ELIZABETH NELSON:
Welcome to Episode 2 of Hollow Hype. In Episode 1, I met Heidi for the first time. I was a member of Ann Arbor City Council and she wanted my vote in support of her development..

Heidi carefully targeted people whose trust and respect would be useful. In 2019, I was in her crosshairs.

When I heard Heidi’s explanation of the Henry Street project, where young urban professionals would choose to live in six bedroom apartments, I was suspicious. I didn’t think she was fooling me because I didn’t believe her. I thought she was lying about who would live there, surely it would be students. That would be fine.

[2019 meeting recording]
“Further discussion? All in Favor? All opposed? It’s approved”

After City Council approved the Henry project and after Heidi announced the plan for short term rentals, she continued to text and email me periodically. Heidi sent me a photo of a big truck, along with a joke about how students were moving in on Henry Street. It wasn’t a joke to me.

[MUSIC]

My name is Elizabeth Nelson. From 2018 to 2022, I served on Ann Arbor City Council. That experience taught me a lot. Mostly, I learned: people will say just about anything if they think you’ll believe it. This is HOLLOW HYPE.

Housing is a problem in Ann Arbor. People need a place to live. Students, specifically, need a place to live.

In 2025, the University of Michigan enrolled over 53,000 students. The University only has housing for about 10,000 students. The other 40,000 struggle to find rentals in our local housing market. Wealthier students can afford apartments in luxury towers downtown with swimming pools on the roof. For everyone else, it’s much cheaper to find a neighborhood house you can share with four or five friends.

Short term rentals, listed on platforms like Airbnb and VRBO, pull these houses off the market for students

WILL HATHAWAY:
it was putting pressure on neighborhoods in particular near the football stadium and Chrysler Arena. That's sort of near the athletic campus where people would, you know, were tempted, I guess, property owners were tempted by the payoff of short term rentals. I mean, if you can make astronomical amounts of money by leasing your property to somebody for six weekends a year, more than you could make renting to somebody at the market rate rent for using it as a house.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Lower Burns Park is a neighborhood just east of the football stadium, the Chrysler arena, and other campus facilities. Residents sometimes call the area LoBuPa, for short. This neighborhood is adjacent to some of the most expensive homes in Ann Arbor.

[MUSIC]

People pay a premium to live on the treelined streets of Burns Park, immediately south of the University campus. A hundred and fifty years ago, this area was the county fairgrounds, with horse stables and a race track. When the horses moved out, it developed into one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in town. Many of the historic homes in Burns Park are quite large, and very expensive.

LoBuPa is just across the street from Burns Park on the west side of Packard. The homes in LoBuPa are mostly smaller and much more affordable.

Heidi focused her investments in this neighborhood.

ANNE BERGGREN:
We have a Loba Pa email list and she was on it. She would, from time to time, pop up defending
her various properties or giving a little advertisement.

KURT BERGGREN:
She used to live right down the street here on Brooklyn

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Kurt and Anne have lived in LoBuPa since 1976.

ANNE BERGGREN:
We raised two children here and we chose this neighborhood specifically.

KURT BERGGREN:
We heard the schools were good here,

ANNE BERGGREN:
I saw a driveway with four children setting up a card table and playing cards. And I thought that's what I want my children to do. They were four and one at the time when we moved here.

KURT BERGGREN:
I came here, we came because I accepted a position as the director of the legal aid program. And that's how I initially got here. I'd been a long time legal aid person. That's legal services for poor people, you understand. And that's how I got here.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
They live on Golden Avenue, next door to a small apartment building. The only distance between their house and the building is the narrow driveway that runs between them.

KURT BERGGREN:
We had a lot of friends.

ANNE BERGGREN:
There was a woman with a son the same age as our son. They were friends.
They did things like digging up the sidewalk together.
Then we had Dan Giles, our friend who played bongo drums in the middle of the night. We went and asked him to please refrain. He became a client of Kurt's actually.
I had a friend that I walked with. Her baby was in a stroller. My dog was on a leash. We would go for long walks.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Kurt and Anne knew both the apartment tenants and their landlord.

ANNE BERGGREN:
The owner was this great person who would notice if something was, if squirrels were getting into our attic. I would notice if his roof tiles blew off. We worked together.

ELIZABETH NELSON
Heidi added this nine unit apartment building to her investment portfolio.

ANNE BERGGREN:
When she first bought the building, she made all these improvements. She painted it. She put in the heat pumps. She landscaped the front. We thought, "Oh, this is great." But then all of a sudden, it wasn't an apartment house any longer.
It happened that we noticed that there was nobody living there. So we asked the mailman. He said, "No, no mail gets delivered there." That was true for about a year. Then all of a sudden, I don't know when we first noticed that it was just Airbnb.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi’s plan for Henry Street - a whole building of short term rentals - wasn’t a new idea. She had done it already, on Golden Avenue.

