WDBM East Lansing.

This is East Lansing Insider brought to you by ELI on Impact eighty nine FM. In this show, we break down all of the news and happenings in the East Lansing community. And now, today's East Lansing Insider.

Hi, everyone. I'm ELI's managing editor, Luke Day, and today we're going to be talking about housing in East Lansing, what local leaders are interested in implementing in order to foster affordability, and what projects may be on the horizon. I'm joined by our Deputy Editor, Anna Liz Nichols.

Thanks for having me.

So in city meetings over the last several months, housing's kind of been a theme. Recently, the city planner, Landon Bartley, he explained some incentives the city can use to bring in new developments. We've heard candidates for years saying that affordable housing is one of the things they want to bring in, even low income housing, which East Lansing doesn't have very much of. A lot of the candidates we've got for city council this year have said that there's not enough housing. That's their belief.

We've got people who think that there should be more student housing. We've got every time there's a housing proposal pitched in East Lansing, most of what you're gonna hear at the city meetings is against it. Usually from people that live in the area, people that wanna protect the classic nature of the area, things like that. Also, push backs against incentives, which we'll get into in a little bit. But well, lot of the discussions recently have been based around the Howard, which isn't even officially pitched yet.

But it's a large 14 story apartment complex that developers have said that they wanna put in the downtown area where the student bookstore is now. The project's being proposed by the Balline family who currently owns the student bookstore as well Harbor Bay Realty. Harbor Bay and the Balline family worked together to bring the landmark to Downtown East Lansing five or six years ago. That was kind of the first large apartment complex open downtown. It opened around the same time as The Hub and The Abbott.

Those are the three big ones that we have now. But around that time, there were several other large apartment complexes pitched. Some of them didn't come to fruition. And the last few years, we've we haven't received quite as many housing proposals, but council member Mark Mark Meadows at a recent meeting said that he's hearing from a lot of developers who want to build in East Lansing. There's a few other projects that have been kicking around for years.

I I I think that what we're going to see in the next few years is some major votes on major housing proposals. The outcome of those could very easily be decided by the makeup of the next city council. We've heard, generally, I think that candidates have tried to pitch themselves as pro development. Some of them have said explicitly that they're pro development. Other ones have said they appreciate smart growth.

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but that's a that's a verbiage that a lot of candidates seem to be using. But in the next three, four years, I I I think that we're gonna see some major projects coming through the pipeline.

You know, we both went to Michigan State University. And to me, it always seems like they're always building new housing, always building new high rise apartments. However, an ordinance the city adopted in 2016 poses a series of issues for developers taking on new projects in downtown.

So, yeah, the 25% ordinance requires that a quarter of the units in new downtown rental developments have to be dedicated to low to moderate income renters, senior housing for people 55 and older, owner occupied, or some other cause that diversifies the downtown housing stock. And since that ordinance was put in place, we've only added, I think, 91 units that meet the ordinance requirements since 2016. That's the senior housing in the landmark apartments. The Abbott is still trying to add a second building with affordable units, but that's very murky. We just heard a presentation from the company that's now taken over that project.

It's no longer done by Convexity, which built the Abbott. They transferred it over to a different developer. That developer needs tax credits from the state to have that project come to fruition, so that's still very much up in the air. And so what the developers from the Howard have said about this 25% ordinance is that they can't get loans to build their project. They're saying that it makes the earnings projections a little bit too murky.

Banks trust that it's going to make money, so they can't get loans. And so they've proposed a payment in lieu of taxes to get around the ordinance. What that means essentially is that they would pay the city, their offer was $2,000,000, and then the city can use that money to do whatever it wants to carry out its housing goals. And so recently from the city planner, Landon Bartley, he told us about different incentives. One of those that he mentioned was the payment in lieu of taxes.

And he said that the developers would have to pay more. They compared their proposal of $2,000,000, which is about $5,000 a unit, to the payment in lieu of tax setups in other similar cities. And the low end of what developers typically were paying is $35,000. So that's seven times the Howard's initial offer. So we'll see if that impacts their proposal, what they're hoping to do.

