Hometown Boy Returns as City Planner
By Dustin DuFort Petty
New City of East Lansing Principal Planner Landon Bartley admits he’s a hometown boy.
“Hagadorn, right across from Hubbard Hall,” he said. “Technically speaking, it’s Meridian Township, but I consider East Lansing my home.”
Those who don’t know Bartley’s profession, might peg him as the cool, young college professor who consistently earns high evaluations from his students and is quick to forgive the occasional late submission. The blonde, new principal planner is wearing a casual crewneck and jeans and looks much younger than his 44 years.
ELi sat down with Bartley at Foster Coffee in downtown to learn about his career trajectory and ambitions for the city’s future.
Bartley found his professional passion in city planning.
“I went to college for linguistics,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Languages are super cool. [It’s] very interesting, especially how language can affect social standing and vice versa. I worked for a translation agency for a while right out of college and was the only guy showing up to meetings – public meetings – about bus routes. I was in Ann Arbor [and] there was some proposal and I showed up and people were like, ‘oh, someone actually came, that’s great.’”
Bartley took an urban transportation class during his last semester at Michigan State University (MSU), sparking his interest in how cities grow and develop. That curiosity also led him to leave linguistics.
That train ride around the country kind of drove home to him the things he’d been learning about in the urban transportation class.
“The train is interesting. American rail is not the preferred mode of transportation,” Bartley said. “When they have the Super Bowl in a city, there are going to be certain entry points. All the highway exits get prettied up. They try to clean up things and say, ‘look at the best face of our city.’ But no one does that for trains. So I was riding on these trains through the unkempt part of America, and I was like, ‘this is the part that the city leaders don’t really care about, the backyards of people’s houses.’ I felt like this was the real America in a way.”
Bartley pauses here, flashing a bright smile to recount an episode of “Seinfeld” in which George Costanza argues an architect is a better career ambition than that of a city planner.
“Fast forward a few months,” Bartley said, continuing his story, “and I was down in Austin [Texas] with a friend of mine, and I was ranting about some proposal. And he said, ‘Dude, you seem so much more passionate about this than anything else. Why aren’t you doing this for your living?’ Why am I not? I don’t know. I went back to his apartment and printed off an application for grad school, filled it out, sent it in and thought, ‘what do I have to lose?’ I got in and I got funding. And I didn’t know what else to do with my life, so why not do this?”
After earning his Master in Urban and Regional Planning from MSU, Bartley has spent the last two decades in Michigan, most recently in the Grand Rapids area. He served the City of Grand Rapids as a senior city planner and cannabis administrator, before taking a job in the private sector, helping to shape regulations for the emerging Michigan cannabis industry.
Bartley is eager to get to work now that he’s back in his hometown.
But now, back in the community that shaped him, he is eager to get to work.
“Everything’s familiar, but it’s changed,” he said. “I understand the lay of the land, I understand the basics. But I’ve been away for 20 years. I can spend more time and energy on the processes, making sure everything is working right, identifying what’s not working right and how we can fix them, understanding the political dynamics.”
Bartley is also working to build up the number of people working in the Planning and Zoning Department and is currently interviewing candidates for the role of senior planner. After that position is filled, he will post for an associate planner, while also attracting interns from nearby MSU.
“My hope, once we have this staff set, is to take care of zoning needs. In planning and zoning, zoning is all the current stuff, planning is the longterm stuff,” he said. “And planning is really my forte. Like I can recognize opportunities, get excited about them and then try to put the pieces together to try to make them happen. So I want to make sure my staff will have the opportunity to learn the ropes, take care of all the zoning stuff, all the permits, all the commission meetings, all things like that. And I’ll help them, of course, but then we can get really into the good stuff. We can say, ‘OK, let’s do a master plan update.’
“For example, I was at the council of neighborhood presidents on Monday [Oct. 9] and mentioned that I would like to do a master plan update,” Bartley said. “Not a full update, but a narrow look at what’s happened the last five years. How are we doing since 2018, [when] the last master plan was done, what do we need to nudge? I often use the metaphor of steering a ship. Running a city is like steering a ship, and that’s for the city manager. But what I see for the city planner is trying to push the boat around, seeing what icebergs are ahead, and then advise everyone on the ship, ‘how can we do this the best way.’ It’s very incremental and very slow.”
He sees the need for affordable housing is real, but knows plans have to work for everyone.
ELi asked Bartley about recent development issues in the city, including opposition to projects like 530 Albert and the Grove Street rezoning, plans to increase density downtown and, in the case of Albert, add five stories of affordable housing.
“Have you heard the acronym BANANA?” he asked. “Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. That’s pretty common. We’ve seen that in the deal with affordable housing. ‘This is very important to me. I just don’t want it right here.’ On one hand, sure. On the other hand, we’ve got to get past that at some point. You live in a college town. You live in a town where expenses are going up. You’re going to have students, you’re going to have rising prices.”
Bartley said the city needs to address this somehow and make sure it works for everyone.
“I find that if you can address not what you’re looking to do but why you’re looking to do it and if you can help them understand why it’s so important, that can really go a long way,” he said. “I think we’ll see a mix of that. If we do adequate engagement in the next year, which will be tough – good community engagement is always hard. It’s not just a one-way street, too. You have to be engaged, you have to come in.”
He identified affordable housing as something the city and its residents will revisit in the future.
“Generally, I feel people don’t mind affordable housing as long as it’s done right,” he said. “If the concerns, say with 530 Albert, if the concerns are really about parking, let’s find a way to figure out the parking. If it’s, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want people to walk two blocks to the parking garage.’ OK, maybe that’s a concern, [but] do we have quantifiable evidence to show that it should be a concern? Is it really a concern about parking, or is it a concern about the people living in the building? Not anything against them, but maybe they’re not the customers the businesses are looking for. Businesses deserve supportive residents and vice versa.
“Over the next 10 years, with my crystal ball without any official statement, I believe that more [affordable housing] is coming. There’s more need coming. We need to make some pretty significant systemic changes in order to really have widespread affordability.”
Being back in EL, means staying in his childhood home some nights and commuting to Grand Rapids on weekends.
For now, as Bartley eases into his role, he finds himself in a familiar place. He owns a home in Grand Rapids with a long-term partner and is commuting back and forth each week. He knows it’s important for him to live in the community he is planning.
“But the circumstances are difficult right now,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do in the long term. But in the short term, I’m commuting, sort of a modified commute schedule. I don’t go home every night. I stay with my parents, which is weird. It’s like, here I am in my childhood room, listening to sounds outside that take me back 30 years.”
Typically, he comes to East Lansing on Monday and leaves Thursday or Friday.
“I’d like to spend weekends here at some point,” Bartley said. “And I think that after six or seven months, my schedule will clear up and I’ll be able to spend more time, on the days I’m in East Lansing, walking around, going to things, being involved. This is my home, after all.”
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