Acres and Pains: Farming Against Blight in Lansing

Unsavory characters.

You probably love black and white photographs of urban decay. You, like me, probably like to stroll down shadowy streets and across forgotten lots in the rain, just trying to figure out what it all means. Do this in Lansing, however, and your ruminations risk being derailed by increasingly surreal scenery: deserted expanses peppered with... rain catchments? Sketchy neighborhoods, full of loitering... chickens? Large, empty white houses... harnessing the power of the sun to grow beans!? 

Having done a few years of residency south of Kalamazoo street, I can attest that urban blight does lose its charm eventually. It takes a toll on the senses, and has a life-eroding quality for anyone living in proximity to it. When part of a city begins to decay, it's is a cyclical problem: rough neighborhoods get rougher, nonresidents avoid them altogether, and they become a haven for criminal activity. 

The Ingham County Land Bank is one of many organizations striving to reverse that tragic momentum every day. Under the auspices of keeping a chronicle on cutting edge and local food culture, I sat down with the Ingham County Land Bank's Garden Program Coordinator and composter child for urban renewal, John Krohn, to learn more about his efforts.(And to see if there's any way I can one day realize my dream of building a labyrinth on city land.)  

G: What's the Land Bank?

J: The Ingham County Land Bank is a division of the Ingham County Treasurer’s office. The Ingham County Treasurer is the person who is responsible for collecting property taxes, and when someone is behind on their property taxes— I think it’s 3 years—their property gets foreclosed on, and repossessed. That can include any property in Ingham County, but most properties are in Lansing, because that’s the area that’s been hit hardest by foreclosure. It’s been beaten to death so many times I hesitate to even bring it up, but the whole housing collapse/crash/bubble a few years ago, that really jeopardized and disenfranchised a lot of people. Because all of a sudden people couldn’t afford to pay their mortgages anymore. Their house wasn’t worth anything. They’re paying a huge mortgage and property taxes on a house they can’t sell. You can see we have a map here. Some our hardest hit neighborhoods, such as Baker-Donora, which is a notoriously rough neighborhood, you can see how many properties we own here.

G: So these green patches are Land Bank property?

J: Yes. And red ones are ones that were ours and we’ve sold. And actually a whole new batch of green parcels will be coming into the system because foreclosure time is in April, I think. The treasurer’s office forecloses on properties and then they basically give them to the Land Bank. Sometimes the City of Lansing is the one that forecloses on people for city taxes, and they can also, in many cases, give them to the land bank. The end goal for us is to get it all back into private ownership, so that it’s back on the tax rolls. More tax base for the city, and stabler neighborhoods, you know, is another big goal of ours. When you start having so many houses go down, when there are very few houses left, you start having this Detroit thing going on. Nobody wants to move in, it’s a cycle that just escalates. We try to stop that from happening by assessing what neighborhoods are vulnerable and targeting them for rehabilitation or building of new houses. We’ve gotten some federal grant money, as part of neighborhood stability programs. There’s been a few of them; they give us grant money to build new houses. Nice modest houses for low income people in these vulnerable neighborhoods.

When the vacant land comes to us, there are a few different ways it can be disposed of. It can be sold at auction as is, with or without a structure, and sometimes that happens. It could be held onto because we have specific plans for something. Sometimes we see a cluster of specific parcels that we have control of, an area like Old Town, where there are density goals. They’d like to have more people living up there, so there are more people in walking distance of the shops and stuff like that. So if we have a few parcels close together, that are on a corner for instance, we might say we’re not going to sell these off at auction. We’re not going to build a single family house on this. We’re going to wait until one or two more parcels open up and put an apartment building here. The housing side of it isn’t my purview, but I know a little bit about it.

Despite the signs, this building was locked.

So properties can be sold at auction, or they can be banked like I described. Some of them are immediately redeveloped using federal money. The vast majority of standing structures we get are demolished. So we’re left with a lot of vacant parcels. Some get rebuilt on, others remain vacant. Some of the houses are nice, and have historic features and still solid bones, so we rehabilitate some houses and put them back on the market. We partner with many private real estate agents, we have a bunch we work with, to market those houses to people. In some cases they are income-based, specifically targeting lower income people. The ones that aren’t go really quickly, because they’re really nice houses for really good prices. So when a property doesn’t get rehabbed, sold at auction, or doesn’t have a new house built on it, it’s just vacant land sitting in the city, that’s where I come in. I’m the Garden Program Coordinator.

One day this will all be yours.

My program assesses these lots for viability to be farmed, or gardened. Really, it’s not just farming and gardening. Options include anything related to agriculture or food systems. One fellow is a soil science researcher at MSU, and he wants a plot just to research natural methods of soil remediation. He's researching certain plants that uptake heavy metals or other contaminants. It’s called phytoremediation. So he’s using his parcel as a research project, but it all relates to healing the land and making it more usable again. The stuff that he does is closely related to food systems stuff, through soils sciences.

G: Does someone have to have a food-related or food systems-related goal in mind to get a contract with the land bank?

J: Beautification is also under our purview. 

