East Lansing Ideas

[Palapinga]

East Lansing is a city with great potential. Innovation is key to bringing a sense of livelihood and vibrance to any downtown. If any has any ideas to what East Lansing could possibly profit from, post them. Who knows? Maybe a developer would share your inspiration and bring your idea into fruition.

[jaredw]

One time when I was driving through Detroit, I noticed Woodward Place at Brush Park. It is a large area of rowhouses, and I thought that the area bound by Burcham, Abbott, and Ann Street could be redeveloped like these rowhouses. Here are a couple pictures of the aforementioned.

[RustTown]

Brush Park's layout is pretty good, but East Lansing could do much better, design-wise, than Brush Park.

[hood]

I posted this the other day in the Off-Topic forum, its an idea for redevelopment of the Red Cedar golf course, I beleive that these kinds of developments will work well in East Lansing. There is already Gaslight Village and The Beaumont, they are somewhat lower order 'new urbanist' developments. Eventually they will move to building higher end dvelopments.

I got bored and made my own idea for a site plan for the Red Cedar golf course. I included the origional, undrawn-on arial, so feel free to make your own if you get time. The thick red lines represent streets, the thin yellow lines represent alleys behind rowhouses, the thin light blue lines represent alleys behind houses, the light green boxed-in areas represent park area and the dark blue boxed-in areas represent buildings with ground floor retail and 1 or more floors of residential above. To be more specific on these, for the rowhouses, I would suggest basically clones of the On The Grand condos in Old Town, those are a good design to put on a street grid. For the houses I suggest high-end 2-3 floor houses on skinny lots, there is an example of a neighborhood in Chicago that made me think of putting houses here, I'm going to try and find the pics of it. For the buildings I would focus on 3-5 story buildings, although 5 stories may be a longshot. they would be in the same general style as stadium district, make them look old and authentic. I also don't think it would be a bad idea for the same developer to buy up all those houses and businesses on Clippert and put matching rowhouses on there from Michigan to Kalamazoo. I think that if all that were done this would be a premier neighborhood and units would sell rather easily, even if they were very high-end.

[Palapinga]

I believe they should construct a two storey Target where the Evergreen Grille is presently located. Also, when they level the current Taco Bell (moving into Stonehouse), they should creat a building like the one where Blockbuster is located and put an Outback Steakhouse. A gourmet restaurant could always be a good possiblilty anywhere too.

[hood]

The type of houses that I was thinking should be built were these ones, from a development in Chicago. The houses start at about $700k and go up to about $900k and are from 4500 sq ft to 6000 sq ft. I'm sure these could be built around here starting at about $500k, and I'm sure that houses like these could sell rather easily if they could be built for less than $700k. If the development was divided up the way I showed, it could probably fit about 100 of these houses. I also think that this tyle of neighborhood may work well for the Plant #1 site also, the only problem there is that people may not want to invest $700k in a house with that location.

[GR8scott]

cool new urban housing

[hood]

On more thing about my Red Cedar site plan, I figured out that there would be about 300 units, that may be a little too much.

[coolbrezze]

I'll say while seeing if Lansing and East Lansing will merge. East Lansing can merge with Okemos and Haslett, all seems to be safe communities within each other.