By Scott Sullivan,
Editor
Water Music
Last week’s Part 3 of our tentatively-titled “Tangram/Canary” series left off with developers Johnny Walker, of Tangram LLC, and his Enclave project near-neighbor Joe Novakowski, COO of Elzinga & Volkers builders, sharing differences near the end of the April 21 Saugatuck Township Planning Commission meeting.
Just what differences might preclude them and other neighbor parties from cooperating with Township officials to extend sewer to all projects (Novakowski is developing Gaslight Estates)?
For example, Capizzo Gallery, its next-door Ivy House events center, Pennyroyal restaurant, the already-underway Koetje Builders’ 30-condo, 8.97-acre Singapore Retreat; Saugatuck Lodging LLC’s 29.24-acre, 76-pre-fab cabins site northeast of the Blue Star at Holland Street intersection, it too with Phase One excavations already underway …
All these are already built and/or underway. It’s too late to stop. All appear interdependent too.
Back to Basics
Saugatuck Township, less densely-populated with more growing space than sister Tri-Communities cities Saugatuck and Douglas, is growing faster as result.
Saugatuck City’s prime-but limited spaces are all but built out — construction there most often is contingent on replacing older homes with new ones, which are outpriced for many, such as this writer, who would love to live there.
Douglas, with more open land still available, is sprouting at a more medium tempo. Exhibit A may be Centre Street Collective, at last breaking ground on its 10+-acre commercial/residential mix “behind the Church” (St. Peter’s)” as locals know it.
Local Kerr Real Estate partners plan 19 single-family homes, 1- or 2-bedroom residential units (apartments, likely), retail shops and offices. They contend work was unnecessarily delayed by a young and new-on the job city zoning administrator — the best many small towns with budgets to match can afford.
He was soon fired by city council after shown evidence his learning curve couldn’t meet demands of Kerr’s complex and time-urgent project.
Contractors, suppliers et.al. work within warm-weather season parameters, asphalt plants close during winter and cannot reopen until typically April when the earth here thaws, material prices often skyrocket based on supply-demand for every unfolding season …
Under current Douglas planning and zoning director Sean Homyen, CCC can finally deploy contractors able to turn earth this spring.
Flashback/Sidetrack
When I was in school in the early/mid-1970s, constructions jobs made lucky winners stronger, more physically fit and attractive to girls (picture shirtless and gleaming with sweat) and were mostly reserved for vigorous, athletic types getting ready for fall/winter sports such as football, basketball and wrestling.
Soccer and women’s sports were still new during America’s pre-Title IX era.
Most often, where I grew up, these went to Purdue University athletes with alumni and sports program connections. I never could land such a well-paying summer job, go figure.
PU to was a hotbed for smart agribusinessmen and the most promising engineers, fields women were cracking more frequently than before.
I was something of an anomaly loving arts and sciences — English, political sciences, history, psychology and the like — hence destined to live earning less. Pre-law was my “out,” but I soured on that too after Watergate. This, my choice, turned out mostly fine for me.
Hygge
Kerr and partners will add to its Scandinavian design elements — shared in part with Tangram’s Enclave proposal — the Danish concept hygge, pronounced “hoo-gah,” here.
“Slow down,” CSC’s website beckons. Enjoy life’s simple pleasures. Nothing inessential causing clutter. Function weds form as one. Tenants can expect “The Art of Living Reimagined.”
Some of the best local builders mean to combine skills, maintaining harmony, towards one end. Lofty goals if and when achieved,
Numbers Game
The township, which first governed both Saugatuck and Douglas villages before both declared independence becoming statutory cities — Saugatuck in 1984, Douglas in 2004 — mostly let go freely, maybe even gratefully. No revolutionary wars were needed. Even without the cities’ combined 2.91 acres, the township remains far more capacious. Still plenty more room to roam.
Per census data, Saugatuck city in 2020 fit 865 residents into 1.17 square miles, 0.28 of them being water surfaces. That was down from 925 shown in the 2010 census, and was guesstimated by Census Reporter this April having dropped to 766.
The same CR estimates Douglas’s density this spring as 1,427 people spread over 1.8 miles, up from 1,368 shown during the last 10-year nationwide census in 2020.
