walker
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Posts posted by walker
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The biggest real estate news in a long time:
FREE PRESS: GM will relocate headquarters from RenCen to Bedrock's new Hudson's building
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2 hours ago, RegalTDP said:
Grand Rapids is on the list, with a big fat zero in homicides so far.
WOODTV: One person was shot and killed in Grand Rapids Saturday morning, police say.
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On 9/18/2023 at 9:19 PM, walker said:
. . . Although not mentioned in the story, in many places hedge funds have been buying up old mobile home parks like these and then have been jacking up the lot rents to intolerable levels because the existing residents can't easily move away without either abandoning or moving their not so mobile home. So having a respectable non-profit such as Family Promise as an owner would at least be an improvement over a predatory hedge fund.
Above is the last paragraph of a post I made last September about Family Promise buying up a couple of local trailer parks to house the homeless before any hedge funds did.
Today Mlive has a story about pretty much what I was writing about. Deep in the story there is a local connection concerning a business that provides rental data to the alleged co-conspirators:
So far there is no paywall -
MLIVE: Price-fixing cartel- Big Michigan mobile home park owners accused of conspiracy
EDIT: There now appears to be a paywall. Here's a backway into the story that so far works via NEWSBREAK:
NEWSBREAK: Price-fixing cartel- Big Michigan mobile home park owners accused of conspiracy
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37 minutes ago, GRDadof3 said:
Kara Wood had shared this on her linkedin, but I didn't get a chance to read it until now.
It does read very strange. Like those national online pubs that came out 15 years ago (IST's, not Rapid Growth or ModelD). They seemed heavy on fluff, like this one does.
Having quotes from locals makes it seem more legit, but part of me wonders if those quotes were lifted from other pubs or events. I'm pretty sure the Dick Devos quote is from an economic summit or something that he spoke at.
I'd hang out with someone with green hair any day.
Actually, it wasn't really the green hair I had a problem with so I probably deserved the comment RegalTDP made about my post. It was the marketing part of her LinkedIn that made me skeptical. There was nothing there that I could detect that said to me credible journalist. Instead it made me think of a publicist managing to get a client's name in a publication.
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If they would have planned ahead, rather than Corewell, they could have rebranded Spectrum as Fairbanks Health (a much nicer sounding meaningless name) then there would be no problem with the street.
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Big expansion of the terminal announced today. They are going to expand and consolidate all the ticketing area to the west and the baggage handling to the east. From the looks of the requisite photo of the officials and politicians with their shovels moving a pile of dirt, I think they were digging on the wrong side of the street from the terminal. Keeps them out of the way I guess,:
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7 hours ago, Pattmost20 said:
Forbes released an article called 5 Ways A Growing City Can Define Their Brand. Grand Rapids was used as the example for all 5 items.
This is just my skepticism I suppose but I don't take seriously articles written by marketing people with bright green hair:
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On 4/5/2024 at 7:48 PM, GR_Urbanist said:
But this just blew my mind. Like seeing a cruise ship on the Grand River. I wish all gas stations oriented themselves like this!
Or maybe I'm just easily impressed. Could be.
I mentioned your comments to my wife as we were driving east on 54th today and we were coming up to this building. I explained to her how this was a preferable urban design having the building right along the sidewalk and next to the bus stop. Partly I think because she was in a mood to cause trouble and argue with me, she said the idea that they planned this to be urban friendly was ridiculous and they probably just placed the building there because that was the best fit for the lot.
For some reason the Kum & Go people think it is a good idea to build three new stores fairly close to each other along 54th Street. So, we continue east. The other two; one at Eastern and the other at Kalamazoo, are both set back on their lots. One of them, I think it was the one on Eastern, has a bus stop adjoining the property but it is not at all close to the building.
Personally, I’d like to think that maybe someone really meant the building on Division to be close to the sidewalk and it wasn’t just an unrelated design decision.
EDIT: actually the two other stores past Division are technically along 52nd Street, not 54th. Past Division, 54th takes a turn north then again back east to become 52nd.
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WOODTV had a story the other day about three Grand Rapids sites that are being added to the national register of historic places. Two of the three are old factories that we’ve discussed here on urbanplanet. The most popular being the old Sligh factory at Century and Logan. The other is the Clipper Belt Lacer Company building on Front. The third is a large residence on Leonard NW. While so far as I can recall we’ve never discussed that house, several years ago I wrote about the members of the architectural firm that designed it, Frank Allen and Son. Although even though Frank Allen Sr. was well known in his time himself, I wrote mostly about his two sons. The firm’s name says son rather than sons because they both didn’t work for him at the same time.
