Hollow Hype

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Welcome to Episode 9 of Hollow Hype. In Episode 8, Heidi proposed a new plan for her development at Southtown. It changed from an all-electric project to one that would rely on gas connections and fuel cells. In 2024, the Planning Commission and City sustainability director Dr. Missy Stults enthusiastically supported Heidi’s innovative plan.

Weeks after Heidi promised the innovative plan of mass timber, fuel cells, and a microgrid at Southtown, she offered to do the same at a City property she wanted to buy.

The concept of Southtown was at least part of the reason why City Council offered Heidi and Marge an exclusive opportunity to buy the City property at 415 W Washington. Council Liaison to the Planning Commission, Lisa Disch, explained all that Heidi and Marge had promised in their offer letter:

[2024 recorded meeting]

COUNCIL MEMBER LISA DISCH:
The sustainability features of this project and the innovations of this project, the mass timber that will probably be used here as it is being used in Southtown…
This is also uh what is projected in the letter because - again we are not at the end of the process we are at the beginning of one - what is projected in the letter would be a pathbreaking project a model for others.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
City director of Community Services, Derek Delacourt, also referenced Southtown

DEREK DELACOURT:
Truthfully, if I were to take this idea of this micro grid and then put it in an RFP it felt a little tawdry in and of itself in that it is their idea that they've come to us with on another project and one I thought was worth pursuing

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Southtown only existed on paper, but people at City Hall spoke about it as if it had already been built. As presented by Heidi, the concept was so dazzling, that it felt “tawdry” to even imagine someone else doing it. Heidi’s promises and commitments were swallowed without question. Heidi didn’t need us, we needed Heidi.

[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.

For about five years, Heidi got everything she wanted from City government in Ann Arbor. No amount of skepticism from residents had any impact. Elected leaders were not bothered by an explosion of short term rentals, the loss of affordable housing, or the terrible optics of making exclusive deals with a campaign donor. None of it mattered. The reason none of it mattered was because few people even realized what was going on.

[MUSIC]

NANCY LEFF:
My husband Todd and I moved to Ann Arbor in 1991. So we've been here for 35 years. We love it. We started out at the corner of Golden and Granger in Lower Burns Park and we still live there today just a couple of blocks away. I started the Lower Burns Park Neighborhood Association which we call LoBuPa. We fell like this is our home, neither one of us have ever lived anywhere this long.
Yeah we love it here and Ann Arbor is our forever home.

ELIZABETH NELSON
That’s my friend Nancy. Her neighborhood - LoBuPa - is where Heidi focused her short term rental business.

NANCY LEFF:
She had already you know been making investments in LoBuPa and there was just a lot of discussion in the neighborhood about what her goals were and our neighborhood felt very vulnerable to short term rentals, houses had been converted and there had been some issues with some of them. And so we felt really vulnerable to that.

I had met with Heidi and Marge personally on a couple of occasions. Once at their house on Brooklyn when they lived there. I was pretty sure that I knew why they were interested in me. I don't think it was, it was not a mystery. I mean I started the Lower Burns Park neighborhood group so of course they thought I had influence and clout… which I don't, because that's not what it's about. But I mean it was just clear that they were interested in cultivating anyone who might provide a favorable impression of them and say oh these people are great and so on and so forth but I. That's not the way I looked at the relationship. I just wanted to know what they were doing.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Nancy moderates an email list in the neighborhood.

NANCY LEFF:
When we started the LoBuPa email list we invited any resident. We didn't care if you rented if you owned or if you were a land owner and also any businesses in our area. It was a private email list. You had to ask to join and you had to show that you had one of those qualifications.

Yeah she qualified. She lived in LoBuPa in at least two locations that I know of. And then of course she owned property.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
On that list, Heidi emphasized her pure motives, her desire to be a good neighbor and simply make the community better. Once, a neighbor used the LoBuPa email list to point out that Heidi’s business - converting long-term homes to short term rentals - was exploiting the neighborhood for profit. Heidi did not accept that accusation quietly.