G: These are contracts, correct? Not leases.

J: Exactly. They’re not leases. The contracts say that in exchange for stewardship of the land, which includes having to mow the lawn, and shovel the sidewalk in the winter, you can do what you will with it, as long as it’s for an approved use.

G: How much does it cost?

J: It’s dirt cheap. $25 to sign up, and you don’t have to pay property taxes on it. You can farm for profit if you want to.

G: So it’s literally just labor and $25. But there are limitations. Since you guys approve things case-specifically, you’re not going to let somebody build a Ferris wheel.

J: A Ferris wheel might be OK.

G: Bad example.

J: People can’t build permanent structures on the land.

G: Do you have other examples, or outstanding cases?

John's reveals his plot (of land).

J: One woman entered into a contract because there’s this beautiful large oak tree. She thinks it's one of the oldest oak trees in Lansing, and it’s in a corner parcel that’s right next door to her house. She just wanted to see this oak tree preserved. So she just entered into a contract for that purpose. So she’s just doing beautification. Saving a tree, maybe planting a few, putting in some flowers, maybe putting in a park bench or something like that, so people can sit under the tree and enjoy its shade. It’s like a pocket park that’s maintained by one private individual, instead of by the city. We had another one just recently over in the Moore’s Park neighborhood where an old store had gone down. It had been owned by this Polish family for generations and part of the family still lives in the neighborhood. They just wanted to see it look nice and kind of be a memorial to a family business that was there for years and years. So they got a contract for that. Just to landscape, put in some rose bushes, maybe a bench, and just make it a nice looking area. It’s kind of a gateway into their neighborhood, too, because it’s right on the outskirts.

G: How long do these contracts last?

J: We typically make them for one year, and if a person shows that they have been a good steward, we can do three years. Our biggest parcel we call Webster Farms. It’s fourteen contiguous acres. It’s mostly woodlot and swamp. Subdivisions all around it, they couldn’t build anything there, because the water table was just too close to the surface and it’s too swampy. That’s how that got saved. But we did clear about 2 acres of it and start a farm that our significant refugee population here in Lansing farms. There are almost 100 Bhutanese, Nepali, and Burmese families farming that.

G: For their own sustenance, or for profit?

Urbandale Farm

J: Some of them sell through their own channels in their own community. This is between Pleasant Grove road and Hughes road. It’s inspirational, because they’re all farming using their native methods, so it doesn’t look like the way that we garden. And they’re growing crops that are foreign to us. So it’s pretty interesting. That’s a partnership between the Land Bank and the South Lansing Community Development Association. We’ve got other community gardens that are partnerships between us and the garden project of the greater Lansing food bank. For instance, this one in Orchard Court, this is almost completely gardened by refugee families. So our partnership with different community agencies is very beneficial.

With these community gardens we have gardens for personal use, people giving things away to family. We’ve got people trying to make a go of being a commercial market farmer. We’ve got people who just want to beautify their neighborhood. You can’t park cars on the plots, when it’s related to the garden program.

G: So no game day parking, then.

J: Yeah, you can’t get a bunch of lots and offer parking for Lugnuts games. But anything that falls within either agriculture or naturalizing spaces aesthetically, or anything relevant to food systems, is appropriate.

G: You said you have plenty of available land?

J: Yes. Even the tiniest one of these green rectangles is a full city lot. The driveways have all been torn out, the basements filled in. So even the tiniest one is still sizable.

John is the garden program coordinator, but his coworkers at the land bank are trying to find creative uses and interested businesses for many vacant buildings across Lansing. His office is a space of generous half-cubicles whose residents trawl for grants, negotiate deals, and court entrepreneurs, for the sake bringing life and activity back to Lansing's neglected spaces.

J: We’ve thrown around all sorts of ideas for what you could do on a land bank parcel. You could have a sculpture park, you could put in a labyrinth. ]

G: Now you’re cooking with gas. I know you said that just for me.

J: Yeah, you could do anything that’s going to be cool, that’s going to be a community asset.
For every steward that the Land Bank contracts, that’s snow removal and mowing that they don’t have to pay for. So it’s in their best interest to court interested parties. Taking on a land bank contract requires labor, but it also contributes directly to the city budget. The less we have to spend on maintaining these lots, the more we can spend on restoring houses and building low income housing. So it’s really helpful.

A local farm. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lansing-Urban-Farm-Project/114311701955132

Though John stresses that such measures are very early in the planning stages, he’d love to see a path to ownership for agricultural stewards. He’s also enthusiastic about establishing an urban agricultural zone. This would provide assurance to prospective contract farmers that there would be no subdivision going up next door. This could also pave the way for relaxing other restrictions, such as the number of chickens one may have in their yard. (The cap is currently five chickens.)

J: If people could farm with 100 chickens on city land, they could begin supplying interested local businesses, places like the Soup Spoon. When I get my East Side Chicken,  it could literally come from the east side. 

For more information, you can contact John Krohn directly at:
jkrohn@ingham.org
or refer to the Ingham County Land Bank's website:
http://www.inghamlandbank.org/