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Wednesday, March 13, 2024
SAFE hosts vigil and die-in on the Diag
The event commemorated the lives of Aaron Bushnell and others killed in Palestine CHRISTINA ZHANG & EILENE KOO Daily Staff Reporters
More than 150 University of Michigan students and Ann Arbor community members participated in a “die-in” demonstration Thursday afternoon to commemorate the death of Aaron Bushnell and honor the more than 30,000 Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. For the die-in portion of the event, demonstrators laid on the Diag while holding Palestinian flags and pictures of people killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza as a collection of audio clips from Gaza played in the background. For the second part of the event, organizers hosted a vigil where LSA sophomore Levi Pierpont, who was friends with Bushnell, spoke about their relationship and Bushnell’s legacy. Bushnell, a United States Air Force serviceman, died Feb. 25 after setting himself on fire outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. in protest of U.S. involvement in the Israel-Hamas war. Immediately before Bushnell self-immolated, he stated, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide” and chanted “Free Palestine!” The die-in was organized by the TAHRIR Coalition, a multicultural coalition of more than 60 U-M student organizations including Students Allied for Freedom and Equality and the Graduate Employees’ Organization. Representatives from the organizations Faculty
ANN ARBOR
JULIANNE YOON/Daily Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) hold a Die-In and Vigil in honor of Aaron Bushnell. Students and Ann Arbor community members participate in the Die-In.
and Staff for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace spoke during the event. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LSA sophomore Annabel Bean, co-founder of the U-M chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, said Bushnell’s death made it clear how far people feel they need to go to be heard. “I think it impacted everybody so deeply because it really just showed that people are desperate,” Bean said. “The movement has blocked streets and highways and talked to our
senators and Biden and vote (but) nothing is changing. … It’s devastating because it shows the extremes that people have to go to for our country, our system to listen to us.” After hearing from the event’s speakers, U-M students and community members laid down on the Diag under fake bloodcovered cloth and surrounded by wrapped-up towels representing the corpses of children killed in Gaza. Organizers also set up posters containing photos of child victims from Gaza. During
the demonstration, sounds of Palestinian people in pain, which were obtained from interviews and videos taken during attacks in Palestine, played over the speakers. After the die-in, the event transitioned to a vigil for Bushnell. Attendees placed flowers on the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library and observed a fiveminute moment of silence in his honor. LSA junior Alex Sepulveda, JVP co-activism chair, said in his speech that he believes Bushnell’s
self-immolation was a deeply meaningful act of protest. “What he chose to do on the day that he committed his action, he gave something to the world they could never take back,” Sepulveda said. “He bestowed a breath of fresh air, a breath of consciousness to the world that will linger in the winds of prosperity and courage forever.” In an interview with The Daily, Pierpont said they were inspired to become more involved in pro-Palestine activism at the University after Bushnell’s death.
“I realized that I needed to jump into activism and do whatever I can to honor the memory of my friend, but also to get other students involved that feel similar — that feel like there’s nothing we can do about the situation,” Pierpont said. “I want people to step up and not wait for something so extreme to happen in their life. Don’t wait for the number of dead people to climb. Don’t wait for your friend to kill themselves in protest. Step up and do something now.” Pierpont said he became friends with Bushnell while through the Air Force’s basic training together during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they had kept in touch since. “I went to basic training with Aaron,” Pierpont said. “I got to know him really well and we kept up through texting, calling, things like that through the years. The last time I saw him was Jan. 5. … I had no idea he was going to do this.” During his speech at the vigil, Pierpont said his grieving process has become difficult with the massive media coverage Bushnell’s self-immolation has received. “It is so deeply unsettling to Google the name of my friend and see it in headlines,” Pierpont said. “It is still so difficult for me to hear other people talk about him. … You shouldn’t know my friend’s name. Maybe someday, he could have written a book about organizing, or you could have met him through his involvement in mutual aid. He could have become a labor organizer. … He could have done anything. I just want to have him back.”