[Sound effect, computer typing]

NANCY LEFF:
She did engage and she engages aggressively, just like she does with any engagement I think that puts her in a negative light. And it was about the fact that you know she and her partner Marge were buying up so much property in LoBuPa. So neighbors were getting concerned about about that and and some neighbors were were very very upset about it

Well Heidi responded like I said vigorously and she said I don't appreciate people accusing me of things unfounded, you know it was pretty bad and like I said I didn't want to get into any of the details so I just shut the conversation down but it was extremely ugly.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi had a few loud cheerleaders in the neighborhood who eagerly attacked any of her critics. Anyone who questioned Heidi’s activities was accused of “spreading hate.”

[MUSIC]

At the end of 2022, at least two neighbors were aware of Heidi’s criminal record. They had found it online. The information didn’t spread beyond a few people. No one dared put it on the LoBuPa email list. Facts about Heidi’s background would almost certainly have prompted more accusations about “spreading hate.”

In 2024, more people found Heidi’s criminal record. That’s when I learned about it for the first time. A friend had searched public databases online and found several court proceedings under names Heidi had previously used. It was stunning. Heidi had gone to prison in California under the name Heidi Ditchendorf. She had been convicted again under the name Heidi Laughery, for crimes committed in Ohio and West Virginia. By the time she came to Ann Arbor, she was using a different name, Heidi Mitchell… then Heidi Poscher.

Three years after two FBI agents stood on my front porch, I finally understood why.

For months, the record of Heidi’s felony convictions circulated privately.

KURT BERGGREN:
The information was given to me. It was actually given to me by Bruce Laidlaw. And Bruce told me not to share it, but I called him up and I said, "I would like to share it with a few people." And he said, "Okay."

ELIZABETH NELSON:
No one dared post the information on social media or anywhere else online. It reflected very poorly on the Mayor and elected City Council, who had trusted Heidi and publicly praised her as a wonderful community partner. The mayor’s cheerleaders included many enthusiastic internet trolls. Their pattern of attack was well known. Anyone who publicized anything negative about Heidi would immediately be accused of spinning conspiracy theories or worse. Facts wouldn’t matter, documentation wouldn’t matter. They would have a field day shooting the messenger.

We were initially hopeful about local news outlets picking up the story. Heidi had committed crimes when elected leaders in Ohio and West Virginia trusted her. In Ann Arbor, Heidi had elected leaders and city staff eating out of her hand. It was alarming. Heidi was not trustworthy. The public deserved to know.

In 2024, I talked to Ryan Stanton of the Ann Arbor News.. I knew him well, He wrote stories about me when I was on city council. He had already heard about Heidi’s criminal record, people had shared it with him. He knew it was true. He knew it wasn’t just a rumor. He wasn’t interested in publishing anything about it. He told me it wasn’t newsworthy.

PETER ECKSTEIN:
The fact that she had served a prison term and then had been convicted again of a felony and evaded prison in a different location. All those things seriously undercut the credibility of what she was doing. I don't think it's even legal for a bank to make a loan to somebody who has that kind of record. I don't think it's at all sensible for a city government to just take at face value everything she says, given that kind of record.

They should have known that, and an active press is one way they should have known that.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
That’s my friend Peter. He’s lived most of his life in Ann Arbor.

PETER ECKSTEIN:
I was born in Chicago and I went to high school in the suburbs. And then in 1954, enrolled in Michigan.

I left Ann Arbor in ‘58 and went to graduate school at Harvard, worked overseas, came back to graduate school at Harvard. 1967, I came back to Ann Arbor.

I got involved in anti-war politics and eventually ran a few times for the state legislature. I always came in second, but I was never elected. I got the nomination for state senator at one point when the district was not all Washtenaw County. It included a lot of the Livingston County, which was quite Republican. So I got the nomination and then in the election came in second, which didn't count for anything. I'm the last Democrat to fail to be elected to the state senate.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Peter has lived in Ann Arbor long enough to observe changes in our city politics, especially recently.