Here's the link to the WOODTV story:
WOODTV: GR Properties added to National Register of Historic Places
Here’s a link to the urbanplanet posts concerning Clipper Belt Lacer Company building:
URBANPLANET: Clipper Belt Lace Building
Probably no one needs a link to the Sligh Factory thread but here it is anyway:
URBANPLANET: Sligh Furniture Block Redevelopment
OK, the rest of this is getting pretty deep into the weeds. Here are a couple of links to posts I did back in 2010 about Frank Allen and Son, the architects of the Andrew and Olive Crane Kendale House at 2350 Leonard St. NW, the third property added to the historic register:
URBANPLANET: Roger Allen and the GR Museum:
URBANPLANET: ROGER AND FRANK ALLEN JR BIO
The links embedded in the bio link above are old and broken. There is no current link to the CMU data but below are good links to the two Frank Jr documents:
SANDIEGO HISTORY: Allen Images
The world’s fair area in San Diego that Frank Jr. developed is pretty much the current San Diego Balboa Park which includes the famous San Diego Zoo. Many of the fair building are still there in use along with the Cabrillo Bridge. When I drove over the bridge a few years ago I didn’t realize it because from the road you are not aware of the structure below and it’s now surrounded by buildings.
I haven’t found any specific detailed bio document about Frank Allen Sr. Besides residences he designed many factories in the Grand Rapids area, including the Belding Silk factories that later became the Gibson Appliance factories in Belding and Greenville. From what I’ve read and heard, both Roger and Frank Jr. were known for finishing projects on time and in budget.
Another residence designed by Frank P Alan and Son that is on the Historical Register is the Felt Mansion. It is on the dunes in Laketown Township near Saugatuck. Unlike many of their other projects that they completed fast, the Felt Mansion took three years to complete:
WIKIPEDIA: Dorr E Felt Mansion
THE FELT ESTATE A HIDDEN GEM OF WEST MICHIGAN HISTORY
WIKIPEDIA: The melon heads legend
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While I was writing my essay above, Khorasaurus was writing a better and briefer answer than mine:
3 hours ago, Khorasaurus1 said:Generally they default to the lowest spot on the property to avoid having to regrade. Which is frequently near the road.
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6 hours ago, RegalTDP said:
Question for the civil engineers in this forum: Is there an infrastructural reason for putting retention ponds by the road? Or is it an aesthetic landscaping choice? Seems like a lot of large suburban developments do this. Or maybe Wyoming's zoning won't allow for commercial developments there. I agree with GR8Scott as I would think there's a lot of traffic at this intersection coming up from M-6.
I am not a civil engineer and I could be wrong but I think there is likely an infrastructure reason. So far the retention pond and the new retention wall behind it are not pretty. I don't think it is an amenity that makes this development more attractive. It is not obvious from the birds eye view rendering but this property is entirely on a gentle slope with the lowest portion in the area where the retention pond is located. They've laid and buried a lot of large storm sewer pipe already on the property that I assume will feed into the retention pond. My uneducated guess is that the current storm sewers on Byron Center Road and 52nd Street may not be adequate to handle the additional run-off from a storm from up the hill. This looks like it should be a prime piece of property but its been up for sale and I think bought and sold at least a couple of times in the last twenty years, so I think there might be some not obvious problem with it.
Too busy right now to take a shot of the new retention pond and wall. Instead here's what Google saw at the retention corner last time they drove by before the construction:
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On 1/25/2024 at 12:29 PM, MJLO said:
Yeah Frontier adding flights to existing destinations doesn't really get me excited either haha.
Looks like another new Frontier destination not to get excited about:
CRAINS: Frontier adds nonstop three times a week to Atlanta
EDIT: Not about GRR but here's a local story and video about flying I just ran across after posting the above that's much more exciting (or at least more bizarre) than Frontier adding a thrice weekly flight to an existing destination :
FOX17: Single-engine plane lands outside Coopersville diner, takes off
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I've noticed the last few months there's been a lot of dirt moved around and a big retaining wall built on property at Byron Center Road and 52nd Street. And the other day I noticed the first building going up in a far corner of the property. Couldn't find a good place to take a picture from the ground and I don't feel like buying a drone, so no breaking news photo. I don't think anyone has posted anything about this here. I did find this old article about the development. The landscape work they've done seems to match the rendering in the article. Anyway, 178 market rate apartments in fifteen buildings:
MLIVE: 12-22-2022 - Byron Center Rd and 52nd Street
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On 8/4/2023 at 5:31 PM, walker said:
Remember we had a big discussion about the old Holland Home senior residence property three or four years ago when it was temporarily leased out for a year as an emergency homeless shelter. Since the lease expired it has sat empty.
