LANSING — Ellen Dowling is used to being honked at.

The Lansing resident dodged cars on a sunny April afternoon as she walked to a bus stop in the center of the Frandor Shopping Center parking lot.

“I can't drive and I can’t get around Frandor without getting half run over like every other second," Dowling said.

It's no secret that the bustling retail district at the eastern edge of Lansing can be less than welcoming to bicyclists and pedestrians, said Andi Crawford, Lansing's director of neighborhoods and citizen engagement.

"For me, as an able-bodied person, it's even difficult to get across the street quickly enough," said Crawford, who walks from her eastside home to Frandor nearly once a month.

Suzanne Wade sums up the area with one word: "congested."

The Lansing resident is a frequent customer at Frandor Tailor & Cleaners, but wishes the space surrounding the business was easier to navigate.

What, Wade wonders, could be done to make the area more appealing to drivers and pedestrians?

Locals use the term "Frandor" to broadly describe the sprawling commercial zone between Ranney Park and U.S. 127, with a northern border including the confluence of East Saginaw Street and East Grand River Avenue. The southern border is Michigan Avenue.

Officially, the Frandor Shopping Center is an outdoor mall within that built-up area. The shopping center sits on 35 acres just south of Saginaw, bounded by North Clippert Street to the west and Ranney Park to the east.

Frandor's retail occupancy rate is high

To Craig Terrill, however, Frandor is a state of mind.

"It's like a retail wasteland," said Terrill, an east side resident. "You don't go to Frandor. You end up in Frandor."

Terrill helps run "Lansing Facts," a satirical Twitter account that traffics in hyper-local references. Frandor is a frequent target of the account's affectionate derision.

"Everybody in Lansing goes to Frandor, but everybody dunks on Frandor," said Terrill, a state employee who describes himself as an "armchair urban planner."

That's the Frandor paradox.

Residents complain about the area's congestion, but the chaos is a testament to demand.

Retail space at the Frandor Shopping Center is 98% occupied, according to Danielle Speirs, a leasing agent with Corr Commercial Real Estate. The center has 61 tenants.

That's no small feat in an era where online shopping has cut into main street business, said Rex LaMore, director of the Center of Community and Economic Development at Michigan State University.

The Kroger store at Frandor is key to driving traffic, LaMore said, since people need perishables as often as once a week.

The fate of another anchor business, the Sears just south of Frandor, will also be key to determining the area's trajectory, LaMore predicted. The Michigan Avenue Sears, located on property owned by Gillepsie Property Management, Co., has survived recent rounds of closures after Sears declared bankruptcy in 2018.

Lots of cars, lots of crashes

The businesses within and near Frandor appear to benefit from the area's heavy traffic.

On an average day, 28,863 vehicles drive from Coolidge Road in East Lansing to the junction of Saginaw and Grand River in Lansing.

"When Frandor was developed it was the perfect example of location, location, location," said Brian McGrain, Lansing's director of economic development and planning. "It's really the gateway from Lansing to East Lansing. So goes Frandor, so goes the region."

But, that gateway can be hazardous for drivers.

Ingham County's most dangerous intersection, as determined by the number of crashes, is sandwiched between U.S. 127 and Frandor.

There were 69 collisions, none of them fatal, at East Saginaw and North Homer Street in 2017, according to Michigan State Police data. Homer Street offloads northbound drivers from the highway toward Frandor.

Several of the county's other collision hot spots were clustered in the same vicinity. East Saginaw and North Clippert streets had 50 crashes and North Howard Avenue and East Grand River Avenue had 49 crashes.

This map shows the Ingham County intersections with the highest numbers of crashes in 2017, according to Michigan State Police data. Click on the red icon to see the number of crashes at that location.

More: These Ingham County intersections had the most crashes

Why improving traffic flow is complex

The Frandor area is a quagmire of commuter glut, one-way streets and merging. It's well-known as a magnet for fender-benders, but redesign would be a challenge, saidAndy Kilpatrick, Lansing's public service director.

Any big-picture design plan would need to rope in the state plus multiple local governments.

East Lansing has a stake as Frandor's neighbor to the east, as do Lansing and Lansing Township.

The Frandor Shopping Center itself and most of the strip malls that surround it are in Lansing, but a section of commercial space to the west of Clippert Street falls within the township.

The Michigan Department of Transportation oversees work on U.S. 127 and state highways, including Saginaw and Grand River.

MDOT officials say they plan to improve driver sight lines at Homer Street between Michigan and Saginaw in 2020, as part of a safety project.

The state agency also is working to upgrade traffic lights where Homer and Howard streets intersect with Saginaw and Grand River.

