One of my favorite local blogs, “Ann Arbor is Overrated,” has been just obsessed for the last month with the talk in Ann Arbor of banning couches from outside of houses. Here’s a link from yesterday’s entry on the topic, but they go back to June and they show no sign of ending.
I’m not sure what is more amusing: the obsession with the couch ban discussion or the fact that the couch ban is a point of some discussion in U of M student circles in the first place. But I will make two observations. First, it seems clear to me that we can narrow down the writer(s) of this anonymous blog down to someone who has a couch on their porch.
Second, a lot of this seems to me to boil down to the different perspective of “renters” (and most students are of course in this category) and “owners.” When you rent your home, you don’t really care a whole lot about things like couches in the front yard, your yard or anyone else’s yard. But when you own your home, you care a great deal about things because a big tattered couch on the front porch of the house next door effects the dollar value of your home. Of course, living next to student housing doesn’t help your property values a lot in the first place…
Anyway, my take on this is pretty simple: I’m a home owner, and for the time-being at least, I live in Ypsi.