Falcon Point Homeowners Worried about Future

Above: City Council’s meeting last night (left to right: Ruth Beier, Diane Goddeeris, and Nathan Triplett)

Last night at East Lansing’s City Council, a development group called FP Investors got Council’s approval for a “cluster plan development” for the Falcon Pointe property, near Hawk Nest, on Chandler Road near State Road. The plan calls for FP Investors “to convert an existing manufactured housing community into a site condominium development.”

What this means to the people who live on some of that property now in manufactured homes remains unclear, and they came to Council last night to express their concern and distress.

Falcon Pointe was originally designed to be a manufactured housing development where people rented the land and had custom manufactured homes built on those rented plots after foundations were built specially for the designed homes.

But only a few people bought into this manufactured homes project, and they are now in a precarious situation because the original developer basically abandoned the project. Most owners are empty-nesters on fixed incomes. They have had no operative leases on their land, and because the roads there are private, the roads are not being appropriately completed, maintained, or plowed.

Some of the homes have been lost to foreclosure, and some abandoned foundations have filled with water, creating dangerous and unpleasant pools. Because there are no operative leases on the land, the owners effectively cannot sell their properties, at least not for what they should be worth.

By all accounts, the owners here have been through hell. Many showed up at last night’s Council’s meeting, as did a representative of the new property owner, FP Investors. That new owner now wants to erect 120 one-story units for rental on the eastern part of the property. The rentals would be aimed at families and restricted to no more than two unrelated persons.

The plan as it was approved calls for only a couple of the existing manufactured homes to be moved, and the developer has said they will try to do it in a way that is least invasive to the people whose homes must be moved. But the owners remain very nervous.

Lois Hagy, an owner of one of the manufactured homes, told Council that many of the owners want to buy the land on which their homes sit so that they don’t face unknown land rental costs, and so that they can more easily sell their homes if they wish.

In response, the investor’s representative, John DePorre, told Council he would talk to his partners about that. DePorre said, several times to Hagy and her fellow homeowners, “Change is hard” and said he recognized the owners there had been “through the wringer.”

Hagy explained to Council that it would be very difficult to move the houses there to other locations; these are not “modular” homes but manufactured homes that are similar to conventional houses. Some are over 2,000-square feet, multi-bedroom dwellings with attached garages and porches.

Hagy said she thought the plots of land were probably worth about $23,000-25,000 and that many of the owners would be able to pay that amount.

Anne Hill, who lives in the adjacent Hawk Nest subdivision and is president of the neighborhood association there, told Council that she appreciates her neighbors at Falcon Point and has been pained by what they have been through. She said she thought the planned development was a good idea but she was very concerned about doing justice to the homeowners in Falcon Point. She said follow-through was going to be necessary.

City staff and Councilmembers explained, as they have before on this development, that there is little the City can legally do to help or protect these citizens who bought into what amounts to a largely-failed manufactured home development.  City Attorney Tom Yeadon indicated he wasn’t sure how Council could act to protect the homeowners because there is a limit to what the City could legally require.

A question was raised about whether the homeowners might be protected through an approval condition that would require the portion of the land where the manufactured homes are to remain as a manufactured home area.  Before approval, such a condition was added, indicating “that any change of location or deletion of proposed manufactured housing location would require a change of the site plan and City Council approval of the amended cluster plan development. “

This would seem to require that those land plots remain manufactured housing, but does not require that the investor sign leases with the current homeowners that would allow them to keep their houses there, nor does it provide any assurance that the leases offered will be affordable to these homeowners.

The condition only indicates that if the land owner wishes to change those plots from sites for manufactured housing to something else, the land owner must come back to Council for approval. That, Council and Yeadon determined, was pretty much all they could do for these homeowners.

At one point, Mayor Pro Tem Diane Goddeeris suggested that the project be reconsidered at another, later Council meeting, prior to approval, to allow more time to negotiate a good outcome for the homeowners. But Council opted to proceed to approval at this meeting, ultimately voting 3-0 to approve. (Goddeeris, Mayor Nathan Triplett, and Councilmember Ruth Beier were present last night, with Councilmembers Kathy Boyle and Susan Woods absent.)

Goddeeris told the homeowners at Council that she thought the investor’s intentions were good and that this was a good place for family rental units to be built. She said she hoped the added condition gave them some comfort and security.