Building for where people most want to visit, live and drives up land value, a situation government checks and balances are meant to mitigate, but don’t always. Regulatory “bureaucrats,” who democratically must hear and weigh all sides, drag things out, in most cases
The township, long foreseeing its lone strip zoned Commercial, the Blue Star corridor, becoming what it already is at this point, is trying its best to balance sometimes-vying interests. The current elected government board, with staff, have funded studies and surveys during at least the last two years. They have applied for available state grants — Michigan has deeper pockets, the Fed limitless ones being able run deficits topping $2 trillion and still growing.
For Walker, squeezing enough “attainable” housing — “with this market,” he told us, “Enclave homes were never going to be “’affordable’” — into 19.3 cares, minus two state protected Critical Wetland acres, might be like squeezing all of Saugatuck-Douglas into a too-small ball.
The Divide
Building public/private sewer lines east-west along Allegan Road to the Kalamazoo Lake Sewer and Water Authority wastewater treatment plant— you’d almost think it was put there on purpose — is a lynchpin for faster-paced development.
For 19 years now, the Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance, begat by environmental allies who helped fund and facilitate opening the 1,100-to 1,200-acre Saugatuck Dunes State Park
acquire have put up money and organized resistance to what they believe is overdevelopment of very nature that draws most here. The legendary lost lumber village of Singapore, drifted over by sand dunes unleashed by taking out tree root networks that had held them together prior, still resounds here.
The goose that had laid the golden egg was dead, maybe there, But not yet nearby.
That may be our fate but who says it must? Many grow impatient for “it” to happen, but what “it” is that?
I count myself not as a party Conservative but lowercase conservationist who wants to save what means most to me. That also means being with people who like to discuss local matters, keep talking, keeping me on my toes.
Republican Patty Birkholz — nicknamed “Purple Patty” for her outfits combining red (for conservative?) and blue (for you-know-who) was both a lower-case conservative, for wanting to preserve nature we so cherish, and liberal (sharing fairly nature’s fruits for the benefit of all — served as first Saugatuck Township Treasurer, then area state representative and senator until both terms expired — provided such a voice.
So did six-term Michigan Gov. G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams, who between 1949 and ’60 called completing the Mackinac Bridge, in 1957 at last connecting our state’s peninsulas his “crowning achievement” lived up to his first and primary goal to link roads, if not always souls and minds, statewide.
William Milliken, the Republican who succeeded Williams 10 years after, from 1969 to 1980, owned a Traverse City department store prior. He too believed in keeping Michigan “Pure” for all.
Closeted gay English author E.M. Forster wrote his 1910 novel “Howards End” as reaching out to someone, maybe anyone, else beseeching “Only connect” as way to breach that divide.
I’m a liberal, not Liberal, too, all for liberty and not being slave to any man or woman’s doctrine. The upper-case kind too often foil themselves by diffusing words not into babble, but in the Bible the Tower of Babel showed as metaphor for futility.
“Saugatuck-Douglas Indivisibles” anti-Trump allies soon schismed into “Good Trouble Indivisibles,” sharing the same aims but the latter more active demonstrating.
In Saugatuck, Indivisibles can chalk slogans and drawings on public sidewalks (favoring ones near the rainbow-painted four crosswalks diamond pointing towards city hall), plus marching black-clad protestors, trailed by a doleful drummer, exuant with a death march, as Shakespeare ends “King Lear.”
In Douglas they can march but not chalk on sidewalks. Confused yet? Wait, there’s more. Why is/are the Saugatuck-Douglas anti-Trump Indivisibles, while the “Good Trouble” claims they/it are Indivisible? Those are Democrats, too loving/lovable by half. All this over a silly “s.”
In the GOP, Trump still unites more than half even after Iran (which, by the way, is still ongoing). That’s enough, in some critics’ minds, to hold down the hammer like King Lear did, but every king must die someday.
Tactics —using strategy and logic to prevail through our various trials — are tangrams too. Try them. It is a fun and wit-challenging and to unlock secrets heretofore unknown, at least to us. Doing so shows we are getting somewhere, progressing on some seemingly radiant path that will leave the world better for us having lived.
To be continued
