Work begins on east side’s Allen Place project

Demolition begins this week on the 1600 block of East Kalamazoo Street to make way for Allen Place, a multi-pronged community hub with 21 apartments, a health clinic, and a new storefront for the long-dormant East Lansing Food Co-op.

Allen Neighborhood Center’s executive director, Joan Nelson, hopes the ambitious project, set for completion next fall, will help the neighborhood retain older residents, spur more development in vacant buildings and lots along Kalamazoo Street and boost a surge of activity on the east side centered on the growth and distribution of local food.

The $11 million project, sponsored by the Allen Neighborhood Center, will be financed by private donations, a grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corp., a federal New Market Tax Credit and $850,000 from the state Dept. of the Environment and Great Lakes and Energy for environmental cleanup.

The core of the project is a new three-story building that will go up on the Allen Street side of the block, now a parking lot where the outdoor farmers market used to be held. (It’s moved to Michigan Avenue.) The top two stories will be filled by 21 apartments and the ground floor will be split evenly between the health clinic, run by the Ingham County Health Department, and ELFCO.

About one-third of the apartments will be “affordable” and the others will be market rate, Nelson said, “although there isn’t a whole lot of difference on Kalamazoo in the east side.”

People of all ages are welcome to live at Allen Place, but Nelson said the 21 housing units are designed to attract people 55 and older who might otherwise leave the neighborhood. She already has a list of 35 prospective tenants, from millennials to seniors.

“We’ve become a millennial magnet on the east side, and I love all the young families and kids, but it’s disconcerting to see people who have lived all their lives here moving to a 300-unit complex out in Mason,” Nelson said.

In 2005, the ANC began talking with the out-of-state owner of the 1600 Kalamazoo block about buying its aging cluster of buildings outright. The block is presently vacant, except for the Allen Neighborhood Center’s headquarters, outreach office, indoor market space and incubator kitchens where classes and workshops are held.

The talks went nowhere until about two years ago, when the owner signaled he would be open to selling the complex. At about the same time, Nelson said, “an incredibly generous benefactor” from New York offered the ANC a loan to purchase the buildings, plus a $300,000 grant to “offset the vagaries of construction.”

The ANC bought the complex in August 2018 and immediately partnered with Cinnaire Solutions, the development arm of the nonprofit Cinnaire, to get financing and to work out a design.

Preliminary work entails cleanup of “all kinds of toxic activity known to man,” in Nelson’s words, and has been underway for weeks. Three tanks from Al’s Gas Station, at the corner of Kalamazoo and Sheridan streets from the late 1930s to the 1950s, will be removed. The 1619 E. Kalamazoo storefront was home to two dry cleaners, a notorious source of chemical residue.

An $850,000 Brownfield cleanup grant from the state’s Dept. of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, will cover the cleanup.

A 6,000-square-foot space on the block’s Sheridan street side will become a “solar courtyard,” with a solar micro-grid and solar dock picnic tables, in partnership with the Lansing Board of Water and Light.

The apartments, health clinic and food co-op are all key elements of the project, but Nelson has her long-term sights set on making Lansing’s east side a showcase for the growth, preparation and distribution of local food. Despite the pandemic, all of the ANC’s food programs grew significantly this year, including the weekly farmers’ market and a popular “veggie box” program that brings produce from dozens of local farmers to consumers in weekly shipments.

“One of the many fault lines COVID exposed was how precarious food systems are, and supply chains for food products,” Nelson said.

The ANC already runs an incubator kitchen, with culinary classes for low- to moderate-income people.

Allen Place’s planned “accelerator kitchen” will take the program a step further, shepherding entry-level food entrepreneurs through the process of establishing a business. In time, Nelson hopes to see new food trucks, diners and restaurants spring up on the east side as these programs come to fruition.

The presence of ELFCO at Allen Place promises a reliable, year-round market for local produce and the culinary creations coming out of the kitchen accelerator.

With Allen Place as a catalyst, Nelson envisions a “food innovation district” extending from Hunter Park on the west, with its year-round greenhouse and acre of cultivated parkland, to Foster Park on the east, with its gardening education center, surrounded by acres of urban farms.

Nelson is eager to take the Allen Neighborhood Center to a new level, but she emphasized that despite a solar-powered bell and whistle here and there, Allen Place sticks to the same community-building basics of health, food and housing.

“This is an extension of what we’ve been doing for the last 21 years,” she said. “We’re just upsizing our work.”