Thinking Through Lansing’s Downtown Revitalization Efforts Using an Environmental Justice Framework
Claire Hipps
I grew up in Lansing, Michigan, which always felt like a sleepy town. Now, each time I visit, there is a new business, high-rise, or construction site I haven’t seen before. The City of Lansing is in the process of redeveloping its downtown corridors so more people can work, shop, live, and recreate there.[1]
The focus on Downtown makes both economic sense and is highly consequential for vulnerable communities living in the City. Downtown includes critical areas along the Grand River,[2] and Riverfront neighborhoods were redlined by the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC).[3] Riverfront neighborhoods still experience the highest poverty rates in the City by census tract.[4] So, Lansing’s downtown redevelopment has serious implications for environmental justice. Lansing’s focus on economic growth has been highly effective for stimulating investment to redevelop brownfields and other blighted areas.[5] However, to truly revitalize the Riverfront, a more direct acknowledgement of the historical wrongs that have led to environmental injustice in Lansing is necessary to ensure Lansing becomes truly resilient and connected while remaining relatively affordable for its long-time residents.
District map of Lansing, Michigan[6]
- Demographics and Environmental Justice Concerns
Common metrics suggest Lansing is growing economically.[7] This is exciting, but Lansing also has high levels of poverty and is unaffordable for many residents: around 40% of Lansing region households fell at or below the “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” (ALICE) threshold in 2025.[8] Put another way, 40% of Lansing region households are working and earn more than the federal poverty line, but cannot afford the basic cost of living. In 2022, personal poverty rates in Lansing were highest among African Americans (27%) and Latinos (20.5%), with non-Latino whites (15.7%), with family poverty rates also varying by race and ethnicity.[9]
We might worry that as City grows economically as a whole, impoverished or minority communities will not see the benefits of that growth. One way to think about the distribution of these economic gains is through the lens of environmental justice, and since affordability is an issue, it makes sense to consider necessity accessibility.
The City of Lansing, much like Michigan as a whole, is contending with negative health outcomes that affect environmental injustice in marginalized communities. Regina Strong (Michigan’s first Environmental Justice Public Advocate) explained that utility prices, water concerns, and air quality are central environmental justice issues plaguing Michigan residents.[10] Strong explains that the “throughline is vulnerability tied to infrastructure, income, and exposure.”[11] This plays out in the City of Lansing, where concerns about access to necessities concern stakeholders and expose these vulnerabilities.
City stakeholders have identified access to healthy food, safe housing, and healthcare as environmental justice issues in Lansing. In a 2021 report, key environmental justice issues that emerged include food deserts, health in housing, and lack of health information and healthcare as key, and stakeholders recommended aligning the Mayor’s Office with the County’s Community Health Improvement Plan.[12] The Mayor has heavily prioritized redevelopment. Some new development has addressed pockets of food insecurity, but other access issues persist. For its part, the Healthy Capital Counties’ Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) for 2025-2027 notes that 34.8% of Lansing city households spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs in 2022.[13] The CHIP report identifies housing as a primary policy concern and is “focused on … expansion of [access to] all types of housing, including rental housing, permanent housing, and short-term shelter housing.[14] This necessitates prioritizing housing rehabilitation and upkeep to reduce lead exposure.[15] The CHIP report indicates that the City has a long way to go on healthcare access, and has the goal of promoting health through better access to quality healthcare.[16] The CHIP report calls for process – outreach to communities to improve resource awareness and other public and civic stakeholders, expanding an Engagement, Education, and Empowerment workgroup, the provision of financial literacy programs, and the provision of healthcare and housing services to unhoused residents.[17]
- Informed New Development Can Address Environmental Justice Concerns
Lansing’s new development has increased access to food and housing in parts of the City while engaging stakeholders throughout the region. This progress is laudable. The City should continue doing great work, remaining focused on its residents and the environmental concerns they face. Conceptualizing environmental justice in the redevelopment context can help with this.
