General Westside/Delta Township/Eaton County Development

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  • Yeah, sorry, Days Inn. We were back in town last summer and at the time they hadn't done anything yet.

  • edited August 2018

    Auto-Owners Insurance is building a fairly major expansion:

    DELTA TWP. — Auto-Owners Insurance is getting bigger. The company plans to build an additional 250,000-square-foot office building at its Delta Township headquarters, enough to house up to 900 people, said Jeff Tagsold, the company's CEO and chairman.

    Auto-Owners occupies about 850,000 square feet of office space in Delta Township. Construction on the expansion project will start next year and wrap up in 2021, Ward said. The new building will be east of a current Auto-Owners building located south of Interstate 496 on Millett Highway.

    I'm confused by their description of where this is going to be. Not only is Millett Highway not anywhere near the current headquarters, but there is nothing down that way south of Mt. Hope which is zoned office save for a tiny little office building used by Meijer at Millett and Creyts.

  • I think someone has a broken g.p.s. at the LSJ.

    There was an interesting story about a 13 million dollar real estate transaction in the mmj industrial park in Windsor Township behind GM! It looks like some local investors have scored pretty big with a New York company. It was for only thirteen of the 180-acre park and perhaps indicates the large amount of money that is going to be made and taxes paid with the new agricultural product Marijuana!

  • My guess would be that they meant Mt. Hope Hwy instead of Millett. Auto-Owners already owns a former BCBS building there and the surrounding land.

  • edited August 2018

    Thanks. I'd remembered that they did have some plan for a parcel on the other side of the freeway some years ago, but couldn't remember if they originally completed the project. I think they were going to build a new building back then and instead just bought the BCBS building, and I'd forgotten until you said it that they'd purchased that property. That makes WAY more sense.

    So it sounds like they are restarting the construction project they had put on hold. Like Jackson National across town, I tend to remember it was supposed to be some data processing center or something. But it sounds like they've changed the scope and this will be general office space.

    Oh, it seems the LSJ has updated the photo with a story mentioning this is a view looking southeast from Auto-Owners "South Campus":

    So, yeah, they are obviously talking about developing this office building on the same parcel as the current south-campus building (former BSBC Building) is on.

  • Lots of news coming, lately. Waverly Golf Course and Michigan Avenue Park has sold. From the LSJ:

    LANSING TWP. — The former Waverly Golf Course has been sold to a Grand Rapids developer for $2.2 million.

    The 121-acre site between Michigan Avenue and West Saginaw Highway is in Lansing Township, but is owned by the city of Lansing. Lansing Mayor Andy Schor announced Wednesday that the developer and city had closed on the sale.

    The profit from the sale will go toward the City of Lansing Parks and Recreation Department.

    Reminder of the current tenative plans:

    In June, Lansing Township's Board of Trustees unanimously approved the rezoning of the golf course.

    The proposed development would consist of 204 apartments, 52 multi-family duplexes, 76 townhomes and 101 single-family homes. Plans for the site also include 120 units of senior housing and 145,000 square-feet of commercial and office space. Site plans call for a 45,000 square-foot box retail building.

  • This is such a large area and it could be such a great green space with cool denser urban-style development, the plan I saw is not that. I look at what they built behind Eastern High and wonder why they built something that looks like a sub-urban anywhere "development in a cornfield" in the middle of the city? This new location could be a very interesting challenge for a developer or just another " what we did before works so why change and do something different" that looks like just that Verndale area to the west. We can always hope for excellence and some community input and maybe this will evolve.

  • edited October 2018

    A few recent observations and updates while driving on West Saginaw this summer/fall (moving from east to west)...

    1. The former thrift store next to LLB Asian Foods hasn't had a for-sale sign up in a while. Does anyone know what's going on there? I talked to the folks at the Asian food store and they said they tried to lease/buy the building about a year ago but someone else got it.

    2. The new bank next to Admiral Petroleum is going up quickly.

    3. The old reserve center complex(?) on the north side of Saginaw is still up for sale; I'm not even sure what one could do with one of these. Turn it into a megachurch? Open a remote college campus? This location would be great for a development if someone would come in and knock down that huge, outdated building.

    4. The new buildings at W Sag/Harriet that have gone up to replace those ugly old 70s office buildings look good, with decent quality construction materials, considering what they are for (fast food/strip mall type retail).

    5. Yonkers has closed in the Lansing Mall. Given current trends, I'd say this mall's days are numbered anyhow.

    6. The old medical building at 6100 W Saginaw (where the BBQ trailer had been located all summer) is being torn up. Not sure what's going in there...

    7. It looks like the childcare center they build right above Carrier Creek is finally open. I still don't understand why this location was developed - there was an old house torn down, and there were a couple massive retaining walls built just to carve a spot out for the building they put on this site... it's not like there's a shortage of buildable commercial space along this W. Saginaw...

    8. Old news, but Horrocks continued to expand last winter to fill more of their massive lot. I'm curious what they'll be building this winter!

    9. When I last drove by, the development on Canal and Saginaw looked to be well underway, with the hotel going up behind the recently finished resturant/retail shops fronting Saginaw.

    And some parting shots... I've mentioned this before, but I really think W. Saginaw would look MUCH better with buried power lines. After all, this is the main drag for Delta twp/Waverly. Imagine all those blightly power lines gone, and the street lighting augmented with some artistic/historic looking poles like elsewhere in the Lansing area. Consider also that this is only about 4 miles of lines as well. Finally, going with the "main street" theme, W. Saginaw could really use more landscaping and some green space at more regular intervals. Perhaps that old reserve center could be turned into a huge twp park and civic center??? Food for thought...

  • The building going up next to Admiral is a Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen.

  • edited October 2018

    The long-empty facility at 4300 West Saginaw was the John W. O'Rafferty High School which opened in the early 60's. Apparently, it was already gone by 1970 when they consolidate it with St. Mary's - at the current Catholic Central stie - and renamed the comined school Lansing Catholic Central.

    Honestly, they probably need to just tear it down and rework that land. There is no single tenant that big - the building is 140,000 square feet - that'd want to move into a building that old. The township would be better off splitting the lot up; the whole lot is a ridiculous 24 acres. The old field beind the property could literally fit about two-dozen single family homes of the type similar to the residential neighborhood. Anyway, the Eyde's own it and are marketing it as a possible call center or data center. Yeah, good luck with that. lol

    Delta Township did have a "downtown" plan years ago (early 00's, maybe?). It never panned out. I think it was going to be a form-based code kind of thing around the Lansing Mall.

    I was out at Horrock's the other day. I hadn't ever been in the part to the north-northwest past the garden center. It's really a gem; the whole thing has become overwhelming in the best way; it makes me sad because it reminds me of what something like the Lansing City Market could have been right in the heart of the city. Whenever I have family from out of town come in and I take them there they are always super impressed. Not every city has a place like Horrocks.

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