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Credit: Nick Manes/Crain’s Detroit Business
Residents of the Mies van der Rohe Historic District in Detroit’s Lafayette Park neighborhood just east of downtown are protesting Detroit Thermal work in the area.
Controversial plans to connect a Detroit high-rise building to steam heat using a historic residential district as a throughway appear to be moving forward.
Board members of the city of Detroit’s Historic District Commission on Wednesday voted 6-0 to approve the plans by utility company Detroit Thermal to connect the 1300 Lafayette East Cooperative building to its steam infrastructure. To do so, the company plans to excavate and restore existing below-ground steam pipes that run beneath the residential townhouse complex west of Lafayette Park.
Residents of the historic Mies van der Rohe townhouses are none too pleased with the project and the HDC approval comes a day after three out of four cooperatives encompassing many of the 186 residences filed a lawsuit against Detroit Thermal in Wayne County Circuit Court. The residents’ lawsuit says they would seek an injunction should the work move forward.
Lafayette Park residents spoke for two and a half hours at Wednesday’s meeting, with a majority of the speakers being townhouse residents who were concerned about the steam line.
Many residents said the cooperatives had not been consulted during the creation of Detroit Thermal’s most recent plan, and that the construction would cause harm to the trees that make up their historic landscape. Some said they were concerned that Detroit Thermal did not have a legal right to work on the cooperatives’ land.
A number of residents of the high-rise at 1300 E. Lafayette St., however, did speak in support of the plan, citing increased expenses due to project delays and a desire to have a new source of heat operational in time for the coming winter. Amy Turner, president of the 1300 East Lafayette Cooperative, said the plans, which had been revised from their initial form, reflected community feedback.
“You all know we need heat,” Turner said. “That’s not being debated this evening, but at every turn, Detroit Thermal has answered the requests of the Mies cooperatives.”
Credit: Nick Manes/Crain’s Detroit Business
At issue is providing reliable heat for the more than 300 condo units in the 1300 Lafayette East Cooperative building, a 1960s-era 30-story co-op housing building in Detroit.
Several townhouse residents used their 2 minutes of public speaking time to read from a report by Kay Sicheneder, an arborist hired by the cooperatives. The arborist expressed concerns that not all plants were accurately documented in Detroit Thermal’s plans, and her report said 23 trees would be injured by the construction, rather than seven, as Detroit Thermal stated. Sicheneder also expressed concern that damage to tree roots may not be visible until the future.
“My fear is that they will go forward with their plan, which does not protect the tree roots adequately,” Sicheneder told the commission. “Trees will suffer. They will start to decline — and it often takes years, because trees are big things, and it takes a while.”
Detroit Thermal’s plan initially guaranteed plant well-being for two years after construction. When questioned by the commission, David Scherer, the arborist hired by Detroit Thermal, said damage to trees can take up to five years to be visible.
In response to Sicheneder’s report, the commission added conditions to their approval of the plan, including that Detroit Thermal monitor trees that are replanted for four years after construction and replace them if they die, and that they do a comprehensive tree survey. Additional conditions that Detroit Thermal tie tree branches rather than cutting them, and replace grass with species that match the existing grass, had been suggested by staff prior to the meeting.
In a statement following the meeting, Detroit Thermal spokesperson Harvey Hollins III expressed gratitude for the commission’s approval of the steam line plan.
“We appreciate the commission’s thorough and demanding application process, which included two public hearings,” Hollins said in the statement. “We also appreciate the many public and private comments we received from Detroit residents during this process.”
The ongoing battle between neighbors stems from the 1300 Lafayette co-op building suffering a failure of its boilers two winters ago. Since then, it has been using temporary boilers parked in semi-trailers on-site at a cost of about $30,000 per month, as Crain’s previously reported.
The building had previously been connected to Detroit Thermal’s steam network — which services more than 100 buildings in the downtown Detroit area — and the co-op board in recent months began discussions with the company to reconnect to that system.
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