Act now to ensure diverse housing options in Lansing

In wrapping up 2024, I’d like to share the latest on a year-long effort supported by housing and neighborhood civic groups (Allen Neighborhood Center, southwest Lansing’s SWAG, Ingham County Land Bank, Ingham County Trust Fund, ASPPIRE, Spartan Housing Co-op), myriad neighbors, small-scale developers and AARP to embrace incremental development and shared-use housing in Lansing.

Shared-use housing is a catch-all term that includes an assortment of housing options including duplexes, rooming and boarding houses, co-ops, cottage developments and back-yard granny flats (called ADUs for Accessory Dwelling Units). Gradually increasing these diverse housing options is one strategy to address the serious housing shortage in our city, as opposed to just erecting lots of apartment buildings. Housing diversity ensures that we have more than single-family homes to offer to:

the roughly 30% of Lansing adults living alone, e.g., the young adult arriving in town for a new job, a traveling nurse, a visiting professor or a newly divorced friend who requires some private space as well as shared space where they can enjoy the company of others in a rooming house or boarding house;

seniors interested in building an accessible ADU behind their homes to accommodate a family member, or a caregiver to assist with daily needs, or simply to provide retirement income;

a newly arrived young adult refugee or a baby-boomer drawn to living in a housing cooperative which provides private space and access to shared space and a support system; or

folks drawn to a cottage development where residents might gather in a shared courtyard for evening conversation, or gardening, or to share a moment with immediate neighbors.

As regular readers of this column know, a group of about 40 Lansingites have been working over the past year to advocate for more shared-use housing in our neighborhoods. This year, the city Planning Department crafted proposals to reduce barriers to ordinary people creating these housing options in our neighborhoods. The zoning approvals process has been long and thorough. Once drafted, the proposals went through an internal review by various city departments.  Then the city’s Planning Commission scrutinized them over three meetings, ending with a unanimous endorsement. Now the proposals are in Council’s hands. 

A public hearing in October drew 22 people and several speakers from the Shared Use Housing Network, residents of housing cooperatives, the developer of Lansing’s only cottage development and a slew of AARP members dressed in their signature red shirts. (The AARP is one of the largest supporters of ADUs in the country.) Not a single person spoke against the proposals. One speaker was neutral, simply offering a caution about parking.

As customary, the proposals were then returned to the Council’s  Development and Planning Committee. Rather than forwarding the proposals for a Council vote, the committee tabled them until Wednesday (Dec 11) in order to give the Planning Department more time to educate   Council member on the proposals. We can only hope that the clear, strong and growing support for more inclusive zoning will prompt the committee to advance the proposals to the Council for a full vote soon.

Lansing’s new zoning proposals are relatively modest and similar to those of 22 Michigan cities that have already approved backyard cottages and other forms of shared use housing. City leaders in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Manistee, Holland, Ann Arbor, Traverse City, Oscoda and others see these changes as helpful in creating more and more diverse housing in a tight market. And the 22 cities are among dozens throughout the nation that have opted for more inclusive zoning and other forms of “gentle densification” as a response to the national housing crisis. Frankly, I’m hard-pressed to figure out what people might be afraid of in these new proposals.  

Recently, someone expressed concerns that shared-use housing might create too much work for an already stressed code compliance department. Let’s look at this. 

First, the thing about incremental development is that it is … incremental.  The likelihood of scores of co-ops or ADUs or cottage developments or boarding houses popping up in a few months or even a year is unlikely.  What we hear from officials in Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor and Traverse City is that people move slowly to take advantage of these options and that the change that occurs in neighborhoods is not jarring but rather presents as a gradual thickening or densification of the urban space. 

And, over time, this gentle densification draws more transportation options, more small service businesses and more robust use of local parks and green spaces.

There is nothing to lose here, but much to be gained — pretty painlessly and without damaging the fabric and feel of the neighborhoods we love. We’re talking about incremental changes that respect local context and also, by the way, happen to generate steady if modest revenues in increased property taxes and income taxes for city coffers as more people find an appropriate place to live in our neighborhoods.

I wonder if there is something else at play here — perhaps just a general uneasiness about change in our neighborhoods? But here’s the deal: Our neighborhoods are always changing. Isn’t it best to have an adaptable, resilient neighborhood, one that can absorb neighborhood-initiated and incremental change to meet the diverse housing needs of our neighbors?

Charles Marohn, founder of the nonprofit media advocacy organization Strong Towns and co-author with Daniel Herriges of “Escaping the Housing Trap,” suggests that “to address the dysfunction at the root of our housing problems, we need to shift our approach. We must move away from a model in which large developers and centralized financial institutions have unprecedented sway over what is built and where, to a more antifragile housing ecosystem in which the bar to entry is low, and every neighborhood can undergo incremental change over time.”

In their book, Marohn and Herriges lay out a practical roadmap for incremental, community-driven change that begins with creating more inclusive zoning that allows for diverse and often more affordable housing options such as those included in Lansing’s zoning proposals.

Input to the Council at this point is critical. Please make a call to your councilmember or send an email to City.council@lansingmi.gov.

Thank you in advance for speaking up in support of more homes for more and different configurations of people that live in our city and our neighborhoods — or for people who want to live in our neighborhoods, if only there was appropriate housing.

(Joan Nelson is the retired founding executive director of the Allen Neighborhood Center. Her column appears monthly.)