Lighted arrows will provide a clearer indication of left-turn and right-turn only lanes and discourage wrong-way drivers from turning head-on into traffic, MDOT spokesman Aaron Jenkins said. A similar light will be installed at Saginaw and Clippert.

More sidewalks, paths are planned

Lansing resident Alison Alfredson avoids driving past Frandor whenever possible.

She notes, however, that the busy streets can be even more overwhelming for pedestrians and bicyclists.

The area's layout is a conundrum, in part, because high-traffic volumes might make it inadvisable to reduce driving lanes, Kilpatrick said.

Nonetheless, the city of Lansing is considering some improvements to the Frandor region, including adding sidewalks to fill in gaps along the northside of Grand River Avenue between Clippert and Coolidge, Kilpatrick said.

Another positive development will be an "east side connector" walking and bike route, set for completion in fall 2019 or spring 2020. The route, which will extend more than three miles from the east side of Frandor to Lansing's downtown, will connect a paved bike path to bike lanes and sidewalks.

Additionally, pedestrians will eventually be able to use pathways at Ranney Park just east of Frandor.

The asphalt pathways also will accommodate county utility vehicles. which must access retention ponds being built as part of a $30 million county drain project to reduce flooding and prevent pollution from spilling into the Red Cedar River.

"It's going to be a lot more appealing, a lot more walkable," Ingham County Drain Commissioner Pat Lindemann said. "Probably, when it's done, you won't recognize the place."

The drain project, which could break ground this summer, coincides with plans for a $250 million commercial development near Michigan Avenue at the site of the former Red Cedar golf course.

Developers of the Red Cedar project have promised to include additional pathways south of Michigan Avenue and north of the Red Cedar River. If the Red Cedar development does not move forward, local governments will pay more (roughly $4 million) for pathways south of Michigan plus additional drainwork, Lindemann said.

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'Every community has a Frandor'

A Design Lansing comprehensive plan, adopted by Lansing City Council in 2012, acknowledged the shortcomings of the retail district surrounding Frandor.

The plan called out "older shopping centers" with "bland, single-story architecture."

Strip commercial development along major commercial corridors "creates an unappealing community image, masks attractive neighborhoods and is dominated by automobiles, parking lots and a visual confusion of signs and overhead wires," the plan noted.

Frandor is a relic of an age when urban planners favored creating commercial zones that were set apart from the neighborhoods in which people lived, said Andrea Brown, executive director of the Michigan Association of Planning.

The growth of the highway system in the mid-20th century enabled that sprawl.

"Every community has a Frandor, particularly older communities like Lansing and our state is rife with older communities," Brown said.

When Frandor opened in 1954, it was one of the state's largest shopping centers. The mall, originally open-air, became partly enclosed in 1972. The mall's owners eliminated those enclosures during a major renovation in 1998.

Breaking up a sea of parking

Alfredson, a longtime Lansing resident, says the mall's design makes it difficult to walk from one shop to another. If she has to shop at T.J. Maxx and then HomeGoods, she'll park separately to visit each store.

Alfredson suggested the mall's owners could add another sidewalk cutting mid-way through the parking lot from east to west.

Another improvement would be replacing excess parking with trees, Brown said. Added green space would break up an ugly sea of concrete and soak up water that leads to springtime flooding.

There is little government officials can do, however, to force developers to retool a privately owned parking lot. The Frandor Shopping Center is zoned as F-commercial for general retail use.

If Frandor were built today, the city would require an eight-foot-wide "buffer" zone of greenery at the edges of the property. There are no zoning requirements, however, for landscaping within Frandor's parking lot, Lansing Zoning Administrator Susan Stachowiak said.

Representatives from Corr Commercial Real Estate, the company that manages the Frandor Shopping Center, say new islands will be added to the mall's parking lot in 2020. The company says it plans to replant existing greenery and re-stripe crosswalks this spring.

Terrill, the self-proclaimed "Chiefs Facts Officer" of the Lansing Facts Twitter account, likens walking through the Frandor parking lot to "being on the cover of late '90s, early 2000s emo album."

"It's just so bleak, especially dodging potholes on a rainy day" he said. "So dystopian."

In Terrill's view, hip, walkable neighborhoods like REO Town and Old Town represent what Lansing aspires to be.

Frandor, he says, represents what Lansing resigns itself to being.

"That's just about the most Midwestern put-down you can say about something — it is what it is." Terrill said. "If people say, 'Frandor is Frandor,' then the Frandor mindset wins."

More:

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Contact Sarah Lehr at (517) 377-1056 or slehr@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahGLehr.

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