The New Tycoon

The Ingham County Land Bank’s quest to make this place a better ... place

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This story was updated to remove the reference to the superintendent's house at the School of the Blind as being in Old Town and to delete a statement that the house is "formally known as the Old Town Manor."

On the day Rochelle Rizzi first saw the grand, brick house along Pine Street in Lansing, it was “complete construction zone.” The 6,000-square-foot Colonial Revival house was once the home of the superintendent of the School for the Blind but had been vacant more than a decade. Rizzi was on a quest to find the perfect space for her marketing firm, Rizzi Designs, and when she stepped inside, she knew she had found the right place. “I knew which furniture was going to be in what room,” she remembers. “It just seemed like a great fit.”

She was given a tour on that day last year by developer Gene Townsend, who was renovating the house for the Ingham County Land Bank. Around that same time, Rizzi and her business partner, Sandra Neuman, had won a contest through Inc. Magazine to meet with entrepreneurial guru Norm Brodsky in New York. He advised her that she must move out of her 300-square-foot office and into something bigger and better. This house was it.

Though she had the desire and the advice to move into the building, there was still the issue of purchasing the $225,000 building. Luckily, the Land Bank was much more sympathetic to her cause than, say, an out-of-state multi-national bank.

She met with Mary Ruttan, executive director of the Land Bank, and Ingham County Treasurer Eric Schertzing, who chairs the Land Bank’s executive board. “I told them what we wanted to do, and they loved my ambition and the fact that we would respect that it has a history to it,” she said. “This was their first commercial sale, so I was really proud to be a part of that.”

Rizzi worked out a deal that most banks would probably balk at in the midst of a recession/foreclosure crisis. The Land Bank granted her two years to pay off a $25,000 down payment. The rest of the payments will be made on a land contract — where the buyer forgoes traditional financing and pays the seller in monthly installments and takes care of taxes and insurance.

But the Land Bank benefited, too. It sold its first commercial property, and breathed life into the mostly vacant 130-year-old School for the Blind campus. Now, less than a year after opening, Rizzi Designs has added four employees (bringing it to 15) and the property is back on the tax rolls.

“Its the socio-economic mission that (the Land Bank) has to revitalize people as much as the properties,” she said. “Whether you start with the people or the properties, its meeting in the middle, its working to make people appreciate what we have.”

The Land Bank is coming up on its fifth anniversary, and though some of its activities have been highly publicized, the Land Bank’s mission and inner workings might be missed by the general public. Gradually, the Land Bank is forging a reputation as an innovative and successful local public developer, filling in some of the broken teeth on the county’s urban areas and taking hold of properties that might other wise deteriorate in the hands of careless property owners.

The benevolent authoritarian

When asked where Ingham County would be without the Land Bank, Schertzing plays it a bit modest. He says that the recent housing crisis has been so huge (asked if he saw the crisis coming back when the Land Bank was established in 2005, he says, “I dont think there would have been a way to predict” that it would get so bad) the Land Bank has only been a “small response.”

The Land Bank has been able to “rally the troops to some issues,” Schertzing says, like providing foreclosure prevention. But the best thing the Land Bank has been able to do, he supposes, is create a few positive stories out of all of the bad economic news. Take, for example, the old Deluxe Inn south of downtown Lansing. The property, which was in mortgage foreclosure, was a sad den of crime and extreme poverty. Lansing’s Human Services Department swept through after a murder and found residents living in squalor; eventually the department went to court to evict some tenants. Last September, the Land Bank bought it from Business Lenders LLC, the bank that owned it, for $400,000. Just a few weeks ago, the property was turned into a canvas for graffiti artists. Soon it will be demolished after being used as a training ground for firefighters, and Schertzing hopes to see it someday become the site of housing catering to urbanites.

The graffiti project was so successful, Schertzing said, that some people want to preserve pieces or purchase them for their homes.

Another heartwarming Land Bank story: It took a couple of vacant lots in the east Lansing Urbandale neighborhood — properties in a flood plain — and leased them ($1 per year) to two gardening experts. Now the neighborhood, recognized as being in a food desert — residents lack reasonable access to groceries — has an urban garden and access to fresh food.

To the delight of some, the Land Bank was also responsible for the demolition of the old Dollar Nightclub on Michigan Avenue near Frandor.

These examples show the incredible power of the Land Bank. That is, to take an interesting idea and run with it. It does not appear, yet, at least, that the Land Bank is crippled by bureaucracy or politics. If Schertzing and the Land Bank board — which includes Ingham County commissioners Debbie DeLeon, Dale Copedge, Rebecca Bahar-Cook and Deb Nolan — think it’s a good idea to let some graffiti artists paint a shuttered motel, all they have to do is say, “Yeah, go ahead.”

