Eye Sore of the Week: 4511 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Lansing

It doesn’t get much worse than this week’s featured property. Fortunately for nearby neighbors, the Lansing City Council ordered the owner last week to make repairs within 60 days or face demolition — and the five-figure bills from the city of Lansing that routinely come along with it.

Ingham County records show the dilapidated home is owned by Alan Investments III LLC, a real estate investment firm based in South Carolina that doesn’t identify its owners in state records. Multiple phone numbers found for the company and its registered agent, Todd Merson, were dead. City officials, like City Pulse, also haven’t had much luck contacting the owners, they said.

Nobody representing the property attended multiple committee and City Council meetings over the last few months on whether the city should demolish the building. The owners now have under two months to voice an objection and prove they have the ability to fix up the place or the city intends to bulldoze the house to the ground — likely when the weather warms in spring.

Councilman Jeremy Garza said the home requires an estimated $61,000 in repairs before it would ever pass inspection from code enforcement. He also noted that the basement is filled with water and that the home’s front yard has long been the “site of many illegal dumpings.”

We spotted a shopping cart next to a battered garage in the backyard. The gravel driveway has been almost entirely swallowed by overgrown grass. The doors and windows are boarded up.

Photos filed in city records show the rear of the home is missing nearly all of its exterior siding.

The inside isn’t much better. Drywall has been stripped from the walls. Trash has been scattered throughout. It’s unclear from the pictures whether the home is fire damaged or just majorly filthy.

And this one has been a long time coming: The original red tag notice on the door is from 2018.

The bright spot: Unless the property owners step forward (for the first time in years) to take responsibility for their property, it doesn’t seem we’ll be forced to see this mess for much longer.