Just out of curiosity, is it students or other people causing problems? How serious are the situations? I guess it just surprises me with East Lansing, but I'll admit I don't spend a lot of time out there, especially not at night.
The answer is "some of both", but a major source of the problem does appear to be non-university-students who, basically, have decided that downtown East Lansing is now a great place to show up and start some trouble. University students themselves are actually remarkably well behaved, even when drinking - they may forget how to get home, but they rarely start fights.
As to how serious, I'm only estimating this number, but based on the radio chatter very early last Sunday (around 2:00 AM), I would guess about 15 police vehicles from other agencies were called in to assist basically all at once (Meridian, Delhi / Ingham County units, Lansing PD, and even Clinton County). I am not counting MSU units in that number who will show up without specific request (EL and MSU share the same radio channel). You can hear panicked or out-of-breath East Lansing officers calling for any backup they can get, and trying to shutdown the entire downtown area.
I am grateful for the good windows in my building for keeping out most of the crowd noise at night, except for in the bathroom where the sound travels through the ventilation! I have talked about this before, downtown East Lansing has become an entertainment district for the whole city [Greater Lansing], so the students are the outsiders. I don't know who is starting fights, but in my experience living in a summer resort party town for many years it is over serving alcohol, and too many places selling alcohol that causes most of the problems. It is sad to say but more enforcement, detain drunks, and cops on the street can help. Out in Provincetown they call it personal protection, they spend the night on jail and are released the next day in most cases with no charges. They also close the bars at 1am. One less hour does make a difference. Teaching people how to behave in public could help.
I think there is enough blame to go around between townies and students, they are all supposed to be adults if they are going out to bars, I wish someone would have taught them how to behave.
Redevelop Cedar Village into mixed use district and approve Spartan Gateway. This will spread the masses of young people with multiple options to congregate safely and still have fun. Also diversify the offerings, more bubble tea, arcades, breweries (sit down drinking establishments like peanut barrel, harrison road house, crunchies, and ellison brewery). Create business incubators for small businesses and start ups. Why not redevelop brookfield plaza into mixed use as well? Add traffic calming measures along east Grand River, Albert Avenue, and Michigan Avenue and make them complete streets. Put peripheral parking garages in Brookfield and the "Evergreen avenue Parks district" to help with congestion, and then people can walk and walk 200 feet to their destination. This would also be helpful on game days. If anyone has looked at the Peanut Barrel's facebook page it is flooded with replies (from non-students) about how they just walk there and not use the lot behind it anyways. Bring MSU medical to downtown EL. Redevelop the Grove street parking garage and city hall into a mixed used buildings to expand the downtown area and make it less linear and more square. Build the farmers market structure in Valley court. I think all of this would help but, what do you guys think?
You know, I'll let other people reply on the specifics, but a big question for me is just - will East Lansing continue to grow? I do not know. We do have the heavyweight of MSU sitting right here. Demographic changes (people not having enough babies) are actually already starting to hit some institutions, but at the university level, what we seem to be seeing is consolidation in the big institutions (which is what we have here), while the little ones, especially the little ones in the tiny towns, go out of business. But our climate doesn't help us either - people move to Arizona and Texas and Florida for the weather, they (for the most part) want to get away from places like Michigan. So I just wonder what the population will be in twenty years, forty years.
Fun fact - when I toured the East Lansing / Meridian Township water conditioning plant, they mentioned that when the plant was built (in 1972), space was reserved to build a mirror image of the plant right next to it, because population projections at the time said that in a couple of decades, East Lansing + Meridian Township would have grown enough that they would need to double capacity. Well, it's 2026, and they still haven't built the mirror side of the plant.
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As to how serious, I'm only estimating this number, but based on the radio chatter very early last Sunday (around 2:00 AM), I would guess about 15 police vehicles from other agencies were called in to assist basically all at once (Meridian, Delhi / Ingham County units, Lansing PD, and even Clinton County). I am not counting MSU units in that number who will show up without specific request (EL and MSU share the same radio channel). You can hear panicked or out-of-breath East Lansing officers calling for any backup they can get, and trying to shutdown the entire downtown area.
Fun fact - when I toured the East Lansing / Meridian Township water conditioning plant, they mentioned that when the plant was built (in 1972), space was reserved to build a mirror image of the plant right next to it, because population projections at the time said that in a couple of decades, East Lansing + Meridian Township would have grown enough that they would need to double capacity. Well, it's 2026, and they still haven't built the mirror side of the plant.