This is in line with the Land Bank’s mission: “Just to make the place better,” Schertzing said.

Blight and delight

The man synonymous with Michigan’s land bank system is Dan Kildee, the former treasurer of Genesee County, briefly a potential 2010 gubernatorial candidate and a co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Community Progress.

Up until 1999, properties that went into tax foreclosure in Michigan hung around for up to seven years. Tax-foreclosed properties are often in bad shape and susceptible at foreclosure auctions to being scooped up by buyers who might just let the properties rot. In 1999, the state Legislature passed a law that allowed counties to take possession of tax-foreclosed properties after just two years. The legislation also allowed tax foreclosures to be done all at once and for the title to pass immediately to the county government. This gave counties control over properties. In 2004, the Legislature created a law that would allow counties to create land banks. Kildee created the state’s first land bank in Genesee County (which followed the Genesee County Land Use Revitalization Council). With a land bank, a county can tear down substandard properties, renovate decent ones and sell them off. (The land bank model existed long before Michigan: St. Louis and Cleveland began land bank programs in the 1970s, followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Atlanta and Louisville, Ky.)

Though Kildee and Genesee County were pioneers in land banking in Michigan, that county and its principal city, Flint, are much different from others. Schertzing, whose job as treasurer includes pursuing delinquent property taxes, almost gets nervous when Kildee and Genesee County are mentioned.

“When Im thinking about Saginaw and Flint and Detroit and Dan and the Genesee model, I had a pretty tough time figuring out how that would apply to Lansing,” he said. The scale of deteriorating properties is smaller in Ingham County. In fact, Schertzing said that at first he was skeptical Ingham County needed a land bank. What tipped him in that direction, though, were the tax-foreclosure auctions.

“It seemed to me that we needed an alternative to just a crass auction that kind of let the bottom feeders into the market that couldnt care less about what happened in the neighborhoods,” he said.

Schertzing put together the state’s second land bank in 2005 — it was a little under the radar, amid a hot Lansing mayoral election — as an alternative to those crass foreclosure auctions. In 2005, the Ingham County Land Bank came into possession of 21 miscellaneous little properties from the city of Lansing (some were just a few feet in size). But in 2006 it got a number of useful properties. One of those was a home at 5926 Laporte Drive in south Lansing. The Land Bank renovated the property, which ended up being its first sale. (However, a recent visit to the property turned up a crew of workers cleaning up what appeared to be a fire inside the house.)

In 2007, at the height of the housing bust, the Land Bank started buying more mortgage-foreclosed homes. Schertzing estimated that the Land Bank has about 425 properties in its possession, a mix of commercial and residential and vacant parcels. Precisely 159 of those 425 properties have a structure. This year, the Land Bank will demolish or start the demolition process on about 60 homes (20 have come down, 20 more were begun last week). Renovation on 14 homes was recently completed, and 12 more are under renovation.

The Ingham County Land Bank has a budget of $6.5 million, derived from proceeds from property sales, federal stimulus funds and reimbursable income. Sometimes the Land Bank will establish a Brownfield tax increment financing (TIF) district on a property. The Brownfield captures future property taxes and can be borrowed against for financing; so if the Land Bank wants to tear down a home, it can use the TIF to borrow money for the costs, then pay it back later with captured taxes. The Land Bank also has a $5 million line of credit with PNC Bank (backed by Ingham County). Schertzing estimated that the Land Bank owns — between vacant properties and renovated houses — about $20 million worth of assets.

The Land Bank also has the effect of putting properties back on the tax rolls. Schertzing says they’ve been able to do that with 40 or 50 properties in five years — but since the Land Bank is so young, that rate could easily grow as time goes on. (You could say the Land Bank is laying the groundwork for a nice comeback in property tax revenues.)

The Land Bank has a staff of eight, including Schertzing and two other county treasurer employees. Its office (appropriately, in a foreclosed house) is at 422 Adams, a tiny street between Cedar and Center streets south of Old Town. A lot of work is contracted, from the upkeep of properties’ lawns, to general contracting.

Lansing Developer Gene Townsend has worked as general contractor on several Land Bank projects. One coup was the rehabilitation of a home at 1039 N. Chestnut St. into a LEED certified house. LEED — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — is a building standard for “green” houses.

“They have the leeway to do whatever needs to be done to meet their mission,” Townsend said. “Thats the whole idea of a Land Bank, to use the taxing power of government in a way that is completely creative.”

Townsend is in the midst of rehabilitating two other homes for the Land Bank — both in the Churchill Downs neighborhood in south Lansing — funded by federal stimulus funds. In partnership with the city of Lansing and the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, the Land Bank has been a steward for Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds. Some of that has gone into tearing down homes, but some to renovations, too.

