Ingham County Land Bank director envisions potential in shuttered school site

Matthew Miller

Lansing State Journal

June 10, 2013

“The cabins” are squat brick dormitories that once housed students from the Michigan School for the Blind.

They form a partial ring around a crumbling running track in the northwest corner of the property. They’re due for demolition before the year is out.

“There hasn’t been anyone interested in redeveloping this site with these on here for several years,” Jeff Burdick observed.

Burdick, the new executive director of the Ingham County Land Bank, was walking the property, past boarded-up windows and painted-over graffiti.

The land bank is getting nearly $837,000 from the state’s share of a settlement with five of the nation’s largest mortgage servicers over faulty foreclosure practices. The money will be used to clear “blight” from the School for the Blind property, which in this case means buildings that may be structurally sound, but are ridden with asbestos and ungraceful besides.

The cottages will go, a dining hall and a maintenance building. A disused auditorium is last on the list, the hope being that someone will come along with the wherewithal to save it. Together, the demolitions comprise the largest single project on the land bank’s horizon.

Burdick, a Michigan native and an urban planner by training, has arrived at the land bank at a moment of transition. In one sense, the organization never has had a larger footprint. The years ago, it owned some 600 properties. It now owns upwards of 900, valued at an estimated $10 million, and officials are expecting that number to grow.

“If we’re at 900 now, we’re likely to be at 1,000 at the end of the year and 1,100 the end of next year,” said Ingham County Treasurer Eric Schertzing, who also is chairman of the land bank. “We’re still in this cycle of more challenges coming at us than we’re able to work our way through.”\

At the same time, the millions of dollars in federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program money that buoyed the land bank’s operations over the past several years have run out.

In the sense of how many renovation and demolition projects the land bank can afford, “we will be, in all likelihood, a smaller organization,” Schertzing said, though he anticipates annual budgets in the $3 million-to-$5 million range.

It also will be a more flexible organization. The federal money came with stipulations that effectively turned the land bank’s efforts toward single-family homes scattered across the city and the county.

“We did less of our own thing,” Schertzing said.

The end of that money will both allow and require a more strategic approach.

Schertzing and Burdick both talked about a near-future focus on mixed-use, mixed-income residential developments along Lansing’s major corridors.

The city has taken a renewed interest in its most visible thoroughfares. Bob Johnson, the city’s director of planning and neighborhood development, said Lansing’s corridors don’t give the best impression, said and “we want to change that perception.”

The idea is that the land bank, which has acquired some well-situated properties over the years, can support that.

But the larger shift may be in finding ways to work with private developers, Burdick said,“if we can find private developers or builders willing to take on these properties,”

“We need to have a little bit more of a hands-off approach and trust that the private market will do right by these neighborhoods.” The question is whether the real estate market has recovered sufficiently, whether the work paid for here by the Neighborhood Stabilization Program has been sufficiently effective, for developers to take an interest in the sorts of properties that typically come to the land bank through the tax foreclosure process.

Burdick spent more than six years working for the Genesee County Land Bank before his wife’s work took them to North Carolina in 2010 and then back to Michigan last year. She’s a veterinary behaviorist, a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University.

By the end of his time in Genesee County, the land bank owned thousands of properties. “We just couldn’t keep up with the maintenance,” Burdick said.

The situation in Ingham County is different, he said. “It’s a large enough number for you to have an impact, but it’s a small enough number where you can get your hands around the situation.”

At the School for the Blind site, he sees possibilities. The logic of the demolitions is to clear the way for rehabilitation of the columned administration building and the former high school, both owned by a nonprofit called the Great Lakes Capital Fund.

But the teardowns will also open up land bank-owned property on the site’s western half. Burdick is imagining townhouses, maybe apartments. “This can really have a great effect on the surrounding neighborhood,” he said. “It’s such a large site.”