Environmental justice can be thought of through distributive, procedural, corrective justice, and social justice lenses.[18] Distributive justice means that outcomes stemming from decisions affecting the environment are equally distributed[19] – for example, one geographic location should not contain all of the state’s landfills. To achieve procedural justice, there must be fairness in the decision-making process.[20] Corrective justice involves both the administration of punishment for wrongdoing and the reparation of losses by those who are responsible for harm.[21] Social justice requires both that members of the community have enough resources and power to live in dignity, but also that privileged people are accountable for the use of their resources and power.[22] The City of Lansing has made great strides towards distributive justice by spurring redevelopment of brownfields and blighted areas into spaces responsive to the residents’ access needs; however, the City should ensure it is not neglecting procedural, corrective, and social justice as well. The City should encourage profitable new development, but ensure that new growth is deputized to address environmental and historical injustice, perhaps by expanding access to existing programs and studying the impacts of redlining.
On procedural environmental justice, there have been calls to focus on process to ensure engagement with environmental justice communities. The State’s Environmental Justice Advocate is focused in part on data collection and access to the political process.[23] To protect Lansing’s residents, however, it’s also important that elected officials dialogue with small developers trying to invest further in their communities. For example, in discussions towards redevelopment of a brownfield in South Lansing, local developer Melissa White said she had been skeptical of city officials after watching downtown redevelopment without investment in other areas, but that Mayor Andy Schor was able to assuage her concerns:
“I always wondered, ‘Why is everything going downtown? Why is everything being taken from the south side? … Why are we not pouring money into the hood, into these underserved communities that could thrive?’ But when [Schor] found out, he didn’t shut the door on me at all.”[24]
The property is expected to be online in early 2027, redeveloped into a $3.8M mixed-use project with an event space and laundromat, with more than $1M in financial assistance from the City and state.[25] There is also a deeper question, about whether process can truly remedy environmental justice and improve outcomes.[26] To nurture access and equity, resident concerns should be surfaced through process and acted upon, not with regards to a specific procedure, but with an eye towards distributive justice.
Redevelopment processes seem to track those involved in Lansing’s Comprehensive Plan, which could have an ancillary effect of improving environmental justice outcomes by virtue of the geographical areas being redeveloped. One substantive measure the City appears to be taking is the adoption of form-based zoning in downtown.[27] In 2021, the Lansing City Council transitioned to form-based zoning, which cuts down on use restrictions and instead focuses on a building’s physical shape and structure.[28] Form-based zoning will allow the City to develop more mixed-use spaces that blend commercial and residential functions in new developments.[29] The switch-up has already led to some success – the City was able to redevelop land contaminated with petroleum products, antifreeze, and other chemicals.[30] The new development contains a grocery store topped with apartments, and a hotel.[31] According to Mayor Schor, the area was previously a food desert.[32] Brownfield redevelopment helps achieve the goal of providing access to healthy food, as identified in the Mayor’s Report on Racial Justice and Equity.
However, it’s not clear that new development and zoning changes are tailored to address environmental justice issues discussed by stakeholders. A great example of this is housing, both its safety and its availability. Demand for housing is strong in Lansing.[33] Despite changes to form-based zoning in some areas in the City, the City in 2025 only approved the construction of 245 new housing units. The City is experiencing a decline in permitted housing units despite new development, a trend which has continued since a peak of 362 units approved in 2021.[34] The majority of housing approved were buildings with more than five units.[35] Only 26 one-unit buildings were approved.[36] Notably, no buildings with 2, 3, or 4 units were approved.[37] So, it is unclear whether more housing can effectively be built out in neighborhoods where single-family housing predominates, since those areas are already extensively developed. Many previously-redlined neighborhoods are zoned for single-family housing,[38] so the form-based zoning change may not lead to more housing being built in those areas.[39] While the City does partner with Capital Area Community Services to offer some Home Improvement Services, applications for this program are currently closed, as we are just coming out of winter.[40] The cited reason for this closure is contractor capacity. One observation: new development is profitable, but it might not be what the City residents grappling with environmental justice concerns need.
There is an important question lurking: can Lansing truly become environmentally just without formally acknowledging the discriminatory land use practices, like redlining, that perpetuate cycles of poverty? At the very least, developing targeted goals to address the impacts of redlining could be a highly effective way to respond to the present environmental justice concerns discussed above. Symptomatic treatment of present burdens that are rooted in historical wrongs is unlikely to be enough to undo the effects of those wrongs. Governmental review of the historical impacts of redlining to understand the present environmental injustices shouldered by Lansing region residents is crucial – both for the City’s own planning going forward, and for establishing a legal justification for programs that directly address redlining’s lingering effects. Although withstanding legal challenges to corrective policies is a tall order, there have been other significant examples of environmental justice policies that have survived.[41]
I #lovelansing[42] and feel tremendous pride for my hometown. In encouraging new development, the City has prioritized the revitalization of brownfields and engaged diverse stakeholders. Lansing should continue to prioritize necessity access for all residents along with economic development. The City should also remain focused on implementing the recommendations of stakeholder bodies it has commissioned, and dialoguing with Lansing residents experiencing poverty and racism. If the City prioritizes environmental justice, I’m confident that great things are in store.