There's a lot of people that are pretty excited about this project. I know that they just had a meeting at Foster Coffee earlier this week about it, but but it seems like they're going to have to adjust adjust their offer, least from what the principal planner was saying at a recent city council meeting. So recently, Bartley gave council presentations. I mentioned about some of the things that the city can do to kind of spur development downtown. And there's trade offs to everything.

Like every single time you see a housing development comes to the city council, there's strong opposition. But at the same time, when the city goes through its master plan and updates that, there's strong support for more affordable housing. So there's never going be consensus on these types of projects, just like there's not ever a consensus on what we should do to incentivize them. Some of the different things Bartley mentioned is the payment in lieu of taxes, but also the city could give developers tax abatements. They've done that in the past with some developments and they've proposed to do it for others and it's been controversial.

A lot of the people on city council that are pro development said that they're pro development because it will help, the city budget. Currently, the city is running at a deficit. There's some arguments about how much that helps as council member Eric Altman recently pointed out. Some of those taxes are going to have to go into providing infrastructure for whatever new developments we have. But I think the general consensus is that adding large developments without incentives would help the city budget.

How much it will help the city budget? Well, if you're adding tax abatements, you're you're cutting down how much they pay. So it's it's chipping away at how much you're helping your finances. So that's a pretty controversial one. But it's also necessary in a lot of expensive areas if you want the housing to be affordable.

It's expensive to build right now and it's especially expensive to build downtown where the property values are high. Along with that payment in lieu of taxes, one of the possibilities is a tax abatement. That's something the city's used in the past to incentivize different developments. It's always controversial because a lot of people see new as a way to improve the city's budget as opposed to doing something like raising taxes, which is currently on the ballot this November. When you build a new development or increase the size of something, like right now the proposal for the student bookstore to build 14 stories on top of it or 13 stories on top of it.

What that does is it increases the property value quite a bit. And so that money theoretically could be go back to the city to fix its financial woes. Of course, there's extra costs that come with that infrastructure, so it's going to chip away at some of that. And then if you offer a tax abatement, it's going to take away from that even further because the developer isn't paying as much in taxes. But right now, if you want your units to be affordable, the property values are very high downtown.

And so developers, you know, you've kind of got two options is you can or developers are saying you got two options. You can help them out in some way so that they can make the prices lower or you're gonna have more luxury units that are more expensive. That's one of the reasons why the units that we've seen in recent years are so expensive in the Hub, the Abbott, and the Landmark. There's a different incentive that well, it's not really incentive, it's more of an ordinance amendment that the city manager asked the Planning Commission to look into. And what this would do is you weigh different types of housing differently.

So right now you need 25% of your units to be one type. What the city manager recommended is that you weigh different types of housing differently depending on what the city wants. And so what he recommended is that we weigh owner occupied units like condos the heaviest. And so maybe if you say, we're gonna add condos, you only need 20% or you only need 15%.

So like you said, many of the units that have been built in recent years in East Lansing, specifically the downtown area, are not necessarily affordable housing units. In recent years around the pandemic, Michigan saw some of the highest rent increases in the country. East Lansing was not immune from from those rent increases, though it remains comparatively to the national average a fairly affordable place to live, where the national average rent for a one bedroom apartment is around $1,600, whereas East Lansing average rent for a one bedroom apartment is about $1,000 according to rent.com. Michigan in general has an aging housing stock. The Michigan Housing Authority back in 2024 said that Michigan is short of just under 200,000 housing units.

The number has decreased in recent months due to some statewide projects in order to build affordable housing. And East Lansing has a large portion of older housing stock. Data from the city reports that around 80% of units were built prior to 1980. And so there is a lot of interest and and need for safe housing units. A story East Lansing info put out recently talked to residents in the historic Hillcrest Village apartment complex.

Residents talked about the sense of community they felt there, that during the pandemic, they all sort of watched out for each other, that, you know, people wave at each other, there's cats in the window, just a place that residents who live there want to live long term.

