ANN ARBOR, MI – Peter Allen of Ann Arbor has carried many titles in his 76-year life.
Local real estate developer. Former U.S. Navy officer. Resident of Ann Arbor for about five decades. Longtime husband to his college sweetheart Sally. The list goes on.
On Tuesday, one title he has held for more than four decades is going away. The lecturer of real estate development at University of Michigan’s Ross Business School is retiring, and his last class is on Feb. 22.
Since starting his UM class 41 years ago, more than 4,000 students have witnessed the passion he has for cities and buildings in the service of a people-friendly neighborhood.
“You gotta be passionate about a great neighborhood, a great sidewalk, a great subdivision with all its hangups,” Allen said of the students that went on to successful real estate careers after his class.
This passion for real estate development was apparent in the classroom, said many of his former students. He brought enthusiasm “every day,” said Tom Fitzsimmons, a local developer through Huron Contracting LLC who took Allen’s class in 1994.
“Peter hasn’t really changed,” Fitzsimmons said. “He’s kept up that enthusiasm ever since I’ve known him.”
Big names in the Ann Arbor development scene took Allen’s class, including Fitzsimmons and Oxford Companies founder and CEO Jeff Hauptman.
One reason for the success is Allen’s focus on student success after they are done in his class, said Andrew Selinger, the investment officer at Oxford Companies who took the class in the late 2000s.
“He was always like a career matchmaker,” Selinger said, pointing out Allen’s propensity to help his students network with developers of like interests.
“He was always the one teacher that was most interested in understanding the students, understanding their story and their interests,” he said.
This focus on networking can feel “sterile” elsewhere, said recent graduate Omar Uddin. With Allen, it’s genuine, he said.
“You’re making friends and making cool things happen,” Uddin said.
Beyond the passion and social skills built in Allen’s classroom were the building blocks of successful real estate development, Fitzsimmons said. The development process used today by Huron Contracting has through lines to those first class projects with Allen, he said.
“The entire development process that he laid out, I use essentially to this day,” he said, pointing to how to build plans around working with local governments, dealing with political, marketing or other risks and more.

Ann Arbor real estate developer Peter Allen speaks at the groundbreaking on a new riverfront tunnel pathway project off Depot Street on Feb. 18, 2020. Standing at right is City Administrator Howard Lazarus.Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News
Future plans
Allen does not see his teaching days as being over, only that it will now take place outside of the classroom. He is the co-founder of the non-profit Equitable Ann Arbor Land Trust, or EA2 for short, which aims to spark development of affordable housing throughout the city.
According to Zillow.com, the typical Ann Arbor-area home value is $448,106 in March, up from about $339,000 five years ago, and up from less than $250,000 a decade ago. The first house Allen and his wife bought in Ann Arbor for $37,000 many years ago just sold for $650,000, he said.
“It’s wrong,” he said.
Read more: New nonprofit group aims to bring ‘equitable housing’ to Ann Arbor
He blames those rising prices to an imbalanced focus and luxury condominium and student housing development, as well as wasted potential on large surface parking lots to provide more housing supply.
Some of his students such as Fitzsimmons, who heard Allen lecture about these issues even 30 years ago, are now developers in this system without proper financial motivation to build more affordable housing.
“It’s something I’d love to try and I’d love to help solve problems such as affordability and sustainability, but it’s not always possible for me as a for-profit developer,” Fitzsimmons said.
The answer to help out developers is more government intervention, Allen said, adding that EA2 wants to collaborate more with city government on these issues.
“Private motivation is good to a point, but nobody can build affordable housing without strong government intervention,” Allen said.
Allen credited the city’s affordable housing millage approved in November 2020 as a good start, pointing to his former student Jennifer Hall’s work as director of operations for the Ann Arbor Housing Commission. That has included his push to build affordable housing on surface parking lots, including plans to build 20 stories of housing on the old YMCA lot.
Read more: 20-story development headed to Ann Arbor City Council for approval
That push needs to continue, Allen said.
“We have to convert and reposition every publicly-owned parking lot in and around downtown,” he said, also pointing to ones on UM’s North Campus near Plymouth Road.
Uddin is a board member at EA2, and said the values Allen taught for four decades is imbued in the nonprofit. That makes it a unique opportunity for a recent graduate like himself.
“It has a good, philosophical end goal,” Uddin said. “Our goal is equity through affordability.”
These values followed Allen from his first class he taught in 1981 until this semester, Uddin said. For Allen, he hopes even students not in the development world learned these lessons and absorbed some of his passion.
“The students are the trendsetters,” Allen said. “They’re the ones that will be influential when they leave. They all want to go to great cities, and they want to be a part of it and understand the economics of what makes a really great building, office, apartment, shop or retail.”
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