The Parking Lot That Keeps Flooding

The Quarters apartments’ parking lot flooded, again

More than a dozen residents at The Quarters apartments in East Lansing woke up last weekend to find their cars partially submerged in floodwater, leaving many fishing their belongings out of their destroyed vehicles and wondering how they’re going to make it to work and school.

The Quarters, located just off Abbot Road near the East Lansing Fire Department, has a well-documented history of its parking lot flooding and destroying residents’ cars. Reviews from more than 20 years ago for the complex under its former name, Ville Montee, complain about the destruction.

Water had reached the side mirrors of his car Saturday morning when he and his roommates woke up, Connor Lindsey, resident of The Quarters told East Lansing Info this week.

Lindsey is a music conductor at Haslett Community Church and among his belongings that were destroyed in his car was all the sheet music for Easter Sunday the next day.

“We were inviting brass to play with us and all of the master score with the brass and the choral parts were completely gone,” Lindsey said. 

An accompanist at the church was able to find extra scores to cobble together a music program for Easter, he said, but the whole experience combined with his totaled car presented challenges for the important day.

The parking lot for The Quarters sits in a flood plain recognized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. On the City of East Lansing website, the city says the FEMA maps were created to discourage developments from being built and operated in areas particularly prone to flooding.

The spare tire for Carlie Gelderloos’ car was floating in the trunk while she spoke to ELi Monday as she pulled CDs and clothes out of the vehicle. Several other residents, with trash bags and buckets in tow at The Quarters, were doing the same.

“I was supposed to go to work on Saturday. I looked outside and my car was flooded, I can’t work. I have to go to work later today, my roommate has to drop me off,” Gelderloos said.

She’s a student at Michigan State University and will now have to purchase a new car with one more year of school to go and she isn’t hopeful that insurance will cover anything.

Gelderloos said she didn’t know about the chronic flooding issues in the The Quarters parking lot before she moved in. And though she thinks she remembers the floods being mentioned in her lease, she wasn’t aware of how persistent the problem is, especially because residents were told that the complex had installed a pump to address any potential flooding issues.

“They were actively advertising that it was non-flooding this year,” The Quarters resident RJ Kilcher told ELi Monday.

Kilcher attends MSU and during welcome week last fall, he said The Quarters put out signage saying that it had non-flooding parking, removing previous signage warning about the flood risk in the parking lot.

This is the third year Kilcher has lived at The Quarters and he said previously residents had been sent texts warning them to park elsewhere when there was a risk of flooding, sometimes days in advance. This time around residents received the warning in the late afternoon, hours after Kilcher and other residents’ cars were destroyed early in the morning.

With all the rent increases he and other residents have experienced at The Quarters, combined with the destruction of several cars over the weekend, Kilcher said he wouldn’t recommend anyone move to The Quarters. 

Neither would Megan Rafferty, the former resident told ELi this week. In 2021 when she was attending graduate school at MSU, she said her car was totaled in The Quarters parking lot after stormwater came up past her car’s windows.

Her insurance wouldn’t cover any of the damage, Rafferty said, and that was the experience of everyone else she talked to that had their cars flooded at the time. And as far as The Quarters taking any responsibility for the recurrent flooding, she said residents were left at a loss.

“There really was not much communication. They just said, ‘hey, there’s a sign in the parking lot that says that there are frequent floods,’” Rafferty said. “I remember me and my roommate both saying, ‘We’ve never even seen that sign before.’ It’s not like it was prominent. Nobody we had spoken to saw it. It’s one little sign.”

The Quarters did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

This story was updated to include The Quarters location.