Lansing's Public Housing: From 833 Units to 66

LANSING, Mich. — In June 2020, the Lansing Housing Commission held title to 833 units of public housing. By the end of 2024, it held 66. Most of the units that left LHC’s portfolio in those four years did not leave the rental market. They left public ownership. Two hundred and two of them now sit on assessment rolls under “SK Lansing Limited Dividend Housing Association,” a Michigan title-holding entity organized in Southfield in March 2022, renamed eight months later from “SK Investments Group LLC” to “Red Michigan Holdings LLC,” and ultimately controlled through a cross-held Florida holding-company structure that operates the homes on federal voucher payments administered by LHC itself.

The homes were federally funded scattered-site public housing built under HUD’s Turnkey program. According to HUD’s Public Housing Buildings dataset for PHA MI058, units in Project 8 became available on October 30, 1969 and units in Project 5 on November 29, 1970. They were added to LHC’s portfolio during the period in which the federal-state Interstate 496 project demolished 600 homes and 200 businesses across the St. Joseph and Main Street corridor between 1966 and 1970, displacing more than 600 families, approximately 2,200 individuals, nearly all of them Black, from what was at that time Lansing’s largest Black neighborhood (Fox 47 News and Segregation by Design reporting, both linked in the sources section below). LHC operates under the Michigan Housing Facilities Act, Act 18 of 1933.

The federal government now pays again, through Section 8 voucher subsidies, to house residents in the same homes, but on weaker tenant-protection terms than public-housing law provided, with a private profit margin extracted from each unit, and 29 eviction cases on file in the eighteen months between June 2025 and February 2026, including 14 filed on a single day.

Key findings

• Lansing’s public housing portfolio collapsed from 833 units to 66 units over four years, a 92 percent reduction documented in the HUD Picture of Subsidized Households dataset for PHA MI058 between 2020 and 2024.
• 202 of those former public-housing homes were sold to a single private entity for $14.62 million across four closings between April 2023 and February 2025, recorded in Ingham County Register of Deeds filings.
• The buyer’s brand changed eight months before closing. The acquisition entity was formed as “SK Investments Group LLC” on March 24, 2022, then renamed to “Red Michigan Holdings LLC” on November 21, 2022 (LARA 802830624), with the result that name-based public-records searches for the SK brand no longer return the buyer (number-based searches do).
• The sale process surfaced very few qualifying bidders. Of 375 entities formally invited to bid, 25 expressed interest and 2 submitted formal bids; of approximately 40 interested existing tenants, only 8 demonstrated they could qualify to purchase the homes they were living in, per City Pulse, “Few tenants qualify to buy homes amid public housing shakeup,” May 19, 2022.
• Twenty-nine eviction cases have been filed against tenants in the former public-housing scattered-site homes since June 2025, including a 14-case mass filing on January 29, 2026, per Michigan state court case index (MiCOURT) records.

The collapse, year by year

The HUD Picture of Subsidized Households is HUD’s authoritative annual dataset on every public housing agency in the country. The PHA MI058 record (Lansing Housing Commission) shows the unit-count trajectory directly:

Lansing Housing Commission public housing units, 2020–2025Units90060040020008332020406202129120222912023682024662025Lansing Housing Commission public housing units by year. Source: HUD Picture of Subsidized Households, PHA MI058, 2020–2025.

Year	Public housing units	Change	Vouchers (HCV)
2020	833	–	1,863
2021	406	−427	1,934
2022	291	−115	1,967
2023	291	0	2,185
2024	68	−223	2,185
2025	66	−2	2,252

Two transactions account for most of the collapse. The 2020-to-2021 drop of 427 units was driven by Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) conversions, which transfer public housing units to private limited partnerships while preserving project-based subsidies. The 2023-to-2024 drop of 223 units was driven by the scattered-site sale to SK Lansing. The remaining 2-to-4-unit annual changes are individual tenant purchases of scattered-site homes that LHC offered to long-tenured residents during the disposition.