For me, 2019 was both the beginning and the end of any friendliness between me and Heidi.

[2019 meeting recording]
“Would our clerk please call the roll of Council”

ELIZABETH NELSON:
One month after I voted to approve the Henry project, I sponsored a resolution directing the city Administrator to report on how we might regulate short term rentals.

[2019 meeting recording]
“Council Member Nelson. Here. Council Member Smith. Here. Council Member Ramlawi. Here. We have a quorum.”

ELIZABETH NELSON:
The Henry project had alerted me to a problem we needed to solve.
I found support among colleagues

[2019 meeting recording]

COUNCIL MEMBER JEFF HAYNER:
A lot of cities are having this problem. It's taking housing stock off the market, it's raising rents. And I even looked at, we looked at a place over on Ashley that's on the rental, on Airbnb, and the person's making more. It was an apartment last year and they're making eight grand more a year Airbnb in it 200 days a year

COUNCIL MEMBER JANE LUMM:
And what it's also doing, it's taking permanent housing stock off the inventory and affecting– you can take that argument that it's affecting the availability of housing that might be affordable to folks,

COUNCIL MEMBER ALI RAMLAWI:
That people are making more money with these short-term rentals than they would with
Long-term rentals and the people that are benefiting are the owners are the investors
They are pocketing the difference And it's coming at the cost of the housing stock in the community You have safety issues you have nuisance issues on top of the affordability issues.
And the city is not capturing the taxes that they would otherwise if these were regulated as hotels

[Background sound of meeting, people talking]

My resolution kicked off multiple public meetings and serious community discussion about the impact of short term rentals in Ann Arbor. Residents spoke out about negative experiences in their neighborhoods. Investors argued that they filled a gap in the market, that Ann Arbor needed short term rentals. People shared stories about homes they had previously rented, how their leases weren’t renewed when a landlord realized that the property would make more money as a short term rental.

Between 2013 and 2025, Heidi bought at least 20 properties in Ann Arbor.

ANNE BERGGREN:
And we wondered where all that money came from. We did wonder. I mean, here she is buying up houses right and left and she was apparently a landlord in San Francisco and we
assumed it came from there.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
It’s not clear where Heidi got the money. When she submitted permits and petitions at City hall, she boasted to staff about her lucrative business in San Francisco. But the timeline from Ohio to California to Ann Arbor is very short.

In 2008, Heidi was indicted on federal charges. Her own attorney said that she faced up to twenty years in prison. When twelve counts were reduced to one, she still faced up to ten years in prison. In 2009, local newspapers in both Ohio and West Virginia published articles about the court proceedings against Heidi. Meanwhile, she quietly bought a house in Shaker Heights, just outside of Cleveland. Articles and court documents refer to the troubles of Heidi Laughery. The Shaker Heights house was bought under a new name, Heidi Mitchell.

In April 2010, a Marietta Times headline announced Heidi’s sentence, “18 months in prison for fraud.” This was the minimum.

Heidi’s report to prison date was delayed several times and her sentence was negotiated further. Somehow, she avoided prison entirely, eventually serving just 60 days at a community detention facility in Cleveland. She would also pay over $840,000 in restitution, $500 a month. A five year probation period began in July 2010.

In 2011, the Marietta Times reported that Heidi Laughery had been living in Meadville, Pennsylvania. In 2012, she paid off the mortgage on the Shaker Heights house. In release documents, Heidi Mitchell is listed at an address in Pasadena, California.

Six months later, in 2013, Heidi Mitchell bought her first house in Ann Arbor. Mortgage documents list her address in Shaker Heights. Later that year, Heidi spoke at the Cultural Heritage Commission in South Pasadena, California – she presented herself as a property owner there. Meeting minutes include Heidi’s explanation that she bought the South Pasadena house “last summer.”

[MUSIC]

In 2013, Heidi was still on probation. Her probation included additional terms about how she would manage finances and credit, with full transparency and the approval of her probation officer.

What did her probation officer know? From 2011 to 2013, where was she actually living– Meadville, Pennsylvania? Shaker Heights, Ohio? or Pasadena, California? When did Heidi have time to build a business in San Francisco? Where did the money come from?

Beginning in 2016, Heidi submitted several petitions to the Ann Arbor Zoning Board of Appeals, in order to expand or add bedrooms to properties that she owned in LoBuPa.

She presented herself as a local, but also explained that she and her partner lived in California. They relied on local managers to oversee properties here in Ann Arbor.

