Four houses in a row have been condemned on the west side of South Howard Street between Michigan and Prospect, and I took my camera out there to document them before their eventual demolition. I found a pristine new section of sidewalk in front of them, still marked off with orange cones. Properly speaking this should be a Hall of Shame entry since the sidewalk is unstamped, despite Lansing Township code requiring it, but given Lansing Township’s shoddy record with sidewalks I think I have to consider any sidewalk installlation to be a win.

A sign in front of the houses talks about a hearing to change the zoning for a planned development, and the scuttlebutt is that it is going to be condos. Oddly, the sign gives the current zoning as commercial. The recent sales record sheds some light on this, as until recently they were owned by the Indian Trails bus company. Indian Trails also owns the parking lot at the corner of Michigan and Howard. It was previously a used car lot, and since Indian Trails took it over, it has gotten weedy and overgrown, since all they have used it for is to occasionally park a few of their Michigan Flyer airport buses. In the 2010s sometime all the houses in the 100 block of South Howard were demolished, leaving a vacant lot between the Indian Trails lot and the four doomed houses. I don’t know the full story, but can only speculate that Indian Trails had some plan for these blocks that never went anywhere.

When these 1920s houses are demolished, it will leave only five houses and a couple of businesses remaining on South Howard. The real estate listing cards in the Belon Real Estate Collection from CADL’s digital local history collection reveal that from the early 1960s to early 1970s, nearly every time a house was listed on South Howard it was marked “value in land only,” meaning the houses were worthless and probably best demolished. This was underlined by the way they generally did not bother filling in the year built for the houses, but marked them simply as “OLD.” Yet they kept surviving anyway, until recently.