Yeah. So when I was doing the reporting on that story, and this first came to city council about a year ago when residents came into the city, city meetings, and they were saying, hey. This new company bought our apartment complex, and they're raising the rent 18%. They're pricing people out. People are not going to be able to live here anymore.

And East Lansing is unique because of the student population. But what Hillcrest Village is is or was, I guess, what I've been told is it's kind of a place that's in transition because long time residents are being priced out was it was a community. People, you know, they rented their homes, but they lived there for ten, twelve, twenty years, and they knew each other. There's just not many places like that, I think anywhere, but especially in East Lansing when you've got such a transient population. And so a lot of the a lot of the people I spoke to for that story, they were very emotional about their neighbors leaving.

They were thinking about their own futures there. It just made more sense to a lot of them to go and, you know, start renting a condo, buy a house ready or earlier than they were ready to do something like that. And so another piece of the puzzle here is that it's the city's struggling to add housing, especially affordable housing, but housing that was affordable is becoming unaffordable. And I think Hillcrest is a good example of that.

Like you mentioned earlier, East Lansing has an election coming up. There are two seats that are going to become available on the five person city council come November. Earlier this month, East Lansing info cohosted a candidate forum with the League of Women Voters, where candidates responded to questions from residents about the topics most pertinent to them. These issues included East Lansing's status as a sanctuary city, the status of public safety in the downtown area amid safety concerns, the city's financial health, as well as questions about housing and affordability.

Yeah. And so I think that this election is gonna be pivotal for what we see the next couple of years. As we mentioned earlier, it seems like every each of the six candidates has got some level of interest in developing in East Lansing. Some have got more, some have got less. Carrie Singh, who currently sits on city council, she seems just in general pretty pro development.

She typically even though there haven't been any big housing projects in front of council over the last two years while we've had Carrie on board, she's typically in favor of developments that have come to the city. Eric Altman and Mark Meadows, they've been a little bit more hesitant to vote in favor of them. But when they were previously land counsel, they did, you know, usher in some of the larger housing developments that we've seen. Around the same time that we had the Hub, the Abbott, and the Landmark come up, there were quite a few other proposals the Hub had proposed. The hub two on Vogue Street, was an even bigger building.

It eventually was shut down by city council, but, you know, those developers wanted to bring something. We've seen some smaller projects developed by the city recently. And if Meadows is right and developers do wanna build in East Lansing, there's gonna be a five person city council voting on these things. Recently, we haven't seen any housing projects come to council in the last two years, so it'll be interesting to see how these the current city council reacts to some of these proposals. But in general, it just seems that Carrie Ebersol Singh, the current mayor per tem who will still be on council, is a little bit more pro development.

Eric Altman and Mark Meadows, they've they've got some reservations about developments that have been coming in. So the two remaining seats on city council, I think, are going to be kind of pivotal. All candidates have described themselves as, you know, some form of willing to develop, but some are more pro development than other ones. This conversation we're having now kind of comes in the context of a year ago, the city was discussing putting a moratorium on all developments. It was after several large rainstorms that caused widespread flooding around the city.

Basically, said we don't wanna build anymore because it puts more strain on our infrastructure. You're covering green space, and that causes flooding. We need to get this figured out. We haven't had any of those large flooding events this summer. But I I I just think it's interesting that a year ago, they were considering shutting down all developments in the city until we get that figured out.

There's not really a solution to it in place, but now we're talking about really large developments. So I'm I'm just wondering if the conversation shifts a year from now. There's a lot of rhetoric from candidates right now about housing. We're gonna we're gonna see what happens, I guess, in the next few years because it's a lot easier to say that you want to build before a project actually comes in front of you. I mentioned a little bit earlier that Landon Bartley said that there's trade offs with every incentive or ordinance amendment for projects.

He also said that there's trade offs for every project period as far as land use. Preserving green space is really important to East Lansing. We've heard that when there were proposed amendments to Valley Court Park and we've heard that for all sorts of different housing projects. And if you wanna preserve green space, you've probably gotta build up. And so downtown's the space that you do that, but downtown land's more expensive.

