It has been less about the developers and more about the drain commissioner. The public part of the project needs to be approved before the developers can get started. From my understanding the latest city council agenda for Lansing shows that they've now handed over the easements needed for the project. If this is true, a start of this next month would seem likely.
Drove by this morning and noticed that the trees around the are mostly cut down. Sad to see them go as some are pretty large, but it's definitely a sign of progress!
I'm excited. I never really believe these projects are happening until I see construction (or clearing or something) start. Really didn't believe Skyvue was going to happen, seemed too good to be true, until demolition began.
LANSING – The Red Cedar Renaissance project on Michigan Avenue is expected to include two boutique hotels - a Hyatt Centric, Moxy Hotel - along with a medical office building, five restaurants, 129 town homes and student housing that can accommodate 1,200 people, developers said.
Construction on the $380 million Red Cedar Renaissance project is slated to begin on June 1, said Joel Ferguson, president of Ferguson Development. Ferguson has partnered with Frank Kass, chairman of Columbus, Ohio-based Continental Real Estate Cos. on the project.
A Hyatt Centric is a modern-style boutique hotel that incorporates the work of local artists into the room design and typically includes a restaurant and bar. Moxy is a Marriott brand that markets itself as an affordable boutique hotel geared toward the Millennial generation. Renderings show the Hyatt Centric at nine stories tall and the Moxy at five.
Site plans show two retail buildings that will sit across from each hotel, totaling 39,000 square feet, which will accommodate the restaurants and shops. Three-story town homes will also be located there. The medical office building will be constructed west of the main development near the corner of Michigan Avenue and Clippert Street.
The student housing complex will be southwest of the main development, with an access road off Reniger Court. Once built, it will be managed by Columbus, Ohio-based Hallmark Campus Communities.
Between the student housing and town homes, the development could bring in roughly 1,500 residents.
As for the trees:
For every tree torn down to make way for the project, three more will be planted he said.
And:
Ferguson said he will develop parks along the south edge of his development where he can construct ice rinks, bike trails and a pavilion for outdoor concerts.
“It’s the best of both worlds,” Ferguson said. “Besides having these things that people have to pay for … we’re going to have a venue for free activities. People will be able to get something out of this property.”
This is much bigger than my what I was expecting. The Hyatt will have more floors than Skyview right across the street and that was substantial addition. This is huge! So exciting for downtown/East Lansing. Especially for all of the additional restaurants and other businesses that will surely pop up within the area as a result.
Love that their keeping some areas open for parks and they have planned for them. This could be a very busy hub in the Frandor area. Fingers crossed that this spurs some more density around Clippert.
The renderings don't quite match up with the descriptions (the rendering for the Moxy shows 7 floors instead of five. The rendering for the Hyatt shows 10 or 11 regular floors instead of nine). I suspect the Hyatt will be very similar to Skyview in height. Either way, they will both be fairly substantial hotels, and I look forward to more refined renderings to give us a better idea of what they'll look like. I'm also interested in seeing the renderings for the rest of the project (the retail buildings, townhomes, student apartments).
I'm particularly excited to hear about the three-story townhomes. Hopefully, with three stories, they'll be something a bit more substantial in design than your typical suburban townhome developments. Hopefully, they'll end up looking more like the On the Grand condos up in Old Town as opposed to the three-story Autumn Park condos built at the back of the Meridian Mall.
This looks very nice, and so much better than past concept drawings. The nice parks and flowing streams and ponds are going to make this really unique,that and a clean Red Cedar are really benefits to the community you don't often find in big developments. The fact that they could include the environmental factors and hopefully good design and plan to make a profit shows me that other developers could do better in both areas if they wanted too.
I hate to be a downer, but in this case, this wasn't so much the developers wanting to do better and more the fact that this was really just the interests of the public and the private sectors fortunately meeting each other for once. The county has been federally obligated to fix the run-off from Frandor into the Red Cedar. On the other side of this, private developers saw a close golf course with offered the last large plot of land on an avenue the region is trying to redevelop. These two are actually and technically/legally two different projects. The county likes it because the development will bring money into the county's coffers to offset the cost of the environmental drain project; the private developers like it because it will bring in money for them. Both sides "win." As the article states, it's still not a done deal, because they haven't exactly coordinate with one another. The drain commissioner is kind of infamous for not working on a developer's schedule when he approves projects in drain districts. It's probably better to characterize this as an the uneasy relationship dance that has just to happened to coincidentally been working out as of late.
Either way, it is nice to see when interests meet like this even if for more cynical reasons. The developers are putting in a bit of extra work and put up with the headache of developing around the drain commissioner's schedule because they realize how valuable a location this is and with the additional bonus that they are getting this valuable location at a discounted price since the city owns this and and the city (and county) both have interests in seeing this land developed as opposed to some private owners charging them full price for the land. A good example of this face is that the old car dealership couldn't be included in the project while the city owned golf course was.
It's just nice to finally have a start for construction, June 1st. I wonder if the trees being cut down and the speculated April start for earth moving could be related to the drain project?
I wouldn't make much of the renderings of the hotels or the floor counts in the article since they're inconsistent with each other and the site plan. Also, the development agreement specified that the hotel needs to be a minimum of 10 floors and 200 room so some sort variance would be needed for a nine floor hotel.
Yeah, quite a few details needs to be worked out. The article could be talking about just regular hotel floors; the requirement could be talking about total floors (including mechanical). All that remains to be worked out, but it's good to see some more massings and preliminary renderings.
I wonder when we'll see a project website for the development? Because that would surely include more renderings. I'd been kind of surprised a permanent website hadn't popped up quicker for this project.
Comments
Some rouge prelim concepts, I assume:
Hyatt
Moxy
Hyatt Centric, Moxy hotels slated for $380M Red Cedar Renaissance
As for the trees:
And:
Love that their keeping some areas open for parks and they have planned for them. This could be a very busy hub in the Frandor area. Fingers crossed that this spurs some more density around Clippert.
I'm particularly excited to hear about the three-story townhomes. Hopefully, with three stories, they'll be something a bit more substantial in design than your typical suburban townhome developments. Hopefully, they'll end up looking more like the On the Grand condos up in Old Town as opposed to the three-story Autumn Park condos built at the back of the Meridian Mall.
Either way, it is nice to see when interests meet like this even if for more cynical reasons. The developers are putting in a bit of extra work and put up with the headache of developing around the drain commissioner's schedule because they realize how valuable a location this is and with the additional bonus that they are getting this valuable location at a discounted price since the city owns this and and the city (and county) both have interests in seeing this land developed as opposed to some private owners charging them full price for the land. A good example of this face is that the old car dealership couldn't be included in the project while the city owned golf course was.
I wouldn't make much of the renderings of the hotels or the floor counts in the article since they're inconsistent with each other and the site plan. Also, the development agreement specified that the hotel needs to be a minimum of 10 floors and 200 room so some sort variance would be needed for a nine floor hotel.
I wonder when we'll see a project website for the development? Because that would surely include more renderings. I'd been kind of surprised a permanent website hadn't popped up quicker for this project.