City Council to vote on ordinance to close loopholes in Right to Renew, Early Leasing ordinances ‘A victory for tenets’
ABIGAIL VANDERMOLEN Daily News Editor
City Councilmember Travis Radina, D-Ward 3, told The Michigan Daily that the most common issue he hears about from his constituents is their trouble navigating the housing market in Ann Arbor as renters. Specifically, many renters say they are being pressured by their landlords to renew their lease early. “Outside of some of the broader activist-led movements in town, this is one where folks are just consistently reaching out as individuals and contacting us about some of the problems that they’re experiencing,” Radina said. The proposed Ordinance to Amend Chapter 105 of the city’s Housing Code aims to help tenants in the city by closing perceived loopholes in two existing housing ordinances: the Early Leasing Ordinance and the Right to Renew Ordinance, both of which were created to strengthen tenants’ rights. The new ordinance was approved unanimously by the City Council at their Feb. 20 meeting and will take effect if it is approved for a second time at
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their upcoming Monday meeting. This ordinance was a product of collaboration between the city’s Renters Commission, its nonvoting City Council liaisons Radina and Councilmember Cynthia Harrison, D-Ward 1, and city attorneys and landlord representatives, according to Radina. The Ordinance to Amend Chapter 105 would alter the language of the existing Early Leasing Ordinance and Right to Renew Ordinance so that landlords could not make a renewal offer to tenants until 180 days into their current lease. If the new ordinance is passed, tenants would have 30 days to decide whether they want to renew after an offer is made. After 30 days, the landlord could either make a second renewal offer to the tenants or find new tenants to rent the property. Additionally, all deadlines and timing constraints regarding when landlords can show properties or sign leases with new tenants would be counted from the start of the current lease, rather than the end. In 2021, the city updated its existing ELO to ensure landlords could not show properties to prospective tenants or sign leases with new tenants more than 150 days before the current lease ends.
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The ELO also required landlords to make a renewal offer to a property’s current tenants before the 150day mark. The Right to Renew Ordinance, which was passed in October 2022, stipulates that landlords must make a renewal offer to tenants 180 days before the end of their current lease and says that unless landlords have “just cause” for not renewing a lease with a tenant, they must either allow tenants to renew their lease or provide relocation assistance. Renters and tenant advocates have said that once the two ordinances went into effect, landlords began to find loopholes in the law. Student tenants reported landlords using waitlist agreements to find future tenants more than 150 days before the end of a property’s lease. A tenant leasing from Campus Management told The Daily in April 2022 that they were pressured to commit to renewing their lease more than 150 days before its end. According to the individual, their landlord said they could not guarantee the tenant would be able to renew their lease in March if they did not reserve a spot earlier. The Ann Arbor Tenants Union said that after the passage of the Right to Renew Ordinance, some landlords have incentivized their
tenants to renew early by telling them the rent price in their initial renewal offer would increase if the tenants did not agree to renew by a specific date. MLive reported that in October, CMB Property Management sent an email to each of their tenants to offer a rental rate for the upcoming year, which the company said would increase if they did not renew their lease by the end of the month. In an email to The Daily, Rackham student Claire Arneson, chair of the Graduate Employees’ Organization’s Housing Caucus, wrote that some landlords make multiple renewal offers to pressure tenants into renewing earlier without technically violating the Right to Renew ordinance. “Before the (proposed) amendment, the ordinance specified that the landlord is required to make a good faith renewal offer, but did not specify a time frame in which the renewal offer had to be made, except that an offer must be made before and be valid until 150 days before the lease end,” Arneson wrote. “This left a loophole: the landlord could extend multiple offers, starting as early in the lease as desired with an expiration date (earlier) than the 150-day mark, as long as another offer was extended
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such that it would be valid at 150 days before the lease end.” In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Rackham student Nathan Kim, a member of the Ann Arbor Tenants Union’s Reboot Task Force, said they advocated for the prospective amendment ordinance because the issue of landlords pressuring tenants to renew early repeatedly came up during conversations the union had with tenants around Ann Arbor. “We have been working with tenants across the city because of the issue of a violation of the Early Leasing Ordinance — whether explicit violations of the literal letter of the law or simply exploiting some of these loopholes — they have been happening, despite the strong laws that were passed in 2022,” Kim said. An April 2023 report by the Renters Commission explored loopholes in the 2021 iteration of the ELO, specifically looking at the issue of waitlist agreements, sometimes called option agreements or holding agreements. Under these agreements, prospective tenants pay a fee, which the report found could range from $150 to nearly $10,000, to reserve a spot in an apartment if the current tenants do not renew. Though the new amendment
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ordinance does not directly address the issue of waitlist fees, Radina said the Commission plans to introduce legislation to address these issues in March. “(The proposed ordinance) is really cleaning up the existing law,” Radina said. “I am in the process right now of working with Councilmember Harrison and the renters commission on addressing the exorbitant waitlist fees and other rental junk fees that we’ve been seeing across the city. And so, that is something that we hope to bring in March for first reading and ultimately begin moving that forward as well because that is really where we’ve seen a lot of really predatory behavior.” Under the current ELO and Right to Renew Ordinance, a property with a lease ending in August cannot legally be renewed or leased to a new tenant until March. This would remain the case under the Ordinance to Amend Chapter 105, as the ordinance requires that landlords allow tenants to consider a renewal offer for 30 days. This means landlords cannot show properties to new tenants or lease properties to new tenants until 210 days into the current lease.
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