High-rise uproar

Bullied.

That’s how many residents of East Lansing’s Flower Pot neighborhood feel as Michigan State University begins development of the former State Police headquarters that sits in their backyards.

That’s because the university won’t budge when it comes to three four-story apartment buildings that will soon loom over their homes — just 53 feet from the property line. A parking lot next to the complex will sit even closer, 22 feet from the currently peaceful neighborhood yards and gardens.

“They don’t seem to have any empathy,” said 22-year resident Cynthia Craig, a retired MSU professor. “We all but lose the use of our own backyards.”

The 40-acre, $156 million, development, which will be completed by 2017, will house over 900 students, joining 300 already living at the property’s University Village. It will include commercial buildings, like a spirit store and coffee shop. The development will replace the university’s current family housing, the ailing Spartan Village.

And because MSU is autonomous from the city with its own zoning laws, East Lansing and Flower Pot residents have few avenues to appeal the project outside of appealing to the university’s good nature and asking it to be more considerate of nearby homeowners.

“It’s never our intention to bully anyone. We want to be a good neighbor,” said Kat Cooper, director of communications for MSU´s Residential and Hospitality Services. “At the same time, it’s our goal to make our students academically successful, to make sure they have comfortable, affordable places to live that are giving them access to the academic resources to be successful.”

Cooper said that the university did try to design the development in a way that would be less detrimental to the neighbor hood. It put the high-rise family friendly building closest to the neighborhood and moved single-student housing, likely to be noisier, to the center of the complex.

But residents say the four-story “buffer” is more like a looming wall.

They’re concerned that the development will cause noise and light pollution, taking away the privacy and peacefulness they were used to when the State Police Headquarters was their neighbor. “We won’t see the sky anymore,” said Sally Wittler, whose gardens back up to the grounds of the proposed housing.

MSU has little interest in these concerns, Craig said. Although Cooper said the university has made efforts to communicate with residents, Craig’s group says they were simply told what was going on, with little opportunity to be heard.

“Every time we try to approach MSU with this, we hear about price point, we hear about a ‘dynamic urban environment’ that the students require for academic success, but we haven’t heard anything about the effect on us. That’s just never been part of their equation,” Craig said.

And Cooper said while the university does acknowledge resident and city concerns, it has to make students its first priority.

“Our main goal here is our students, and their academic success, and that’s the most important thing in whatever we do at MSU,” she said. “It offers them an opportunity to live on campus, adjacent to everything that they need to be academically successful.”

While they point to other sites MSU could have chosen, residents aren’t demanding a complete site change — they just want some compromise. Appeals for changes, like higher windows on the buildings so people can’t look into their yards, and ideas like switching the buildings with one of the development’s many parking lots, have been ignored.

“I know that sounds like just a little bit, but changes like those are huge,” Cooper said. “If we made major changes like changing the way a window faces, it changes the entire design of the building.” And because Residential and Hospitality Services is self-sustaining, it would fall to students to make up the difference in the form of higher rent.

She said some reasonable compromises have been made.

“We’ve made a substantial number of incremental changes based on the feedback that we’ve gotten from the neighborhood, and we think we’ve been a good partner. But there’s some things that they feel very strongly about that we also feel very strongly are important for our students,” she said.

Along with addressing some early-on concerns over traffic, the university has agreed to upgrade fencing and landscaping by planting more trees as a buffer, especially between lots and the taller buildings.

“They said that they would plant some evergreen trees that, in about 30 years, would be tall enough to block the buildings. I’ll be 92 when that happens,” Cynthia Craig said. She says it’s not enough.

And because of MSU’s autonomy, the city doesn’t have much more influence over the project than Craig’s group.

The East Lansing City Council, former city mayor Liz Schweitzer and current Mayor Nathan Triplett voiced concerns over the project through letters to the university’s Board of Trustees.

The letters’ request the Board of Trustees to meet with residents were denied, however, said Larry Craig, Cynthia’s husband.

MSU’s concession in response to the letters? Offering to let neighborhood residents choose the paint colors of the four-story buildings that will soon tower over their homes.

And when the group filed a Freedom of Information Act for documents on the site, the $23,000 quote MSU gave them to complete it added insult to injury.

The cost was reasonable for such a broad request, Cooper said.

State Rep. Sam Singh, a Democratic former mayor of East Lansing, said MSU should aim to be transparent and should have been more reasonable over the FOIA request.

“In the end, we all know what they’re looking for, document-wise, so why not provide that to them?” he said. “Their request through FOIA was appropriate, and I would hope that the university would honor it.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me to hide behind costs, and things like that.”

And MSU’s actions could have some real consequences for university relations, East Lansing City Councilwoman Kathleen Boyle said.

“If there isn’t any accommodation, if there isn’t at least some solution to some of these concerns, that’s got to impact the relationship — both between the neighbors and the university, and between the city and the university,” she said.

Despite some run around and scheduling conflicts, residents were able to secure a meeting with President Lou Anna K. Simon later this month to have their concerns addressed, they hope.

Larry Craig is confident that if Simon sees their side of things, she has the power to help them.

“If we could get Lou Anna to stand right here, she would see just how little space there is, out that way, and how enormous those buildings would be in relation,” he said.

Even though early stages of construction began last week, the group isn’t giving up on their longtime home anytime soon.

“It’s a fantastic neighborhood — it’s a family neighborhood, it’s quiet, it’s green, it’s friendly, everybody knows everybody,” she said. “The people who live in this neighborhood love this neighborhood.”

Spreading the word is their last hope. “Court of public opinion is all we have,” Cynthia Craig said. “Appealing to MSU’s better nature and publicizing our plight.”

“We’re looking at any avenue we can find to be heard.”