This is the summary. The full white paper (V1.1)— with sources, bill numbers, and the evidence behind every claim — is available here:
📄 Download the full white paper: Look About You (PDF, 23 pages, v1.1)
Updated from v1.0 — see the note at the end.
Earlier this year, pollsters asked six hundred Michigan voters a simple question: out of fifty states, where does Michigan rank?
The answers came back between 25th and 29th. Average. And nearly identical across party lines.
In July, U.S. News ranked Michigan 46th of 50 — ahead of only New Mexico, Mississippi, Alaska and Louisiana. The categories were weighted by a national survey asking residents what matters most in their own lives. Michigan wasn’t graded on a stranger’s priorities. It was graded on what people say they care about.
We ranked 33rd in 2017.
The record
Income. 39th per person, last in the Midwest. Michigan was 8th in the nation in 1953 and still 16th in 1999. In 2022 the average Michigander earned 87.1 cents for every dollar the average American earned — the lowest ratio ever recorded.
Education. 45th. One in four fourth graders reads proficiently, the same share as in 1998. September’s state test showed 38.2 percent of third graders proficient — a new low in that exam’s twelve-year history. And a law penalizing districts that use unapproved reading curricula cannot be enforced, because the Education Department has no authority to ask what curriculum districts use.
Energy. Michigan households paid 22.99 cents per kilowatt-hour in June, the highest residential rate in the Midwest and 25 percent above the national average. The state ranks about 45th in reliability. High price, poor performance, at the same time.
Jobs. 44th in unemployment at 5.0 percent, when Indiana and Wisconsin stood at 3.3.
Roads. 47th in pavement condition, on above-median funding. The state stopped collecting engineering-grade road data in 2019 to save money.
Before anyone reaches for the weather
Minnesota ranked third this year. South Dakota, North Dakota and Nebraska joined it in the top five.
Whatever is happening to Michigan is not happening to states that share our winters.
The fact that makes it fixable
Michiganders aged 18 to 29 were offered a choice: a job here, or a similar job at similar pay somewhere else.
Eighty-nine percent chose Michigan over California. Eighty-seven percent over Chicago. Eighty percent over Texas. Those margins held across every party.
Only 64 percent expect to still be here in ten years. The ones with bachelor’s degrees are the least likely to stay.
This is not a state people are fleeing. It is a state people are leaving reluctantly, for work.
Asked what would decide where they take a job, they put housing cost first, low crime second, affordable training third. Public transit and walkable communities finished near the bottom, with the weather.
They are not asking for amenities. They are asking for a place to live and a job that pays for it.
Twelve changes. None of them original.
This is the paper’s central claim: every item below is already law somewhere else, passed by legislatures of both parties, with results anyone can look up. Michigan is not being asked to invent anything.
Beat the reading deadline. July’s science-of-reading law was right. It doesn’t take effect until 2032. A child starting kindergarten this fall reaches fifth grade before her teacher must know how to teach her. Mississippi did it in two to three years and now outreads us.
Report school results honestly. The state test and the national test differ by thirteen points on the same children. And a law penalizing districts that use unapproved reading curricula cannot be enforced — the Education Department has no authority to ask what curriculum districts use.
Stop taxing improvement. Rehab an empty storefront and your taxes rise. Leave it rotting and they don’t. That rule is in a 1994 implementing statute, not the constitution. The Legislature wrote it. The Legislature can unwrite it.
Let people build. Michigan is short somewhere between 97,000 and 190,000 homes — but a unit count is the wrong measure. In 2025 this state passed the point of having more residents over 65 than children under 18, and its median home was built in 1973 for a family with children in it. The bipartisan Housing Readiness Package has sat in committee since spring. Local officials say it preempts them, and their strongest objection — that the pipes can’t carry it — deserves an answer.
Honor other states’ licenses. We license about 180 occupations. A family moves here, the job is real, and the spouse can’t work for six months. More than twenty states have fixed this.
Let clinicians practice to their training. Michigan’s nurse practitioner rules are the most restrictive in the Midwest. Some counties have fewer than ten primary care physicians per hundred thousand people. More than forty states have fixed this.
Make quitting legal again. Detroit became the auto capital because men kept leaving to start rivals. In 1985 Michigan made non-compete agreements enforceable, and inventor mobility fell about a fifth.
Stop writing off the adults. Michigan already spent thirteen years educating the people now working below capacity, and they never left. Of Michiganders who completed apprenticeships in 2022, 94 percent were working here a year later, earning a median $80,700.