I don't remember anyone posting anything here about it since then. While they have apparently been working on it for some time, I just learned today that Hope Network is working on converting it to apartments for the disabled. A Google search turns up this as the most recent story about it:
CRAINS: Hope Network- Starts Work on 40m Housing Project
A new news story on WOODTV says that at least part of the old Holland Home will be used as a homeless shelter. They don't mention anything about the Hope Network project from last year. I imagine this is in addition to the Hope Network project, only on a different part of the property, but they don't explicitly say:
WOODTV: Retirement Home Repurposed for Homeless Housing
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49 minutes ago, RiversideGR said:
Not much in the way of detail yet, but Pinnacle Construction will be presenting to the Creston Neighborhood Association this week about a proposed residential development at Leonard and Lafayette.
This was the site of the very old Catholic St. John's Orphanage. It was torn down in 1960. The nondescript building next to it that looked sort of like a prison back when it had a chain link fence partly enclosing it, was built as its replacement. Slide down a page in this link for photos and the story of the orphanage:
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If you live long enough eventually memories from your youth become fodder for archeologists. WOODTV has an article about construction workers working on the expansion of the museum discovering remnants of the one of the two old Voigt flour mills that sat on the channel next to the river on the westside downtown.
WOODTV: construction unearths pieces of history
Here’s a Facebook photo of the empty mill around the time it was torn down (click on the X to bypass the log-in box) :
FACEBOOK: Pearl Street Mill 1971?
If you were driving or walking from the east side over either the Bridge Street or Pearl Street bridges you would first drive over the longer river spanning bridges but then you’d come to smaller spans over the channel. Even after the channel was filled in and the area was converted to a giant parking lot, the channel bridges were still there. You can see the guardrails of the channel-less bridge in the photo above.
When I was in grade school the Kiwanis Club would sponsor a special travelogue movie for all the fourth and sixth graders at the Civic Auditorium. We’d take chartered buses downtown (the public schools did not have many of their own busses back then.) The buses would take a hard right from Pearl Street to a road on the strip of land between the channel and the river and wait there for unloading instructions. This was before urban renewal. From the buses you could see all the effluences pouring out of pipes attached to the factories on the east side into the river. When it was time for your bus to unload, the driver would make another hard right and drive over the old interurban bridge (what’s now the Gillette Bridge) and drop you off on Lyon Street in front of the Civic Auditorium.
The other old flour mill was roughly where Betty and Jerry are buried now. When I first was a substitute mailman, I can remember delivering mail to that other mill. Old Ralph Voigt and his elderly secretary still went to work there even though both mills had long been out of service and the channel was gone, replaced by a huge parking lot. Don’t know what they did there all day. Maybe they took care of his personal business and collected monthly parking fees.
Later when I had my regular mail routes in Heritage Hill, I used to deliver mail to Ralph's house on College. I went into his opulent front parlor a few times when I needed him to sign for certified or registered letters. He was actually sort of my neighbor. My apartment was in a house directly west of his the next block over on Madison, except there were several backyards of houses on Washington that separated my yard from his. When he died, he left most of his estate to the St Mary’s Hospital nursing program. Where that money may be now, I don’t know since the nursing program no longer exists. The house he gave to the public museum and they ran it for many years as a Victorian museum with its furniture as it was when he died. They still have it but it is not normally open to the public.
Here's a short video of the house:
And if you can’t quite place where the mill on Pearl Street was, here is the Google view of it:
And if you've got this far and are interested in seeing historic aerial views of the mills and the channel, you can find 1955 and 1947 aerial views of the area if you are willing to dig into this site:
https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer
LATE EDIT: Found this old photo from 1969 of the other flour mill where I delivered mail to Ralph Voigt (probably the year before.) It is the big gray building next to Sullivan's Tile Store along Bridge Street. The channel has been filed in for several years at this point:
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3 hours ago, Raildude's dad said:
Based on the shadows, the viewer is at the corner of Mt Vernon and Pearl St. looking NW. I'm not sure what the side street to the left is but it must be the same wave of the magic wand that eliminated the Pearl St exit ramp.
I think you are right. Here's the description of the property from the earlier Crain's article:
QuoteThe irregularly shaped project site is about 7.25 acres, according to the plans, from the west property line along Winter Avenue to the east property line along Mount Vernon Avenue, just west of US-131.
There are at least three recent renderings floating around - each one different, particularly regarding the street layout:
I think they've got some work to do before they start building.
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On 2/28/2024 at 10:53 AM, cstonesparty said:
reupping on this comment since the recent renderings show same metal cladding trend... folks who were hoping for brick & ivy / old fashioned ballpark cues. It's definitely not that!