Townsend was also chosen by the Land Bank to create a master plan for the redevelopment of the entire School for the Blind campus. The Land Bank owns, by Schertzing’s estimate, about one-third (11.5 acres) of the property; the rest is controlled by the Lansing Housing Commission and the Mid-Michigan Leadership Academy, which has operated a charter school at 730 W. Maple St. since 1996, and bought its building from the state in 2006. The property is essentially an entire college campus smack in middle of north Lansing and is predominantly abandoned. Such a project could be the Land Bank’s largest yet.

Condo luck

“I’d like to get a couple of more things knocked off in REO Town,” responds Schertzing when asked if the School for the Blind will be the Land Bank’s next high-profile project.

He’s speaking of the old Deluxe Inn, at I-496 and Washington Avenue, as well as a project with developer and environmental consultant Alan Hooper to renovate the former Ramon’s Restaurant farther south on Washington. Hooper recently purchased the building from the Land Bank for $116,000.

But the School for the Blind is on the radar. A couple of years ago, the Land Bank did a marketing study of the area, and formed a plan to develop 15 condominiums near Rizzi’s new headquarters. Schertzing said he would like demolition to begin sometime next year on 10 acres of former dorms on the west side of the property.

Though the Land Bank has an ownership interest in the property, it still has to collaborate with the city of Lansing on the overall design of the property.

But things are moving along at the School for the Blind. The Greater Lansing Housing Coalition is in the process of renovating the former library building into a “neighborhood empowerment center.” That building — perhaps yet this year —will be the coalition’s headquarters and contain city of Lansing and Land Bank offices, plus host early education classrooms.

“I think what will happen after the neighborhood empowerment center is open and recognized as a neighborhood opportunity is there will be more interest generated in the development of those buildings,” the Housing Coalition’s executive director, Katherine Draper, said of the still-abandoned buildings on the property. “Theres a lot of ideas, a lot of players. We have to proceed cautiously because all the people involved in that development have to agree with what is going to be done there.”

Another player (or players) looking to make something out of the School for the Blind property is Lansings theater community. Oralya Garza, vice president of the Lansing Civic Players board, has a vision that two pieces of the property — the cafeteria and auditorium buildings — would become a performing arts center. The Lansing Housing Commission owns the building, but Garza said the commission agreed to let her tour the buildings this week. She also foresees a visual arts component.

"The bigger plan is creating an entire arts community on the School for the Blind property using the existing buildings," Garza said.

Garza mentioned the fledgling Stormfield Theatre, run by former BoarsHead artistic director Christine Thatcher, and the award-winning Peppermint Creek Theater as potential users, in addition to the Civic Players. Having a home at the School for the Blind, Garza said, would allow the Civic Players to expand its at-risk youth theater program.

Schertzing said that while he has concerns about how to pay for a theater, “an arts community can work."

"It comes down to what is necessary to create that place that people want to live and work and play in. Theater certainly fits that bill," Schertzing said.

Garza came at the arts community idea as a way to serve the surrounding neighborhoods, teaching young people how to create art in their backyard.

"It might be pie in the sky, but if we dont try, nothing happens," Garza said.

The Land Bank has also made an effort to rehabilitate homes in the neighborhood surrounding the School for the Blind to try and restore the neighborhood. Schertzing said the Land Bank has renovated six houses there so far.

The School for the Blind opened in Lansing around 1880 on the site that was formerly the Michigan Female College. The school, which had moved from Flint to Lansing, closed around 1995.

Townsend’s master plan depicts roughly 70 units of various types of housing, including a few rentals but mostly condos, some with interiors facing a park, others over shops. The school’s running track would be preserved but turned into a mini-nature preserve at its north end with a water fountain and a blind of trees. The plan also has space for parking, which Schertzing says anticipates a special use, like a theater.

Small Wonder

The excitement in Rizzi’s voice is noticeable when she talks about the “grassy knoll” at the School for the Blind property. Rizzi looks at the area and has a vision to put a sculpture garden there. And she’s contacted none other than the School for the Blind’s most famous graduate, Stevie Wonder, to be a part of it. Rizzi says she’s working with the Lansing Housing Commission to acquire the knoll and is putting out an request for proposals for artists to submit ideas for the sculpture garden.

Last month, Rizzi Designs was hired by the Land Bank to be its marketing department. Rizzi will redesign the website and do marketing outreach for the Land Bank. The slogan it has come up with is, “Create (blank).” In the “blank” is space for the words “place, community, opportunity.”

“Theyre creative in renovating, but also how to solve problems,” she says. “They really truly want to make Ingham County bigger and better.”

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