[MUSIC]

PETER ECKSTEIN:
It's very clear that a political machine heavily financed by development interests and ideological allies was able to win many elections and in the end scare out challengers. So someone might be considering running for city council, and, "Well, how much would a campaign cost?"

We reached the point where any candidate favored by the machine could start the campaign with a guarantee of $30,000 in campaign contributions. And it reached the point where they didn't have to because they had already scared out other people who might be thinking of running. So the machine perpetuates itself.

You give enough money to the machine candidates, and the machine will perform for you. That's just not the way city government should be run, or any government for that matter, but certainly in a city like Ann Arbor, which should know better.

Heidi was one of those donors, generous donors to the machine, who got favored treatment and an amazing shortage of skepticism when it came to her projects.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Fifty years ago, Peter campaigned for the Michigan State Senate on a platform that included public financing of elections. This issue has concerned him for decades, well before big money flooded city campaigns in Ann Arbor.

PETER ECKSTEIN:
Now we have a PAC which is specifically designed to evade the limits on contributions to campaigns. So I can only give a thousand plus dollars to a city council candidate, but I can give unlimited amounts, to a PAC which then can then give major amounts to a campaign. So it's to throw away all the well-meaning limits on campaign contributions that are in the law and develop a way around them.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor formed his own PAC in 2023. Right away, he got three donations of $5,000. One of them came from Heidi.

[Sound effect, outdoor market]

In the summer of 2024, Peter and I worked on a grassroots campaign for public financing of elections in Ann Arbor. We circulated petitions for a small donor matching fund, modelled after a program that currently exists in Evanston, Illinois. For most of that summer, I carried a clipboard at the farmers market, at evening festivals, and outside the library, collecting signatures to get campaign finance reform on the ballot in Ann Arbor.

Mayor Taylor, all of city council and other elected leaders in the County opposed campaign finance reform, vehemently.

PETER ECKSTEIN:
Oh, it was craven. On the one hand, you had such a progressive figure as Bernie Sanders, who would give a speech, where he'd give a long list of objectives that he saw. And he says, "But first of all, the most important thing is we have to have public funding of elections, of campaigns." And the city council, who was very content with the machine, was very content with having private funding of campaigns adamantly opposed it,

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi donated $1,000 in opposition to campaign finance reform. Another local developer gave $5,000. Dark money PACs flooded the City with false flag mailers– the mailers featured large photos of Donald Trump, endorsing the small donor matching fund as a helpful scheme to elect republicans in Ann Arbor. The anti-reform campaign was wildly disingenuous and at times, absurd.

Meanwhile, no news outlet would publish the story of how Heidi, a convicted felon, was one of the biggest campaign donors to Ann Arbor city government.

In November 2024, the local political machine soundly defeated campaign finance reform in Ann Arbor. The local machine also delayed the one and only news story about Heidi’s criminal background.

[MUSIC]

Shortly after the November 2024 election, I got an email from a student at the University of Michigan. She was a student journalist at the Michigan Daily. The Daily had been alerted to Heidi’s history and they were looking into it.

Documents about Heidi’s record had been shared with journalists at just about every local news outlet. The students at the Michigan Daily were the only ones brave enough to write about it.

The Michigan Daily interviewed local residents and elected leaders about Heidi, campaign finance, and city government generally. I told them about my experience with Heidi. I shared emails, screenshots of text messages, and everything else I had to document my interactions with her. I was ready to talk about it.

When all the interviews and fact-checking were done, those of us who knew about it were eager to see the article. The students told us that the story would be published soon, it just needed to be vetted by their legal advisor. Somehow this last, final step of review took a very long time. Weeks went by… then a month.

Peter has some history with the Michigan Daily. As a student, he wrote for the paper and also served as its editor. He has a lot of stories about writing for the Daily in the 1950s.

