For a relatively small city, Ann Arbor, MI, is a happening place—urbane and collegiate, but also earthy and unpretentious. Downtown denizens can drop into any number of bookstores or listen to live music at one of the city’s annual festivals. Along the Huron River, University of Michigan students unwind between classes, while others jog and throw Frisbees.
You need a farm infrastructure to run a viable business, and as farms disappear, the market for farm equipment dealers and suppliers shrinks. Farmers here fear falling below a critical threshold that’s needed to keep that infrastructure in place.
The Conservation Fund is working with the city of Ann Arbor to assist in implementing a unique and vital greenbelt program. In the coming months, the Fund will continue to work with its partners, including The McKnight Foundation, to provide project management support, stewardship planning and outreach with local landowners.
In recent years Ann Arbor has slowly become a victim of its own success. Suburban sprawl has threatened much of the rural heritage that gives southern Michigan its charm, while also jeopardizing the city’s distinct downtown character.
In response, The Conservation Fund is helping to implement the Ann Arbor Greenbelt Initiative, a far-reaching project designed to protect and link city parks, natural areas and working farms throughout the city, while curbing the growth and effects of sprawl.
Over the next three decades, the initiative is expected to raise $80 million through taxes and state and federal incentive programs, which will be used to purchase land and development rights both within and outside the city limits. To date, the Ann Arbor Greenbelt Initiative has received more than $1.7 million in federal matching funds from the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program to purchase the development rights from five working farms.
The initiative has spawned other conservation efforts as well. In addition to the city of Ann Arbor, four out of the eight townships within the Greenbelt District have voted to protect farmland and open space inside their borders, thus allowing the jurisdictions to leverage their investment in the initiative for even greater returns, both economic and environmental.
The Upper Midwest, which has long sustained both wildlife and thriving communities, is now increasingly threatened by sprawl and land sales. The Fund's new initiative is working to protect the remaining forestlands, prairies and undeveloped lands along the Mississippi River and across the region. Read more>
From government agencies to corporations, from private landowners to land trusts and local communities, the Fund's partners seek our expertise to:
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