Habitat for Humanity in Lansing to redevelop houses, land owned by Sparrow Hospital
LANSING, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - In the coming months, a block just down the road from the former Sparrow Hospital in Lansing will be transformed after a donation from the hospital and some elbow grease from Habitat for Humanity.
For years, the University of Michigan Health Sparrow campus, which was just called Sparrow Hospital before the transition, bought up houses and land around their building on Michigan Avenue in case it needed to expand.
"To put a hospital-owned clinic or some other sort of supply facility would not be good for the neighborhood. I mean, it is truly an older neighborhood that's really kept up, and it should be returned to being a neighborhood," said Margaret Dimond, the president of the University of Michigan Health West Region and Sparrow's first woman president.
That land and those houses are being sold for $1 to the Ingham County Land Bank and the Habitat for Humanity Capital Region.
"They're all what I would say dilapidated, for lack of a better word. But the the renovation will start this spring into the fall, and hopefully, the interior in the winter. Then they'll be available sometime in 2025 for putting them up on the market and for sale."
Dimond said that giving away those houses and land was an important project to her as a new leader of the health system. Once all is said and done, this donation could be worth millions.
"It's the right thing to do for the neighbors and because these are going to return to the stock of available housing for those folks around the hospital that want to live there, that want to be neighbors of the hospital. This just gives back," she said.
