"We want your input and here is how you can give it. We plan to host meetings and we want to listen."

On Monday afternoon, I sat with Nelson and Marvin Beatty, who is among Nelson's investment partners, in the park just north of the building they own that houses Bert's Warehouse.

(Bert Dearing, the mainstay's owner, stopped by to say hello to his landlords in the park area. "Three months ago, this was an eyesore," he said of the property. Nelson and Beatty said it cost more than $100,000 to convert it into the new space.)

It's the site that had been targeted for new mixed-use development with 79 units by Joey Jonna of Birmingham before Nelson bought it as part of his spending spree that has resulted in a roughly 20-building, 250,000-square-foot Eastern Market real estate portfolio.

The property that Nelson's Detroit-based Firm Real Estate wants to demolish is actually four buildings, including that one that houses Mike Coney Island. Mike wouldn't say much about his future plans when I talked with him briefly this morning as he cooked for a patron, but he said the space has been a restaurant, although not under his ownership, for decades.

"I plan to close the restaurant and start a new business somewhere else," he said in a text message this afternoon after this story published, noting that he "was busy and couldn't really talk."

"I want to be out of the restaurant business and do something different. This is my own decision and has nothing to do with being forced to close. I have had great communications with the Nelsons. They treat me fair."

There are three buildings that line Russell Street and one that has Division Street frontage and that spans north to an alley. Nelson says the four foundations are in poor condition, and a wall is buckling.

"Not all four buildings were built at the same time, but they are all very old. You have four different foundations that are all compromised. They have varying degrees of deterioration," he said. "It would be one thing if it was one foundation in one building. You could repair that. But here, you have basement in parts and not in the other."

Beatty said that whatever takes its place will be done deliberately and with input from the community.

"We would much prefer to structure whatever we do with a plan, not just throwing shit against a wall and trying to figure out how people are going to react to it," Beatty said. "For us, the best thing to do is to plan something, to structure something that we think will work for the entire community."

What ultimately ends up at that site will be the byproduct of lots of discussion and ideas, Beatty said.

"By that time (that community meetings start), we'll have some conceptual understanding or conceptual idea of what we want to put here. Like any development, it's like a horse that started out before the committee and ended up as a camel," Beatty said.

Indeed.

Nelson's tenure as a landlord in Detroit has been bumpy to date, almost a year after I first wrote about him.

Concerns about rising rents have prompted backlash over fear that the eclectic food district will lose some of its identity as a go-to spot for affordable space for artists and small businesses. Several have closed or are leaving under Nelson's ownership, including Russell Street Deli and Mootown Ice Cream & Dessert Shoppe LLC, but he is also bringing in new restaurants, like Jose's Tacos.

He said he is aware of the concerns, as well as some of the criticism and name-calling he has taken in the media and elsewhere, including a meme featuring Photoshopped chain restaurant logos onto the key Russell Street building that houses/housed Supino Pizza/Mootown/Russell Street (to close in September)/Zeff's Coney Island.

For Firm Real Estate, he says, "renewal" in Eastern Market "is when you are building new construction and when you are attracting new businesses to make sure that it is within the character that makes Eastern Market unique. It's not chain restaurants."

I made a remark about the meme.

"Well, I wonder, 10 years from now, when those (chain) businesses are not in those buildings, what will the fans of those memes say? But I cannot predict the future. It's building buildings that fit within the scale and feel of the market," Nelson said.

He is just one of a new corps of landlords swooping into Eastern Market and buying property in the country's oldest food district, but he has by far attracted the most attention even though others have done nothing of note with their properties so far for a variety of reasons.

Others include Detroit developers and economic development professionals Roger Basmajian and George Jackson and New York City-based developer ASH NYC, replacing the street-level business operators in Eastern Market that traditionally owned their own properties (and sometimes others).

According to Dan Carmody, president of Eastern Market Partnership, some existing businesses have expressed concerns about rent increases as the new landlord crop pours money into improving the district's older buildings. Part of that concern arises because the space has been comparatively inexpensive for decades, Carmody said in October.

"The previous landlords came up in an age where having a warm body and somebody paying any kind of rent was an advantage over having vacant space," he said.

Nelson said Monday that eight of his buildings are currently under renovation, and that work on the Supino/Russell Street Deli/Mootown/Zeff's building should be done in about a month.

Nelson has said that rents in his properties will be "market rate" and has previously said that he plans on carving out affordable space for artists and food users as his overall vision for his portfolio progresses.