Pay the utility for reliability, not for building. Roughly half the cost of rebuilding Michigan’s grid is guaranteed monopoly return — under either technology path. The state’s own utility regulator now says realigning that incentive may be the single biggest affordability opportunity available.
Stop buying strangers. A Bay County plant took a state grant, $6 million in incentives and a federal loan facility up to $544 million. It opened to a governor’s ribbon-cutting and a presidential visit. In July, all 140 jobs ended.
Keep Michigan companies Michigan-owned. The firms that quietly lead world markets from small Michigan towns were mostly founded between 1945 and 1985. Their owners are retiring now. Colorado and Iowa made it easier to sell a company to its employees. Michigan has done nothing.
Publish the scorecard. Michigan has no standing, state-produced accounting of where it ranks. That’s why every such number arrives from a magazine or a think tank and can be dismissed as somebody’s methodology. A ranking the state publishes about itself cannot be.
What’s deliberately not here
Two items in Michigan’s policy debate are genuinely contested between the parties, and the paper leaves them out rather than smuggling them in: the state’s labor law, and the timetable of the emissions mandate.
Reading is not conservative. Housing is not liberal. A power bill is not a political party.
Asked whether Michigan’s two parties should compromise to solve the state’s problems, residents said yes by 91 percent to 4.
What to ask
To any candidate, of either party, at any level. Accept no answer without a number and a date.
Which of the twelve will you deliver, and when?
One more number
In 2025, for the first time since record-keeping began, more Americans moved into Michigan than out.
The margin was under two thousand people. A rounding error, and a signal.
None of the twelve changes above requires a tax increase, a constitutional amendment, or a rescue from Washington. Every one is already law somewhere else.
Michigan isn’t being asked to invent a future. It’s being asked to get out of the way of one.
📄 Download the full white paper (PDF, 23 pages, v1.1 — September 2026)
Twelve items, each with the Michigan problem, the evidence, which states already did it, and the specific ask. Includes the opposition’s case where it is strong, a note on what the paper deliberately leaves out, sources, method, and a record of corrections made during research.
What changed in version 1.1
If you downloaded version 1.0, here is what is new — and what is not.
Item 4, on housing, is substantially expanded. Everything else in the paper is unchanged. No figures elsewhere were revised and no claims were withdrawn.
The addition is a demographic argument the first version missed entirely. In 2025 Michigan passed a threshold the country will not reach until roughly 2029: we now have more residents over 65 than children under 18. Seventeen states have crossed. Texas and Utah may not until after 2050.
That changes what a housing shortage even means. Harvard’s Joint Center projects that households headed by someone 65 or older will account for roughly 92 percent of all net household growth nationally between 2025 and 2035. Meanwhile fewer than 4 percent of American homes have single-floor living, a no-step entrance, and doorways wide enough to pass through.
So Michigan holds a large stock of three-bedroom houses built for families with children — median year built, 1973 — in a state producing fewer of those families every year.
Which produces a paradox that explains this state better than any shortage figure. A community can have a surplus of large family houses and a severe shortage of housing that fits its actual residents, at the same time.
A widow can sell her four-bedroom house, but the only alternatives require leaving the town where her church and her doctor are. So she stays. And the young family that would have bought it cannot find an entry-level home, because the people in those homes have nowhere to go.
The ladder stops working at both ends.
The practical consequence is that one set of buildings serves both generations. A cottage is a downsizing option for a retired couple and a first home for a young one. An accessory dwelling houses an aging parent or an adult child. A duplex gives an older owner rental income and a younger household a way into a good neighborhood.
Which is worth saying to anyone opposing these reforms on neighborhood-character grounds. The duplex is not for strangers. It is for the widow on your street who cannot manage the stairs and does not want to leave.
Version 1.1 also adds two things to Item 4’s ask: legalizing missing-middle housing in existing neighborhoods, and pairing zoning reform with a path to fund water and sewer capacity — because that last objection, raised by local officials at a committee hearing in May, is the one criticism of the pending legislation that cannot be waved away.
This framing draws on Mike Hathorne’s work on what he calls the Great Housing Reversal.
David Maness writes The Centaur Desk. He is a geophysicist and was a small business owner in Michigan for 38 years. He served on the Mt. Pleasant Public Schools Board of Education, as chairman of Isabella Bank Corporation, on the Michigan Oil and Gas Association board, and on Michigan’s first Environmental Rules Review Committee. He writes only for himself.
Corrections welcome. This paper is versioned, and errors brought to my attention will be fixed in the next release, with the change recorded in the version history. If you find something wrong, please say so.