PETER ECKSTEIN:
Joel Berger, who was an upperclassman and had a position on the Daily. He persuaded me I should join and then when I joined, I became his assistant on the city beat. So there were two of us whose sole responsibility was to cover city government and city affairs. And I used to go down to the police station every early evening and read the police blotter and see what was going on in the city.

In my day, they had a board in control of student publications, and it presumably had all kinds of powers. Those powers were seldom exercised. The chair of the board was a saintly law professor named John Reed who, I guess you'd say, was our consultant on libel issues.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
That was the Michigan Daily in the 1950s. In 2024, the Michigan Daily’s legal consultant was not a law professor. It was former Ann Arbor City Council Member, Joan Lowenstein.

PETER ECKSTEIN:
When she was first entering politics 30, 40 years ago, her specialty as I knew it then was First Amendment law, especially issues of libel. So in that sense, she would not be an inappropriate choice to help a student newspaper deal with issues of potential libel.

But Joan is the treasurer to the machine.
She's the treasurer to Taylor's PAC, she's the treasurer to Taylor's campaign, and if any of his satellites can't come up with the treasurer of their own, she's typically treasurer to their campaigns too. So she is treasurer to the machine.

[MUSIC]

ELIZABETH NELSON
Campaign treasurers are not just bookkeepers. They are trusted allies who track donations and submit every finance report for a campaign. In local elections, the treasurer is the most visible name attached to a campaign, other than the candidate.

When Joan Lowenstein was asked to review the article about Heidi, she was then the treasurer on record for five members of Ann Arbor City government: Mayor Taylor, then Council Member Linh Song, Council Member Jen Eyer, Council Member Dharma Akmon, and Council Member Jenn Cornell.

Joan Lowenstein was quite possibly the most inappropriate person to review any article about City government in Ann Arbor.

That’s what I said to the student journalist at the Michigan Daily. I couldn’t believe that Joan had ever served in this role for a newspaper that theoretically covered city government.

I was assured that Joan had properly recused herself from reviewing the article about Heidi. Of course she would recuse herself, but that was a pretty low bar. It also wasn’t a perfect solution. When Joan stepped away, the students had a new problem. They had no legal consultant for the article about Heidi and they had to find one.

[MUSIC]

After weeks of delay, the article about Heidi was finally published in March 2025.

PETER ECKSTEIN:
It was the Michigan Daily that was the only place that the story was halfway told.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
The Daily asked City Council members if they had ever been approached by Heidi or any other developer, asking for favorable policy.. All council members denied that this had ever happened. It’s hard to know how they interacted with other developers, but Heidi didn’t have to try very hard to “approach” them. Elected leaders in Ann Arbor intentionally put themselves in Heidi’s orbit, meeting and socializing at Venue. When eight City Council Members celebrated Jen Eyer’s birthday at Venue, was Heidi approaching them or were they approaching Heidi?

Mayor Taylor told the Michigan Daily that he was made aware of Heidi’s criminal record in the summer of 2024. He explained that his PAC had re-directed the $5,000 it had received from Heidi. The money was donated to a local LGBTQ organization. Three days after the Mayor redirected the $5,000, City Council unanimously approved the rezoning at Southtown for gas lines and fuel cells.

The Michigan Daily is still the only local news outlet that ever reported anything about Heidi’s criminal background and her connection to City leaders.

In May 2024, then City Council Member Linh Song participated in a panel discussion at Mackinac Island, an exclusive resort where Michigan politicians and lobbyists gather for a conference every spring.

Linh Song bragged about the takeover of Ann Arbor City government in the elections of 2020 and 2022. She repeated the legend of anti-housing villains who had dared to oppose a development. For her purposes, It made sense to remove all context, including the small detail about its location on top of monitoring wells for pollution that is now a Superfund site.

