Town in transition

Decades ago, East Lansing’s rapidly changing residential make-up began influencing the policies and decisions that continue to shape the city

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Acknowledging the past is crucial to fully understanding the present and conceptualizing the future. East Lansing is no different. The community in the city has balanced ever-changing relationships among students, residents, MSU and the city’s government since the university was founded in 1855.

Everything the city of East Lansing has done historically to help balance the scales influences how the community changes in the future.

To some, 20 years go by in the blink of an eye. To others, that amount of time is an eternity, East Lansing City Councilmember Kevin Beard said.

“A lot of folks come to East Lansing and think it’s always been this way,” said Beard, a city resident for more than 25 years. “It really takes a long time to see a significant change. In some respects it seems like a long time, but the city is always changing, albeit slowly.”

About 20 years ago, while a vast array of problems and issues confronted the area, East Lansing began to shift toward the city residents know today and laid the foundations for the urban center destined for the future.

The student population

East Lansing was built around a university, and with that university comes a significant student population.

The thousands of MSU students who call East Lansing home make the city special, said state Rep. Mark Meadows, D-East Lansing, a resident for more than 30 years and a former East Lansing mayor.

“You have to accept that if you want to live here,” Meadows said. “There’s a vibrancy and energy in a university that you don’t find anywhere else. In terms of lifestyle, it’s something that has to be enjoyed.”

But about 20 years ago, as student renters began to live in closer proximity with residents, problems arose.

A shift in rental habits in the last quarter of the 20th century created tension between renters and residents in neighborhoods that historically had been MSU faculty and staff. Some undeveloped neighborhoods on the east side of the city started to develop when standards were low.

Conflicts between renters and their full-time neighbors existed due to the nature of lifestyles. Students might have partied late into the night, disrupting families trying to sleep. Residents might have chosen to mow the lawn early Saturday morning, waking a student from a weekend snooze.

“During that time period it was okay for 10 people to live in a house and nobody really cared,” Meadows said.

“But it did create a lot of noise and conflict in the neighborhoods.”

The rental shift brought problems to the city, as East Lansing didn’t have proper rules in place to keep students — and landlords — in check.

Neighborhoods close to campus began shifting to student rentals at a rate faster than the city initially could keep up with, but in the late ’80s and early ’90s, officials found where restraints needed to be and began to work them into code.

“We began to recognize there were types of housing more appropriate for students,” Meadows said.

“We wanted to create a status quo, create expectations. If you’re moving into a rental neighborhood, you have an expectation, if you’re moving into a traditional neighborhood and (it) starts to go rental, it screws up all your plans for your property.”

The president’s view

While tension between renters and residents built, a range of minor to serious crimes added to an East Lansing that barely resembles today’s town.

Drive-by shootings, shotgun hold-ups and armed robberies dotted the crime map in the ’80s and early ’90s.

There were numerous problems the city saw during that time that it doesn’t see much of today, East Lansing Police Chief Tom Wibert said.

“You just can’t imagine those types of things happening now,” said Wibert, an MSU alumnus. “East Lansing is a lot less violent.”

Students felt they could get away with anything, 1993 MSU graduate Jack Conway said.

“There was a strong feeling you could get away with murder,” he said. “This was before the Internet — students did things knowing there was no way they could get caught.”

In addition to crime, the city also had to find solutions to sometimes-disruptive student lifestyles.

Some problems existed because of a lack of sufficient ordinances. In the ’80s, when Wibert was new to the police force, ordinances prohibiting open alcohol containers were nowhere to be found.

“They’d have a regular hand and another hand with what seemed like a permanent appendage — a cup of beer,” he said.

“We had more people walking around with a cup of beer than not.”

Noise violation calls showed Wibert where many problems with residential neighbors came from — noise, filth and run-down houses.

“We’d get called to a noise violation, there would be a live band in the back yard and 20 kegs — the huge, bodacious parties that just don’t happen anymore,” Wibert said.

Police would respond to calls to find holes in ceilings, windows without glass and fungus growing in carpet — all things that can lower a neighborhood’s value.

Wibert said he realized it was time to change the city’s appearance while on security duty for “The Great Debate” between presidential candidates Ross Perot, Bill Clinton and George Bush in 1992.

While checking the Clintons’ room at the East Lansing Marriott Hotel at University Place, 300 M.A.C. Ave., Wibert looked out the window to see what the future president would look out to during his stay in East Lansing. What Wibert saw — “sacks of trash, fast food cups, a car that had been abandoned and weeds were growing up around it” — left a lasting impression on the future chief.

With a glut of crime problems and an absence of adequate ordinances, police and city officials knew changes had to be made to ratchet up East Lansing’s reputation and quality of life, especially with growth soon to take place.

A growing town

For many years, East Lansing was considered a bedroom community — a home to the university and suited to cater to the students of MSU.

The city began a transformation to become a more comprehensive community, said Jim van Ravensway, East Lansing’s former director of Planning and Community Development Department.

“In the past, it was always viewed as a suburban community adjacent to the state capital and MSU, not much beyond that,” he said. “That began to change in the ’80s, and the thinking there was that it had to begin to generate its own economy.”

With that change of thought, city officials began looking differently at the downtown area. A fundamental shift started to make downtown East Lansing more than just a commercial strip on East Grand River Avenue, but a core to the city with uses for everyone.

Van Ravensway said 15 years ago, changes to the city began to accelerate.

Officials realized the city needed to expand in size and ensure financial stability to be a self-sustaining community.

“East Lansing went from being an older, built-up community to a community that had grown in size and became a city that had its older area and developing areas,” van Ravensway said.

“That was something new to East Lansing. Suddenly it found itself similar to suburban communities. In a position to grow.”

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