Douglas said. “If the 
container gets reused many times, 
that’s sort of the best-case scenario.”
Going forward, Hitt said the team 
is looking into different types of 
materials that could be used to make 
reusable containers as durable and 
sustainable as possible.
“One of the big ones we’re looking 
at is bringing in different types of 
reusable materials such as stainless 
steel,” Hitt said.
LSA sophomore Melissa Oz, a 
student ambassador at Planet Blue, 
a campus organization focused on 
sustainability at the University, 
said though she hasn’t used the 
program yet, she thinks it could be 
an environmentally-friendly option 
for students who walk downtown 
to get takeout at the participating 
locations.

 UMich study reveals environmental impact of reusable 
carryout containers
Researchers examine environmental benefits and drawbacks of reusable 
carryout program in Ann Arbor 

ISABELLA KASSA 
Daily News Reporter

RESEARCH

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

