When you drive into downtown East Lansing on Grand River Avenue, the first thing you see isn’t the selection of shops and eateries that Downtown East Lansing has to offer. 

No, it is the blighted, beat-up buildings spanning from, just past Crunchy’s on Grand River Avenue, all the way to Abbott Road – East Lansing’s Park District. 

One of the rundown building on the corner of Abbott Road and Grand River Avenue used to be the site of a Citizens Bank, which closed more than 10 years ago and has been abandoned since. The other buildings have seen businesses come and go, with none being able to sustain itself for a long period of time.

The buildings are an eyesore and some business owners and operators in the area find it detrimental to their businesses.

“I think it hurts it a lot,” said Joe Conrad, the owner and founder of Conrad’s College Town Grill.  “I mean the city kind of ends at the corner of Abbott and Grand River, and it should be continuous, all the way to Crunchy’s, it should reach over the park. Instead you’ve got three vacant city blocks basically.” 

Kristin Nelson, a key holder and employee at American Apparel, near the corner of Abbott Road and Grand River Avenue, said the area should invite people into downtown by showing them what the city can offer, but instead might drive some away. 

“I think it kind of makes the appeal of this strip kind of lower,” Nelson said. “Because when you’re out driving this way it’s the first thing you see and your first impression is ‘oh, there’s a whole bunch of abandoned buildings around here.’” 

“It probably hurts the businesses that are closer to it because people get the first impression when they see it that it might be a bad area, or there might not be much to offer over there.”

That could change within the next few years however, as there is currently a plan in the works to demolish seven properties near the corner of Grand River Avenue and Abbott Road, including the old Citizens Bank building, in order to build up an eight-story, multi-purpose building. 

Two months ago, the East Lansing City Council approved the plan for the project and has since started conducting a finance evaluation on the Planning Development Investment Group’s (PDIG) plan to fix up the area. 

“We are working through the question of ‘does the city finalize our portion or our participation?’,” East Lansing City Manager George Lahanas  said. “Like I said there’s some public owned buildings and also a question of giving them incentives, so the city is doing a financial review of that development entity for us to determine if we would recommend the council go forward or not.” 

Lahanas said the sale of the land needed to make the project happen would be easier now, since voters approved an amendment to the East Lansing city charter last month that made it so the city only needs a 50 percent majority vote to sell city owned land except parks, instead of the previously needed 60 percent vote. 

Lahanas said the proposal came about after the city only received a 57 percent approval vote to sell some city owned land to DTN Management Company last November, to assist in their plans to help redevelop the area.

“We had partnered with a developer, DTN, through a public process about two years ago and we needed to sell several parcels of land to make that project go forward. That failed last November,” Lahanas said. “At some point our interest is to move that land forward for development; have the land redeveloped back to a productive use for the community.” 

Lahanas said the city has not had talks with DTN since the proposal passed, but hopes they do in the near future. 

Lahanas also said that while the city does not have a concrete timeline for when this could be done if it moves forward, members of city council are optimistic something will happen sooner rather than later.

“We have seen a lot of great interest in our downtown, lots of people come downtown for different things, and so overall I think we are very optimistic,” Lahanas said. 

But Joe Conrad has a believe-it-when-he-sees-it sort of mentality. 

“I get a newsletter, that claims they’re discussing some plans, but I’ve been getting that for eight or nine years with nothing being done,” Conrad said.