Drive past Marsh and Haslett Roads and for most of the last decade you'd have seen the same thing: a cracked parking lot, a boarded-up grocery store, and a bank building nobody had touched since it closed. What actually tells you a project like this has stopped being a rendering and started being real isn't a groundbreaking photo op or a township press release. It's a commercial listing with a price attached.
That listing exists now. As of this year, two retail spaces totaling 3,000 square feet are on the market inside the renovated building at 1621 Haslett Road, asking $27.50 per square foot annually, zoned for restaurant use. After a decade and a half of the plaza sitting mostly empty, someone can now sign a lease there.
Fifteen Years Of Almost
The L&L grocery store that anchored this shopping center closed its doors in 2011. For years after that, the 19.5-acre site cycled through the kind of quiet that plazas get when a big anchor tenant leaves and nothing fills the gap. The bank building stayed open a while longer, but eventually that closed too, and the corner became the kind of place people drove past without really seeing.
The first real attempt to change that came in 2022, when developer Bosgraaf Homes proposed a mixed-use concept for the site, pitching roughly 301 new housing units alongside retail space. Demolition on the old grocery and bank buildings began in October 2023, clearing out more than 30,000 square feet of dead commercial space. The one building spared was the brick structure at the north end of the property, the former video store site, which the plan calls for renovating into retail and restaurant space rather than tearing down.
What The Approved Plan Actually Says Now
The version that eventually got approved through Meridian Township's Brownfield Redevelopment Authority looks smaller than what Bosgraaf first floated. The current plan calls for 189 housing units total, split between 74 townhomes and 115 multifamily units. That's more than a third below the original 301-unit pitch, a meaningful scale-back that happened somewhere between the first concept and the version that actually cleared approval.
Part of what slowed things down had nothing to do with the housing count. Stormwater management plans for the site sat with the Ingham County Drain Office for review, and the Ingham County Road Department asked for an additional traffic study before signing off on the site's commercial zoning. The project also relies on Tax Increment Financing tied to its Brownfield status, which is standard for a redevelopment on a site this size but adds its own layer of approvals before a shovel goes in the ground. None of that shows up when you're driving past an empty lot, but it's a lot of why the empty lot stayed empty for so long.
The Listing That Changes The Read
Here's the timeline in one place, because the gap between "announced" and "actually happening" is the whole story on this corner.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2011 | L&L grocery store closes, plaza starts emptying out |
| 2022 | Bosgraaf Homes proposes a mixed-use concept with roughly 301 housing units |
| October 2023 | Demolition begins on the old grocery and bank buildings |
| 2025 | Revised plan (189 units) clears Brownfield approval; construction targeted for fall |
| 2026 | First retail space, 3,000 square feet, listed for lease inside the renovated building at 1621 Haslett Road |
A zoning approval or a demolition permit tells you a project is legally allowed to happen. A leasing listing with a per-square-foot price tells you someone thinks a tenant will actually pay rent there this year. That's the difference between paper progress and the kind you can watch from your car.
The Interurban Trail Gets Something Out Of This Too
The part of this project that has nothing to do with housing counts or zoning fights is the trail work. The Interurban Trail already runs along this stretch, and the redevelopment plan includes upgrades to it, including year-round public restroom facilities that will be turned over to the township for public use. Township planning documents also describe roughly 21,000 square feet of the site as public-facing commercial and gathering space, meant to sit alongside the trail rather than compete with it.
Marketing materials for the site's retail space also list pickleball courts and a trailhead park among the planned amenities. None of that is confirmed as built yet, but it tells you the site is being designed around people who are already walking or biking that stretch of the Interurban, not just around new residents moving into the townhomes.
What This Looks Like If You Live On This Corner
If Marsh and Haslett is part of your regular loop, here's what's realistic to expect over the next couple of construction seasons:
- Ongoing construction traffic and periodic lane restrictions near the intersection, since the plan builds out 19 separate buildings in phases rather than all at once.
- Retail tenants likely showing up before most of the housing does. The restaurant-zoned space is already being marketed, while residential construction typically trails commercial buildout on a phased project this size.
- Trail users seeing physical changes before residents do. Restroom construction and trailhead improvements tend to move faster than multi-building residential phases.
- A construction footprint that could run for a few more years yet, given the site is 19.5 acres split across 19 planned buildings.
The corner isn't finished. It isn't close to finished. But for the first time since 2011, there's a dollar figure attached to space in that plaza, and that's a different kind of update than the ones this site has produced for the last fifteen years.
If you're the kind of Haslett resident who's been watching this corner since the demolition crews showed up in 2023, Heidi Smith is watching it too, and is happy to talk through what a corridor like this tends to mean for the neighborhoods around it whenever you're ready for that conversation.
