I honestly doubt that it's harder to finance now. Maybe earlier pre-recession, but demand is so obviously strong that it has to be at least as easy to finance now as when Stadium District was built.
Just my opinion, but probably more than financing and more than anything I think it's probably the Gillespie Group beginning to show it's size. It's obviously still not big enough where they can do more than two projects at once. And since it's only Gillespie Group developing downtown we're probably going to continue to see this relatively slow pace of development short of some larger developer coming in. There could obviously be a residential high-rise in downtown Lansing with all of the apartments the Gillespie Group has filled, but they don't have the means/connections to do something so ambitious. So, yeah, I think it has to do with GG being the only circus in town aside from Ferguson Development, and they don't really do downtown stuff.
Gillespie isn't going to grow his company in any meaningful way or do anything more ambitious until some outside comes downtown and shows him up in his own city.
Prior to the recession we had projects like East Village and City Center II being proposed in East Lansing. Those projects can't get anywhere near the financing that was talked about back then, so I don't think the markets have fully recovered.
But SkyView is a good example of the financing opening up. I think it is still increasing and hasn't hit its full potential yet. I can't wait to see what the next few years bring.
And none of those had financing back then, either, and that was as apparent with City Center then as it is now. Developers were simply more ambitious and confident/wishful that when these projects did get to that stage of development they'd be able to go to the banks. I tend to remember very few projects making it to the stage where we were talking about financing. More to the point, and it's kind of ironic, but it seems that developers were even more reliant on public tax breaks and incentives then than they are now.
There was an article in the LSJ today about Lansing having one of the best housing markets in the country, now, but that's been true for quite awhile since the recession. The actual city has been growing again for three years now, which is something that couldn't even be said during the "boom" years right before the recession. I really do think it has less to do with financing and more to do about competion and the recession having weeded out the hucksters. You had a lot of people proposing stuff that wouldn't have been built regardless, and this is particularly clear of the projects we saw proposed in 2006 that were still making excuses as to why their weren't shovels in the ground right up until the crash at the end of 2008.
I guess I'd enjoy hearing from non-Gillespie developers on this issue, myself, to settle this.
Lansing was on the cusp of a boom at the worst time possible. A bunch of seemingly promising projects were proposed in 2007/2008, right before the worst real estate and financial market crash in a long time. I'm pretty confident that if those projects proposed during that stretch had started just a year or two earlier they would have happened. Before the recession money was insanely easy to come by, it's disappointing that downtown Lansing didn't benefit much from the pre-recession windfall. Money is nowhere near as easy to come by now as it was pre-recession, that's slowly changing but we probably (hopefully?) wont see anything like the few years leading up to 2007 ever again.
I was impressed by the State Journal articles that pointed to infrastructure as a place that is holding Lansing back. I think that the terrible state of the roads we have today are a legacy of the austerity government starving policies that were the wrong reaction to the recession, and proof of failed governance. Those same austerity people today were responsible for the recession in the first place. the free market easy money people promoted people to buy things they really could not afford, I think it may have been a good thing that some projects did not get started back then if they were going to be based on getting easy money. I think Lansing is coming back in a kind organic way, that the place itself is a nice place to live, kind of in spite of government turning it's back to a lot of issues here. I think that we use to have large local banks that had a greater interest in local development. I don't know but I don't think any bank here is locally owned. There is also still a let's spread out over the prairie mentality that is always seeking the next farther out ring of development, This could be changing. Perhaps the fact that the city is growing again points to that change.
Looks pretty nice. View from that upper apartment is awesome! I really liked the old proposal for a 6-story building here - it would have actually showed up on the skyline - but I suppose this kind of mid-rise infill is the name of the game in Lansing right now.
I think it looks OK now that it is done. The building photographs well and looks good on TV sports reports. Still they could have done better in many areas that have been discussed already. The corridor between Cedar and Larch is the perfect place for high rise apartment buildings. It would great to see more north south development there to go with the east west of Michigan Ave development.
So, I have been noticing some promising upgrades on buildings to the north of the outfield, along the strip bounded by Cedar and Larch, between the outfield/stadium and the motorwheel apartments area, but I haven't been able to find a good thread to post comments about this area of Lansing. Is there one, or should I start a new thread?
Comments
Just my opinion, but probably more than financing and more than anything I think it's probably the Gillespie Group beginning to show it's size. It's obviously still not big enough where they can do more than two projects at once. And since it's only Gillespie Group developing downtown we're probably going to continue to see this relatively slow pace of development short of some larger developer coming in. There could obviously be a residential high-rise in downtown Lansing with all of the apartments the Gillespie Group has filled, but they don't have the means/connections to do something so ambitious. So, yeah, I think it has to do with GG being the only circus in town aside from Ferguson Development, and they don't really do downtown stuff.
Gillespie isn't going to grow his company in any meaningful way or do anything more ambitious until some outside comes downtown and shows him up in his own city.
But SkyView is a good example of the financing opening up. I think it is still increasing and hasn't hit its full potential yet. I can't wait to see what the next few years bring.
There was an article in the LSJ today about Lansing having one of the best housing markets in the country, now, but that's been true for quite awhile since the recession. The actual city has been growing again for three years now, which is something that couldn't even be said during the "boom" years right before the recession. I really do think it has less to do with financing and more to do about competion and the recession having weeded out the hucksters. You had a lot of people proposing stuff that wouldn't have been built regardless, and this is particularly clear of the projects we saw proposed in 2006 that were still making excuses as to why their weren't shovels in the ground right up until the crash at the end of 2008.
I guess I'd enjoy hearing from non-Gillespie developers on this issue, myself, to settle this.
Lobby:
So, I have been noticing some promising upgrades on buildings to the north of the outfield, along the strip bounded by Cedar and Larch, between the outfield/stadium and the motorwheel apartments area, but I haven't been able to find a good thread to post comments about this area of Lansing. Is there one, or should I start a new thread?
There is a Stadium District thread where you can post about this area.