[1] Lansing’s GDP increased by over 10% between 2018 and 2023, census website
[2] State of the Region Report 2025 p 28.
[3] Jean Kayistsinga, “Lansing Demographic and Socioeconomic Profiles,” NEXO Vol. XXVII, No. 2 (2024) https://jsri.msu.edu/publications/nexo/vol-xxvii/issue-2/lansing-demographic-and-socioeconomic-profiles#:~:text=As%20displayed%20in%20Table%205,also%20varied%20by%20race/ethnicity.
[4] Kim Kisner, “Inside Michigan’s Environmental Justice Landscape: A talk With the State’s First Environmental Justice Public Advocate” SBN Detroit (Jan. 29, 2026) https://sbn-detroit.org/inside-michigans-environmental-justice-landscape/.
[5] Id.
[6] Mayor’s Report on Racial Justice and Equity 23 (2021).
[7] Healthy! Capital Counties, Community Health Improvement Plan 2025-207 40 (2025).
[8] Id. at 16.
[9] Id. at 39.
[10] Id. at 21. The report acknowledges the lack of progress on healthcare access, saying explicitly that “access to care has consistently emerged as a critical need and a legacy priority area in every CHA conducted by H!CC since its first CHA in 2021.”
[11] Id. at 39-44.
[12] Robert R. Kuehn, Taxonomy of Environmental Justice, 30 Env’tl. L. Rptr. 10681 (2000).
[13] Id. at 10683.
[14] Id. at 10688.
[15] Id. at 10693.
[16] See id. at 10698.
[17] See Kisner, supra n. 10.
[18] See Leo V. Kaplan, “South side redevelopment is a lansing success story,” CityPULSE, https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/south-side-redevelopment-is-a-lansiledng-success-story,164051.
[19] See id; see also Susan Vela, “$3.8 million redevelopment proposed for blighted south Lansing property” Lansing State Journal (Oct. 28, 2025, 6:07 p.m.) https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2025/10/28/south-lansing-redevelopment-miller-road-washington-ave-binnis-bar/86944918007/.
[20] See, e.g., Nicholas Bagley, The Procedure Fetish, 118 Mich. L. Rev. 345 (2019). (arguing that administrative processes should focus on trade-offs at the heart of any system designed to structure government action, instead of process for its own sake)
[21] See Sarah Lehr, “Lansing plans to overhaul zoning rules with a major change. Here’s what you should know” Lansing State Journal (Mar. 28, 2021, 10:00 p.m. ET) https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2021/03/29/lansing-overhauls-its-zoning-rules-form-based-code/4716619001/. Brian McGrain, Lansing’s director of economic development and planning, explained that “the average resident, when it comes to their homes, their neighborhood, they’re not going to see giant change… if you live in a single family home in a establish neighborhood, that’s going to be the same. There are opportunities for in-fill housing – it would probably look like what you already live around.” See id. Of course, opportunities for infill housing are one thing, but as discussed, the City has permitted fewer housing units each year since 2021, and very few approvals resemble infill housing. See infra, notes 28-31.
[22] See id.
[23] See id.
[24] See Eric Lacy, “Meiher market, hotel project billed as ‘game-changer’ for downtown Lansing,” Lansing State Journal (Aug. 29, 2018, 5:53 p.m. ET) https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2018/08/29/meijer-lansing-hotel-downtown-grocery-store-urban-market-gillespie-stadium-concord-hospitality/1122423002/.
[25] See Lehr, supra n. 24.
[26] Mayor Andy Schor, State of the City 2024 (Grewal Hall 224, Downtown Lansing, Mar. 12, 2024), https://content.civicplus.com/api/assets/d2abb3c7-4b68-425e-9561-60d40e32f62a.
[27] See Dep’t of Hous. & Urb. Dev., Comphrensive Housing Market Analysis, Lansing-East Lansing, Michigan(2022). As of Janurary 1, 2022, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimated demand for new housing to be around 1,525 new homes for 2022-2025. HUD noted that 150 homes currently under construction will meet part of this demand during the first year of the forecast period (emphasis added). At the very least, this suggests that new development is not meeting the complete housing demand in Lansing.
