Thursday, March 28, 2024

Downtown housing perfect for students

If you build it and price it for them, they will come. And in numbers large enough for twelve stories worth of buildings.

Last week, the East Lansing City Council authorized the breaking of ground on an eight-story, mixed-use building near the downtown Ann Street Plaza. The project — brainchild of A&G Partnership developers David Krause and Doug Cron — will have a little bit of everything: retail space, housing and parking. The developers also have plans to construct the St. Anne Lofts, a four-story, mixed-use building that will be mainly dedicated to retail space and housing, while also featuring an open-air restaurant.

These two construction projects hopefully will be a fixture in downtown East Lansing for years to come.

Students should be most excited about the new housing opportunities. Ten total stories of apartment space in the middle of downtown sounds like it’d appeal to students.

MSU has a ton of students, period. Students need places to live, whether that’s on or off campus. With the recent redesign of the Brody Complex Neighborhood, the university has done its part in offering attractive, affordable housing for students who want to live on campus.

Both of these buildings, when completed, hopefully will offer enticing housing at reasonable prices for students who might not want to stay on campus anymore, such as juniors, seniors and graduate students.

Housing in the heart of the “bar district” will be sure to attract students who can afford it. The location is ideal because it is both close to campus and in the middle of East Lansing’s nightlife. That being said, if the housing is too expensive, students will find other places to live.

But it’s in the best interest of the city and the developers for the housing to be relatively inexpensive and to maintain a student presence “downtown.” If the price of housing exceeds what students are willing to pay, trying to sell those apartments to older, more professional consumers creates a little cognitive dissonance and friction between the values of those consumers and the locale.

Basically, that location is tailor-made for students, and pricing them out of it would be a mistake.
By no coincidence, the building will finish in August 2012, just in time for the 2012 fall semester, when students will be in need of housing.

In addition to offering (hopefully reasonably priced) housing, the building also offers a small amount of retail space and the expansion of downtown parking.

The retail space, on the ground floor of the building, can add to the diversity of downtown businesses, and the parking relief is necessary because of the assured increase in traffic that the construction of the building will attract.

This is a step forward for the city, one that will reshape the feel of downtown into an attractive place for students to live, not just work or play. With construction set to begin in a few weeks, the look of downtown East Lansing is set to change within the next year, in a way we hope will be welcoming to students.

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