The flood zone kind of cuts diagonally across the area bound by Clemens on the west and Michigan-ish on the north. It really shows how if water gets in through the Kalamazoo Street opening in the freeway, how hard it is to get out since all the natural outlets to the south are closed off by the freeway. The Harton Street Pump Station is in the end of the district, but I think that's just a sewage pumping station; I'm not sure if there are any separate stormwater pipes for just the neighborhood that feed into it for local stormwater removal.
What the township did do for their section of Urbandale (east of Mifflin and south of Michigan) is rezone it all to "commercial" use to get the homeowners out of their as the property owners sell or die out. It's also why any multi-family residential that does get built over that way has the ground floor parking instead of apartments on the ground floor. But, this area would do much better in the city. But the city doesn't want it particularly because of its location and state.
It's funny, because I did some local history research on this area a few years back, and read through a lot of old Lansing State Journal articles on it, and it's been a bad area since it was developed. Like you said, parts of it were basically a shanty town. One article speaks of how people were renting out old chicken coops for housing and of course those didn't have running water or any sanitary infrastrucure, and I think the BWL or county had them clean this up. This was maybe even as late as into the 40s.
The irony of it all is that in the late 50s, Lansing did try to annex nearly every section of the township on the eastside, and it was actually approved. But it was then overturned on a technicality because it was included in an annexation that also included a small part of Delta Township on the westside. Then the laws changed a few decades later which made annexation almost impossible. So...here we are in this mess of jurisdictions. lol
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What the township did do for their section of Urbandale (east of Mifflin and south of Michigan) is rezone it all to "commercial" use to get the homeowners out of their as the property owners sell or die out. It's also why any multi-family residential that does get built over that way has the ground floor parking instead of apartments on the ground floor. But, this area would do much better in the city. But the city doesn't want it particularly because of its location and state.
It's funny, because I did some local history research on this area a few years back, and read through a lot of old Lansing State Journal articles on it, and it's been a bad area since it was developed. Like you said, parts of it were basically a shanty town. One article speaks of how people were renting out old chicken coops for housing and of course those didn't have running water or any sanitary infrastrucure, and I think the BWL or county had them clean this up. This was maybe even as late as into the 40s.
The irony of it all is that in the late 50s, Lansing did try to annex nearly every section of the township on the eastside, and it was actually approved. But it was then overturned on a technicality because it was included in an annexation that also included a small part of Delta Township on the westside. Then the laws changed a few decades later which made annexation almost impossible. So...here we are in this mess of jurisdictions. lol