Eye Sore of the Week: 20th anniversary edition

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Eyesore: 20th anniversary edition

This week’s eyesore arrives through a deep dive in our archives and takes a look back at the very first blighted home featured in City Pulse’s Eyesore of the Week, way back in July 2004. 

Good news: The home no longer exists. The neighbors bought the land in 2010 after the city ordered the decaying home on the property to be demolished in 2005. In its place is a freshly mowed lawn and a cute little vegetable garden, which looks like it’s just about ready for harvest.

The three-story Tudor-style home that once sat on the property between Martin Luther King Jr. and Butler boulevards west of the Capitol was owned by MSU alumnus and former NFL player Duane Young. Empty since 1988, the boarded-up windows, peeling paint, precarious downspouts, overgrown bushes and busted roof was enough for the city to have the place demolished in 2005. The address no longer exists. Nothing has been built there since. 

The land now serves as a way to give the neighboring lot a bit more breathing room — with a picturesque garden to boot. The property no longer poses a safety risk, so that’s a bonus too.

Young — who spent five years with the Chargers and won a SuperBowl ring in 1994 — had owned as many as 20 homes across Lansing by the early 2000s. The city of Lansing filed suit to gain control of 13 of those dilapidated properties by 2006. Young’s family publicly recognized that their rentals had not been kept in great condition but still pleaded with the City Council for a second chance. At one point, they even offered to make them available to Hurricane Katrina evacuees. The Council still voted to demolish at least three more of the homes before 2007.

A search of Ingham County parcel records show that Young no longer owns property in Lansing.

City Pulse went on to feature at least one more of Young’s properties in this column, as well as hundreds of other seedy properties across Greater Lansing for the next 17 years (and counting).

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