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EAST TOWNE VILLAGE
LIVE-WORK NEIGHBORHOOD
Residential development north of Eastwood should
consist of townhouses, condominiums, and apartments
that provide workforce housing for nearby retail,
office, and research-related production. It may
also accommodate some senior lifestyle housing.
Strong pedestrian connections to Eastwood and
surrounding retail should be provided to create
a walkable environment. Development should line,
and be oriented to, the extension of Coleman Road
and should include bike and pedestrian connections
to the civic uses on Wood Road and the recreation
area to the north in Clinton County. At Towne
Center Boulevard and the Coleman Road extension,
mixed use development with neighborhood commercial
uses should be designed as a transit oriented
development to accommodate future transit opportunities.
New housing at this location
should be buffered from Wal-Mart by a transitional
band of well designed, productionoriented flex-space/small
format office space. This type of use will encourage
additional non-retail employment in a low-rise,
high-tech format. Providing high-quality flex-space
for wet-labs, prototype development, and product
commercialization could help tether the DDA district
to the local research sector by offering state
of the art space for advanced manufacturing of
MSU-licensed technologies; specifically new technologies
and businesses that have outgrown their incubation
facilities and are ready for larger space. Such
space could also help to foster other low-impact,
high value-added types of businesses that require
larger horizontal floor plates.
From a purely functional
standpoint, flexspace and office uses would more
effectively make the transition in scale from
big-box retail to a residential neighborhood,
as well as shield the neighborhood from traffic
and glare associated with that use. It would also
provide areas for spillover parking on evenings,
weekends, and holidays. These types of uses would
also be largely indifferent to the presence of
Wal-Mart whereas other uses, particularly highquality
residential, may be difficult to recruit to this
site because of the externalities and image associated
with big-box retailing.
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Conceptual Development
Example
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