What did not change at the same rate was demand. The voucher allocation grew from 1,863 in 2020 to 2,252 in 2025, but vouchers without a sufficient supply of voucher-eligible units do not produce housing; they produce a waiting list of would-be voucher holders looking for a unit that will accept them. The 2022 City of Lansing Consolidated Plan to HUD acknowledges the supply problem in its own language: “A shortage of affordable housing may exist for very low-income households earning less than 30 percent HAMFI.” That same Consolidated Plan describes the scattered-site disposition as “reducing the overall amount of affordable housing stock under the jurisdiction of the public housing authority.”

The homes the city sold

The Interstate 496 highway project, constructed by the federal and state governments through the center of Lansing between 1966 and 1970, demolished 600 homes and 200 businesses across the St. Joseph and Main Street corridor (per Fox 47 News reporting linked in the sources section below) in what was at that time the city’s largest concentration of Black households, families who had been concentrated there because restrictive covenants and redlining had excluded Black households from most other Lansing neighborhoods through the 1960s (per CEDA Michigan reporting linked in the sources section below). Per the Segregation by Design project, the construction “displaced over 600 families (approximately 2,200 individuals) in Lansing, Michigan, nearly all of them Black.” Property owners received compensation under federal acquisition rules; renters and contract buyers, who were not formal property owners, did not receive relocation payments under the same rules.

The scattered-site homes that LHC sold to SK in 2023 were added to LHC’s portfolio during this displacement period under HUD’s Turnkey program. Per the HUD Public Housing Buildings dataset for PHA MI058, units in Project 8 Scattered Sites became available on October 30, 1969 and units in Project 5 Scattered Sites on November 29, 1970. The HUD Turnkey method, introduced in 1966, allowed private developers to build single-family homes that the housing authority would acquire on completion, distributed across residential neighborhoods rather than concentrated in a single complex. The geographic distribution of LHC’s scattered-site stock, per pre-sale records, put about 115 homes south of I-496, 47 in central Lansing, and 40 on the north side. By 2022, the Lansing Consolidated Plan listed 254 scattered-site homes still on LHC’s books, across four core complex areas: 113 at LaRoy Froh, 68 at Hildebrandt Park, 62 at Mt. Vernon, and 11 at S. Washington Park.

By the end of 2024, 202 of those scattered-site homes had moved out of public ownership.

The buyer

On December 17, 2021, an entity calling itself SK Investments Group submitted an unsolicited proposal to LHC offering $17,700,000 in cash for 242 of the scattered-site units, with no financing contingency, and stating in writing that “SK intends to keep all properties as affordable housing rental properties with Section 8 Project Based Vouchers provided by LHC.” Earnest money of $200,000 was deposited with Cinnaire Title Services, and Lansing counsel for the buyer was Thomas L. Lapka of 605 South Capitol Avenue, who serves as registered agent for multiple Limited Dividend Housing Association entities in the Lansing area. The Michigan acquisition vehicle the buyer would use was not yet formed at the time of this proposal; it was filed three months later, on March 24, 2022, by Tzvi Koslowe of 23075 Laurel Valley Street, Southfield, Michigan, under the name “SK Investments Group LLC” (LARA 802830624).

On November 21, 2022, “SK Investments Group LLC” was renamed to “Red Michigan Holdings LLC” by amendment to the same LARA filing. After November 2022, name-based public-records searches for “SK Investments Group” in Michigan returned a different, unrelated entity (SK Investment Group LLC, LARA 802546629) under different ownership. The renamed buyer entity remains findable in LARA records by entity number 802830624; a name-based search alone does not return it.

The actual sale closed in four phases, recorded in Ingham County Register of Deeds filings: $11.92 million in April 2023, $2.31 million in January 2024, and $390,000 in February 2025, for a total of $14.62 million, a 17 percent discount from the December 2021 proposal price. SK financed at least $8.73 million of the purchase through Civic Financial Services LLC, a private money lender, and those mortgages were subsequently assigned through Goldman Sachs Mortgage Company to U.S. Bank Trust National Association, as trustee for Legacy Mortgage Asset Trust 2024 INV1, a private-label mortgage-backed security.