So it would probably be cheaper, I'd venture to guess, if you built a project in places where land was more affordable, but that contributes to urban sprawl. Now you're building in places that are currently green. That could add to flooding, that could upset nearby residents, and you're gonna have people that come to these meetings, these city council meetings when you're voting on these things that are upset probably regardless of what project that you're proposing. Nobody's gonna love anything that comes in, whether it be because of the incentives or the project itself. And so in the last few years, what we've had was the Hagen Realty Project, which is still kicking around somewhere.

It hasn't been it received approval for a zoning change that it needed for its project. They're trying to build townhomes on Grove Street, but it hasn't been formally approved. It hasn't received site plan approval. And when that zoning change was going through city council, you heard a lot of residents who went to the meeting that were concerned things like more flooding, because they've had flooding issues in the area before. But then also just concerns about, street parking and adding traffic to the area.

People were people were worried that with more people coming in and out of a new housing complex, I think it was only 40 or 42 spaces, but it would still add traffic to an area that's a pretty residential area already. There is a fraternity or sorority house nearby. So it's not it's not like some of our really owner occupied only neighborhoods, but there's still a neighborhood nearby. Some of the residents didn't like this, idea of adding, rental housing where more people would be coming in and out. They thought it was a traffic to kids walking to school, things like that.

The other project that we almost got a couple years ago was a workforce housing project. It was downtown in that, lot behind Peanut Barrel, the surface level lot. And a lot of the complaints about that were people who wanted to preserve the surface level lot. They said it's an accessibility issue. There's not much surface parking in East Lansing.

Some people with mobility issues might struggle in the parking garages. We also heard from some of the business owners down there that did not want they'd heard from some of their customers that did not want a new, housing complex downtown over that lot because their customers liked the lot. And then the the third thing that we heard from there's actually a citizens group that was formed to kind of oppose that project. They were threatening legal action and all sorts of different things. But they also said they didn't like the incentives the city was offering the developer that was planning to build that workforce housing.

Again, that's right in the downtown, so affordability is relative. In dollar terms, this project was supposed to be affordable to people that make between roughly $30,000 to $70,000 a year. What that meant is that and again, these were rough estimates. This is a project that was rejected three to two. It a very close vote.

Usually, you can tell these things are going to shake out at the council level as they're going through the works. This is one that I had no idea how they were going to vote. But in this development that was rejected, their plan was to have studio apartments that cost about $984 a month. A one bedroom was about $1,054 a month, and a two bedroom would not cost more than about a little bit under $1,300 a month. So it's relative.

Those prices are up because it's in the downtown area where it's more expensive to live. That might sound affordable to some people and to a lot of students, it probably doesn't because they've got other responsibilities.

So housing is a major issue in East Lansing and will remain a top issue in this upcoming city council election. Voters should have received their absentee ballots in the mail by now if they've previously requested them or they're on the permanent absentee ballot voter list. And later this month, East Lansing will have several days of early in person voting starting October 29. East Lansing info will be covering all the latest information leading up into the election and after.

Eli is also gonna continue to cover the developments with the city's police oversight commission. If you've read some of our past coverage, you know that a police union contract kind of stripped the commission of a lot of its powers and now they're arguing that the contract doesn't require that all of these amendments, I guess I should say, go into place. They think that the attorneys have argued that there's certain language in the new ordinance that doesn't need to be there. They're gonna have more difficulty getting information for some of the reports they receive. They can't say as much publicly.

It's big changes to the Oversight Commission. We're gonna continue to cover that up until council votes on it later this month. And if you want a lot more information about that, check out our podcast from last week. That was the main topic. Yeah.

So to read up more about some of the topics that we've talked today, to continue with our coverage because there's going to be more housing stories in the near future, head to eastlansinginfo.news. And for East Lansing Insider, I've been East Lansing Info managing editor Luke Day.

And I'm deputy editor, Annalise Nichols.

East Lansing Insider is brought to you by ELI on Impact eighty nine FM. We are on the web at eastlancinginfo.news and impact89fm.org. Thanks for listening.