East Lansing Council Delays Vote on Apartment, Places Moratorium on Data Centers, Officially Discontinues El Fresco

The East Lansing City Council delayed a vote on a 13-story apartment building proposed for downtown at its meeting Tuesday night, but some members of council signaled they may be open to the project after more details are hashed out. 

The building, proposed for 530 Albert Ave where the Bailey Street surface parking lot currently sits, has been widely discussed for months. If approved, the apartment will be marketed as a high-end rental option for students who want to live near Michigan State University’s campus. The proposed building includes two stories of public parking, an indoor pool and spa, basketball court and more. 

Questions from council about how the developer will meet the city’s diverse housing requirement and how public parking will be managed will likely need to be answered before permission is given to break ground on the project. The proposal will return to council at its next meeting on April 7.

The biggest challenge facing developers is a city requirement that 25% of units in new downtown housing projects go towards diversifying the area’s housing stock by being affordable, owner-occupied or fitting in some other category. 

Developers hoping to build the apartment, Minnesota-based Tareen Development Partners, plan to meet the requirement by making a quarter of units moderately priced. To make this financially viable, developers say, they would need the city to agree to a payment in lieu of taxes for the lower priced units, which would allow developers to pay a reduced fee instead of property taxes. 

Two members of the five-person City Council – Councilmember Mark Meadows and Mayor Erik Altmann – said at Tuesday’s meeting they are not interested in giving the developer a tax break, and Councilmember Kerry Ebersole Singh said she would be “far stretched” to support it. However, Altmann said he would be open to lowering the diverse housing requirement, a position Councilmember Steve Whelan previously stated. 

Cody Dietrich, vice president of development for Tareen, said at a previous meeting the company may be able to make the project work without a tax break if the diverse housing requirement is dropped to 10% of units. 

Since the city added the diverse housing requirement about a decade ago, only one project has met the requirement, The Landmark, which included the Newman Lofts senior apartments in its project downtown. Developers have said the requirement can make construction prohibitively expensive.

At its March 25 meeting, the city’s Planning Commission will discuss the East Lansing’s diverse housing requirement and alternate pathways the city could install for developers to bring projects, while helping the city carry out its housing goals. This could mean lowering the diverse housing requirement or introducing a fee in lieu program that allows developers to pay into a fund to get around the requirement. 

However, Principal Planner Bartley said it will likely take months to craft and approve an ordinance to amend the city’s requirement.

Meadows asked about a parking agreement between the city and developer. Under the current proposal, Tareen plans to build a two-floor parking ramp with 83 spaces, which would replace nearly all the spaces in the Bailey parking lot. 

Senior Planner Alycia Reiten said the city would develop an agreement with the developer for how the parking garage will be operated. Meadows said he needs to see the agreement before voting in favor of the project. 

Council declined to vote on the project, but that doesn’t mean it may not be approved eventually. Altmann commended developers for incorporating community feedback into the proposal and said there are several aspects of the proposal he likes, including the public parking, aggressive stormwater management and the edges of the building being pulled back a few feet from the property line. 

During an exchange with Reiten, Altmann said a development will eventually be built over the parking lot, and the council may not be able to leverage approval to steer favorable aspects in a different project. 

The Bailey Street Parking Lot is privately owned. The developer needs approval from the city to build a structure exceeding eight stories, but if a different development is proposed for the area that does not exceed the city’s height limit, it could be administratively approved and not go through City Council. 

A project that is administratively approved also would not need to meet the city’s diverse housing requirement, Reiten said. 

Council puts a six month moratorium on data centers. 

With nearby municipalities like Mason and Lansing facing public outcry for considering data center proposals, the East Lansing City Council voted in favor of a six-month moratorium barring data centers from the city Tuesday night.

According to the agenda item on the moratorium, the city’s zoning code does not adequately consider the impacts data centers may have on “the environment, public health and safety, community character and aesthetics, and other land uses.”

Principal Planner Landon Bartley said the moratorium will give his team time to learn more about data centers and craft an ordinance to regulate them. There are not any applications to build data centers in East Lansing right now, Bartley said. 

“[We] took a look at the ordinance and… it has some areas of uncertainty,” City Attorney Steven Joppich said, “as to how if we did get an application and needed to process it, how would it be done?”

The moratorium was approved unanimously. 

Albert El Fresco won’t be back this summer. 

After council members verbally agreed to scrap Albert El Fresco at the body’s March 10 discussion-only meeting, the blocked off downtown space that has hosted games and seating during the last six summers was officially discontinued when the consent agenda passed without discussion on Tuesday. 

Surveys distributed to people who visited the space last summer showed generally positive feedback, but downtown business owners gave mixed reviews. 

Council eventually opted to not block off the downtown stretch of Albert Avenue this summer after city committees and commissions, the East Lansing Police Department and residents of the Newman Lofts senior apartments opposed the space. Members of council said they believe El Fresco has outlived its usefulness and creates public safety issues.

The city will also put less seasonal seating out this summer. At the March 10 meeting, Altmann said the Downtown Development Authority recommended eliminating seasonal seating due to “camping related” concerns.

It was a sharp turnaround for how the council views the space compared to a year ago. Last year, most of the council’s discussion about Albert El Fresco was about whether or not to expand its boundaries.