What I find interesting about this rendering which no one has commented on is that while there appears to be an event going on, there is still plenty of nearby apparently free on-street parking available. I guess they must have the parking all figured out.
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Back in the early seventies when I was still a mail carrier, I took a night class in urban planning at Grand Valley's Thomas Jefferson College through a community outreach program called the Urban Institute. Neither Thomas Jefferson College or the Urban Institute exist anymore. Anyway, what the class mostly consisted of was going and visiting various architects and people active in city planning. The class only had six or seven students, all non-traditional like myself. One night we went to city hall and visited with someone from the city planning office, don't remember who. Someone asked this same question about the height restrictions.
The planner we talked to somewhat despairingly blamed it on the former city planner and architect of the sixties urban renewal, John Paul Jones. He said that Jones believed in this idea that Grand Rapids was something called a prairie city and shouldn't have tall buildings. Whatever a prairie city might be, it is hard to think of Grand Rapids with its valley and hills as being on a prairie. I don't know if Jones was really the source of the height restriction or not, or if this was just his idea or if this prairie idea was just something fashionable then in city planning circles.
Jones came to town as an expensive consultant from New York on urban planning and then got himself the job as the city planner and moved here. I went to high school with his daughter, Paula Jones, although I didn't know her well.
Garrett Ellison almost ten years ago wrote a long article about Jones and his part in the sixties urban renewal. Nothing about the prairie restrictions though:
MLIVE: Urban Renewal - John Paul Jones
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8 minutes ago, joeDowntown said:
One step closer. I have to imagine we'll see real plans and updated renderings soon:
Quote. . . The stadium design will reflect the community’s culture within the furniture and boating industry,
Huh! Boating industry?
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On 12/8/2023 at 10:26 PM, walker said:
A project to convert the old Michigan Bell call center on Michael in Wyoming into low cost senior housing has been kicking around a while. It's for 150 units. I don't recall anyone posting anything about it so I will.
Here's a WOODTV story from earlier this week about the groundbreaking:
WOODTV: Senior Living Facility Breaks Ground in Wyoming
Here's an Mlive story from last month but it's behind a pay wall, it's got a nice picture of a pile of dirt in the parking lot:
And here's a good article from Crain's that explains the project in more detail but it's from last year:
CRAINS: Former Wyoming Office Space Eyed for Affordable Housing Project
Here's a couple of recent photos of this project:
First, I cut and pasted this drone shot from Orion Construction's LinkedIn page. I think this was taken sometime last month. What I like about this photo is that it shows the new construction in what was a parking lot in the foreground and you can see the old Michigan Bell building at the corner of Michael and 36th Street in the background that's being converted into apartments:
Second; here's a ground level shot I took yesterday looking southeast from the west side of Michael. They've about doubled the number of new units since the earlier shot:
This is a senior affordable housing project. From deep in the Crain's article in the original post:
QuoteThe 68 apartment units and 30 townhomes will be priced at 60 percent of the area median income for Kent County, and the additional 52 units of new construction will be priced at 30 to 80 percent of the area median income for tenants.
Slightly off topic: I noticed that Lott3Metz Architecture LLC is the project architect for this project. As long time planeteers may remember, Ted Lott used to be a frequent contributor here, not so much anymore. His firm has recently merged with a Detroit architect:
CRAINS: Grand Rapids and Detroit architecture forms merge to build statewide reach
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I thought this article was behind a paywall but I guess not. My sister e-mailed me this link and I can read it just fine.
It's about the old Romana Park amusement park that was operated by the trolley company and later by the bus company where Gaslight Village is now just west of Reeds Lake. My parents took my sister and me there a few times in its waning days in the early fifties. Despite what the article says, I don't think they operated the roller coaster the last few years. I can remember my father saying it was condemned, maybe that's just what he wanted me to think.
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It was just a matter of time I suppose but the deer and the turkeys will have to find their way to the nature preserve just east of Wing Ave.
Allen Edwin Homes "is planning a mix of multifamily condominiums and single-family homes on more than 66 acres of previously undeveloped land in Kentwood."
CRAINS: developer plans 256 units of housing on totally undeveloped land in Kentwood
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Grand Rapids Airport (GRR) News and Developments
in Grand Rapids
Posted
More construction ground breaking at GRR. This time for a new garage for the snow plows and blowers:
GRR PRESS RELEASE: Ford International Airport Breaks Ground on $8.5 Million Snow Removal Equipment Building
The placard in the press release photo of the ground breaking dirt pile doesn't seem to match the press release content: