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. . . December 1994
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Behind the door covered with cartoons ("in case of further deregulation, bus tickets will drop down from overhead compartments") and bumper stickers ("a city without trees isn't fit for dogs"), in an office overlooking the parking lot of the UM Art and Architecture building, Kate Warner greets her students and colleagues in the Department of Urban Planning. Her new graduate students soon learn what her colleagues have come to appreciate throughout her 22 years in the department: her, warmth and gentility do not belie, but in fact complement, her fierce determination to see all Americans in decent homes--and in communities as strong and diverse as the one in which she was raised.
In the 1990s, a similar style of urban design, sometimes called "neo-traditionalism" is popular with some city planners, who rally to revive everything from front porches to town commons to recreate more compact, friendlier communities. Places like Mariemont are their models.
To Kate Warner, Mariemont was simply home. She remembers walking to the corner grocery store to buy popsicles, walking to school, walking to the park, walking to restaurants, walking to the library and she "always assumed this is the way it should be."
She also remembers a mix of housing: single family homes, row houses, and apartments buildings of different sizes. This range of housing choices, she says, helped make Mariemont a diverse place, where the children of wealthy families went to school with kids from single-parent homes. Promoting this kind of diversity--in housing choices and in communities--would become the focus of her career.
The most common response of city planners, she says, has been to choose "access through mobility, with cars, rather than access through proximity. We don't develop as communities, we develop as residential tracts, where you must drive from one driveway to the next." More highways, she points out, have spurred the growth of subdivisions, malls, and office buildings at highway interchanges-the "edge cities" that may well go down in history as the dominant urban form of late-20th century America. Warner is studying the housing trends of one nearby edge city: the Detroit suburb of Southfield. Like a sympathetic biographer forced to acknowledge the bad habits of her subject, Warner doesn't like one trend she's finding: whites and African-Americans are comfortable with integration at different ratios. Whites tend to move out of what they perceive as increasingly mixed communities when African-American residency reaches 30 percent, well before the 50-50 rate of integration African-Americans prefer.
She cites Ann Arbor as a "very pedestrian town for comparable cities its size," and says that shopping malls "haven't snuffed out downtown" as some had feared, but instead have "made downtown a much more interesting area, with specialty stores, entertainment, restaurants and historic buildings." With a boom in downtown restaurants and new townhouses, Royal Oak outside Detroit is another "swinging place to be," she says. Still, sprawl is the rule. Warner says the average new home is 2,000 square feet, rests on at least a 1/4-acre lot, has at least a two-car garage and costs almost $200,000. The cost is prohibitive for more and more people, she says, and adds to "the crisis in this country: how will we do housing for low- and moderate-income people?"
But Kate Warner believes we already have the technology to house far more people and to build stable communities in the bargain, and she has dedicated the last several years of her career to spreading the news.
Her husband loves to needle her by pointing out the "trailer parks" along Michigan Avenue in Ypsilanti. She insists that these parks, which date from the 1950s and '60s, are relics. Manufactured homes no longer look like trailers, she says, and they're not all in parks. Though the smaller "single section" units are still available, the market is growing for larger "multi-section" ones. Some purchasers place their homes on their own private lots instead of renting space in a park. And state-of-the-art designs include large kitchens, several bedrooms, decks and picture windows. Manufactured homes are now more stable and weather-resistant too. In a major 1993 study of manufactured homes in Michigan for the state Department of Commerce, Warner and her colleagues found that federal regulations enacted in 1976 to strengthen construction and inspection standards helped to improve structural durability, fire and wind safety. "It's a wonderful technology," she says. "We can produce homes of quality at less cost than site-built housing, and we can produce them faster." What's more, "manufactured homes frequently do appreciate, because manufactured home market values respond to the same conditions which determine the value of site-built housing." In other words: location, location, location. The 1993 study team found that the re-sale prices of manufactured homes vary across regions within Michigan just as the re-sale prices of site-built homes do. After poring over state records, Warner and her colleagues concluded that "manufactured homes, like site-built housing, can be viewed as an investment with probabilities of appreciation and equity accumulation."
Her survey of the largest manufactured home community for seniors in Michigan, Chateau Avon in Rochester Hills, found that three-fourths of residents had moved there from single-family, site-built homes. The same number are satisfied with their manufactured homes and with the community. They especially liked the "all senior character," the accessibility to shopping, the community's appearance, and the security and safety. Warner's "dream" is to see a fuller range of uses of manufactured housing: by non-profit housing developers, co-ops, condo owners and in subdivisions. Ever the visionary, Warner muses: "Has anyone ever thought of a neo-traditional manufactured housing community?"--MT Tovah Redwood is a former Ann Arbor freelancer. She has recently joined the Department of Housing and Community Development in Kansas City, Missouri.
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Warner grew up in one of the country's first "planned communities," 
In another 30 years, 20 percent of the population will be over 60. "Single-family, suburban homes the way we've continued to build them--disconnected from services and other people--don't fit a graying society, and will fit less and less as people grow older."