[2017 meeting recording]

HEIDI:
Hi, my name's Heidi Mitchell. I'm the property owner along with my wife of 1700 Packard. And I just wanted to stop in tonight. This was a I was in town and it's a great opportunity. to um to uh take a look at this and see how your um how your board works
Uh first of all I want you to know that I'm from Ann Arbor. I went to Slaussen Junior High School. I went to Pioneer. I went to the University of Michigan. We both both my wife and I grew up in southeastern Michigan. We now live in San Francisco.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
In response to one of her petitions, Six local neighbors emailed the zoning board, complaining about Heidi’s property. One showed up to speak

[2017 meeting recording]

PUBLIC COMMENTER:
I um in the last year the apartments at 1700 Packard Street have appeared to have been only partially inhabited. I'm told that the tenants were renting individual rooms with others they had not met before, much as like in a rooming house. Um, I don't know how many tenants were actually there the entire time at any one time or in total.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi responded.

HEIDI:
Neither this property or any of the other properties we have are are rooming houses. Um it's a serious little family business that we run. And um And I'm disappointed that we've missed the mark in terms of being good neighbors in a in a neighborhood that is very, very special to us.
Um when we're in town, we stay in Lower Burns Park in a in a different place that we have.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
In every public meeting, Heidi emphasized family and community

[2018 recorded meeting]

HEIDI:
I would like to start by saying today is my mom's birthday. Oh. So. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, this, these properties I bought, 824, 830 and 812 and, you know, we have a small family portfolio.
We try to abide by the same kind of, outlook or approach. Really, we've only torn one building down because it was in such bad shape, but really just build up nice housing.
.
[2018 recorded meeting]

HEIDI:
we do have a home in San Francisco but I'm here every other week so we're very much present in the community. We started Prentice in 2013 with a single-family purchase on Sylvan and now we're up to 12 or 13 properties and have enjoyed it very much and are contemplating spending more time in Ann Arbor because it's just been a great process for us. Our kids love it and we really feel at home here.

[MUSIC]

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi was intentional in her language, trying to solicit good will for reasons that had nothing to do with her projects. She had grown up here, it was a family business, and her kids felt at home. It was her mothers birthday! None of this was relevant to the details of her plans, whether or not they should be approved.

I’ve spent hours digging through County records of deeds and mortgages, trying to understand the empire that Heidi built in Ann Arbor.

In Michigan, Heidi registered separate limited liability companies, or LLC’s for the Ann Arbor properties she owned. This is common practice among landlords. However, in 2016, she registered an additional LLC in Wyoming, called Prentice Partners of Ann Arbor.

She then registered more LLCs in Michigan, different iterations of Prentice Partners. In 2020, there were six Prentice Partners LLCs, five in Michigan and at least one in Wyoming. Properties transferred back and forth between the Wyoming LLC and the Michigan LLCs. One LLC would submit bills to another. Mortgages list combinations of these LLCs, as Heidi and her partner leveraged assets to borrow money.

In 2023, five of the Michigan LLCs were updated to add a new resident agent: a woman whose husband happened to be chief lending officer for a Michigan bank, the same bank that loaned Heidi money.

In Ohio, people remember Heidi’s approach 25 years ago.

LARRY MINCKS:
She was acting like she was a high flyer. She was, you know. She was acting like she was more than what she really was. I think it was the opinion I got from her. She was a con person. And you know, you hear them talk and they're talking and they don't even understand what they're saying.

JACK MOBERG:
Heidi seemed to talk, and I guess today currently seems to talk, in a language that allows you to think that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And when the conversation's over, you wonder what bread is. She has an almost pied piper way about her of endearing herself to you, endearing the ideas that she's presenting to you, gaining your support, and you're not quite sure what it is you bought into.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
In 2024, the mayor of Ann Arbor spoke glowingly of Heidi

[2024 meeting recording]

MAYOR CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR:
What we have here today is a local developer who has demonstrated commitment to doing good work in the city, doing work that provides affordability, doing work that accomplishes and engages our A20 goals. We are getting exactly what we asked for.
This is a conversation that is beginning. We are seeing whether this successful community-minded community partner can put together a proposal that works. And I am eager to see what's next.

[MUSIC]

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Nine months later, the Michigan Daily exposed Heidi’s criminal record and her influence in Ann Arbor.. Student journalists reported that the FBI had questioned me, other members of City Council, and also the Mayor. The article documented over $8,000 that Heidi had contributed to political campaigns of the Mayor and other City Council members. In response, Heidi was bitter. She said that the Michigan Daily was totally irresponsible for publishing claims based on lies and hearsay.

Heidi’s influence in Ann Arbor was not lies or hearsay– it was visible in city records, public meetings and events that included elected leaders, City staff, and Heidi herself.

Thanks for listening. Visit HollowHype.com to find more information about this episode.

Coming up in episode 3: City staff recommend a short term rental ordinance that would impact Heidi’s business. She begs me for help. When I refuse, she finds new members of City Council willing to meet her needs. This has been HOLLOW HYPE.