[2024 recorded presentation]

COUNCIL MEMBER LINH SONG:
Uh we had a NIMBY City Council, majority council that voted against low-income senior housing. Half of it was market rate and at below market rate.

What kind of city are we where we would vote against low income senior housing?

My colleagues, Councilmember Travis Redina and Jen Eyer, they pulled their weight. They had a vision for the city before we came aboard and we helped push it along.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Her reference to Southtown was even more simplistic.

LINH SONG:
Density infill, density infill. Uh I think one of the responses I had to one of the projects was uh you had me at density. Bring us a project that can triple the units in an existing footprint. Fantastic.

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Song bragged about removing her own accountability and delegating decisions to unelected, Mayoral appointees.

LINH SONG:
Yeah in Ann Arbor, city council actually… we voted to take ourselves out of the site plan approval process.

It's uh permitting… shortening the length for permitting right, uh taking the political aspect out of uh site plan approval process, trusting our planning commissioners

ELIZABETH NELSON
She returned again and again to the idea that Ann Arbor residents simply didn’t understand what was right and good. She shared one of her favorite theories: that approving projects from developers like Heidi was somehow supportive of refugees.
.
LINH SONG:
Oh, NIMBYs. Yes…. I get a lot of calls from NIMBYs.

And what I like to do is I bring food everywhere I go. Um and it's really hard to yell at your city council member when she brings a tray of baklava.

As city staff will introduce me, I'll just say, enjoy the baklava.
I have a message from Muhammad Al-Shalabi, who makes the best baklava in Washtenaw County and that is he would love to be able to live in this city with his family, along with other refugees from the Ukraine, from Afghanistan.

But even even if um you speak to people's sympathies and if we try to get them to empathize, we also need to educate them on the real economics of increasing supply, right?

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi found favor with a unanimous City Council that framed every development decision in terms of righteousness. Developers like Heidi were righteous, providing what was needed. Scrutiny and oversight was an obstacle. Resident input was misguided and uninformed. In this environment, elected leaders were unlikely to hear or react to any skepticism about Heidi or any other developer. In their view, only an ignorant, unsympathetic person would question anything about a development, much less oppose it.

At City Hall, the department of Sustainability was another perfect target for Heidi. Ann Arbor has famously pledged to reduce carbon emissions to zero, but city leaders oppose the boldest strategy to achieve it, a public utility. Dr Missy Stults, director of the city’s department of sustainability, has a nervous habit of talking faster and faster whenever anyone asks her about progress or benchmarking. Local environmentalists joke about how many words she can spit out so quickly, without actually answering a question.

[MUSIC]

At the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Heidi and Missy supported each other..

[2024 recorded presentation]

DR. MISSY STULTS:
Not everything that matters can be measured and so part of what we're trying to do is tell more stories… the impact it has on the low-income household that suddenly isn't suffering from energy poverty because we've done Energy Efficiency work and we've helped them access renewables.

HEIDI:
That's going to happen more and more

DR. MISSY STULTS
What?

HEIDI:
That's going to happen more and more

DR. MISSY STULTS
It has to, right? I mean we are human, we are storytellers and we need to amplify the impact this has so part of my job - I too have a doctorate - is thinking about the data and pushing us to different kinds of data to be able to build the movement because metrics work for some of us but truth is most of us are already there that metrics are going to work for, we need to be better storytellers

HEIDI
Well, in crafting my answer I'm going to rely on my doctorate in art history… no, I'm just kidding. I do have a doctorate in art history but it's got nothing to do with this

ELIZABETH NELSON:
Heidi does not have a doctorate in art history. She also tells people that her undergraduate degree is in mathematics and economics. That’s not true either– her degree is in communications. Like her friend Missy, Heidi believes in the value of telling stories.

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

Coming up in episode 10: I travel to Ohio and West Virginia, looking for clues about what Heidi did before she showed up in Ann Arbor.

If you have something to share about Heidi’s activities in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, or California. Please reach out to hollowhypepodcast@gmail.com