[28] US Census Building Permits Survey 2021-2025, visualized by Sid Kapur. https://housingdata.app/places/MI/Lansing.
[29] Id.
[30] Id.
[31] Id.
[32] Lansing Parcel Viewer, Lansing Form-Based Zoning Code, https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/0653d6769be c9746198b0de76801ac5309 (accessed 3/24/2026). Notice the zoning north of the River – the neighborhoods near North St. and Grand River Avenue are zoned R-2 – residential or R-3 – residential. For both R-2 and R-3, single-family, adult foster care, and family day cares are the only principal permitted uses, while two-family or multi-family dwellings are conditional uses in R-3 and not permitted in R-2. These neighborhoods are surrounded by IND-1 – Industrial or MX – Mixed-Use districts. Recall that much of environmental injustice in Michigan’s highly concentrated areas stems from concentration around industry, see Kisner, supra n. 9.
[33] It’s worth seeing that this may not matter, if residents from the Northside communities want to move into downtown housing and its affordable for them. However, there is unmet housing demand in Lansing, see HUD, supra n. 33, and while many people might want to live downtown, that isn’t necessarily true for everyone. It’s not a stretch to hope that development responsive to residents would account for differences in preferences, where a young professional might wish to live and work downtown, and a family may prefer to live in a single-family home on the northside with an accessory dwelling unit for friends or extended family members.That intuition, strengthened by the evidence of unmet housing demand, suggests that form-based zoning can be helpful, but not sufficient to create a robust and accessible housing market.
[34] See “Home Repair Program,” The City of Lansing Community Development Office, https://www.lansingmi.gov/319/Home-Repair-Program (accessed Mar. 24, 2026); see also “Home Improvement Services,” Capital Area Community Services, https://cacs-inc.org/housing-repairs/ (accessed Mar. 24, 2026) (explaining that the Home Repair Program Pre-Screening Questionnaire is currently closed because “the predetermined number of submissions has been received …. This is to ensure contractor capacity can be met”).
[35] For example, New Jersey’s landmark environmental law, which explicitly protects racial minorites and those for whom English is not their first language, has withstood equal protection scrutiny. See, e.g., “Victory, NJ Appellate Court Affirms Legality of Environmental Justice Law,” Earthjustice (Jan. 5, 2026) https://earthjustice.org/press/2026/victory-nj-appellate-court-affirms-legality-of-environmental-justice-law.
[36] #lovelansing is a tag often used by Choose Lansing, which provides tourism information for visitors. See Choose Lansing Social Media, https://www.lansing.org/media/social-media/; see also Joey Pants, “Check Out the New Murals All Over Lansing” WMMQ.com, (Sept. 23, 2019) https://wmmq.com/check-out-the-new-murals-all-over-lansing/.
[37] Jay Krammes, New Year – New Downtown Developments in 2026, Downtown Lansing Inc. (Dec. 29, 2025) https://www.downtownlansing.org/news/new-year-new-downtown-developments-2026.
[38] According to Downtown Lansing Inc, “Downtown Lansing includes all spaces within the “Central Business District,” which is bounded by St. Joseph St. to the south; the east side of Capitol Ave. to the west; Shiawassee St. to the north; and Larch St. to the east. Established in 1996, the Central Business District contains more than 1,000 businesses in a 64-block area. The downtown area is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.” See About Us, Downtown Lansing Inc, https://www.downtownlansing.org/about-us; see also Boundary Map, Downtown Lansing Inc., https://www.downtownlansing.org/sites/default/files/documents/DLI-Shopping-Districts-2026.pdf.
[39] Christopher Green Szmadzinski, The Map that Destroyed a Neighborhood: How have geographic decisions impacted the shape of Lansing? (Nov. 22, 2021) https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/19e90e698bc44081b7eb6dbea3506c3d
[40] American Community Survey 2020, visualized by https://www.lansingography.com/2022/07/geography-of-poverty-in-lansing-are.html.
[41] Mayor Andy Schor, State of the City 2024 (Grewal Hall 224, Downtown Lansing, Mar. 12, 2024) (discussing infrastructure investments and achievements in revitalization of various tracts in Lansing, not all of which are downtown).