The Michigan acquisition entity sits at the end of a Florida cross-held holding-company chain. Yanir Hadan and Amnon Zakay are the controlling principals through Yard Holdings LLC and Figtree Holdings LLC, both Florida domestic LLCs at the same Sunrise, Florida address. Yard Holdings is the member of Figtree Holdings; Figtree Holdings is the manager of Yard Holdings; the same two principals manage both. Tzvi Koslowe, who runs the Michigan-side operations, does not appear on any Florida filing. The Florida-Michigan corporate connection is established through the shared “SK” naming convention that runs through Koslowe’s earlier Michigan entities, including SK Holding Group LLC (LARA 802113132, formed August 2017) and SK Affordable Housing Company (LARA 802464667), a domestic nonprofit corporation that has filed no IRS Form 990 since its formation in June 2020.

Corporate chain from Florida controlling principals to Lansing parcelsFloridaAmnon Zakayequity owner, Sunrise FLYanir Hadanoperational control, Sunrise FLYard Holdings LLCFL L09000097707Figtree Holdings LLCFL L09000086632 (SK brand)membermanagerYard is member of FigtreeFigtree is manager of YardMichiganRed Michigan Holdings LLCLARA 802830624 (formerly SK Investments Group LLC,renamed Nov 21, 2022); organizer Tzvi Koslowebrand linkvia “SK” namingSK Lansing LDHA LLCLARA 802867162; title-holder on 209 parcelsof former Lansing public housingtitle vehicleOwnership chain from Florida principals through the SK Investments Group brand to the Michigan title-holding entity that holds 209 former public-housing parcels. Source: Florida SunBiz filings (L09000086632, L09000097707); Michigan LARA filings (802830624, 802867162); SK Investments Group website.

The sale process

Of 375 entities formally invited to bid on the scattered-site portfolio, 25 expressed interest and 2 submitted formal bids, per City Pulse reporting. Of approximately 40 existing tenants who expressed interest in purchasing the home they were already living in under public housing, only 8 demonstrated they could afford it (the remainder could not assemble cash for purchase or qualify for a mortgage), per the same article. Council Member Adam Hussain (Third Ward), on the record at the time, labeled as “perplexing” Executive Director Douglas Fleming’s proposal that LHC would continue managing the scattered-site homes after they had been sold, “namely because the ‘headache’ of managing the properties was an impetus for the sale.” The Consolidated Plan and LHC board minutes do not record any analysis of why the response rate was so low or how the two formal bids compared.

The earliest public document opposing the sale was an email from a Lansing resident, Kyle Richard, sent to all Council members and the Mayor on April 26, 2022, three months after the SK proposal arrived and a year before the sale closed. The email is preserved in three different CivicClerk meeting packets (civic_files 4795, 4738, 5766) because Richard sent it as public correspondence to multiple committees. It reads, in part: “the Lansing Housing Commission is planning to sell over 250 homes currently held as public housing to a private investing firm out of Miami, Florida… public housing is a public good and if we are not getting enough money from the feds to support our stock selling them to someone in Miami is not the answer.” No Council member response to this email is recorded in any subsequent CivicClerk file.

On February 13, 2023, Fleming appeared before the Committee of the Whole and confirmed the sale was about to close. Council Member Jeremy Garza asked about the 191 homes being sold; Fleming said the sale “should close in the next couple weeks.” Council Member Hussain asked about post-sale management; Fleming said “Michigan Asset Management Group is contractor,” which the case-file research identifies as likely referring to Michigan Asset Group LLC of DeWitt (LARA 801534229). Fleming said the new owner had spent $500,000 on maintenance over the prior six months, that 4 units were red-tagged and offline, and that “of the 20 reinspections today they are all passed.”

The post-sale record

A 2025-2026 BS&A Lansing parcel search returns 209 parcels titled to “SK LANSING LMTD DIV HOUSING ASSOC” at 23075 Laurel Valley Street, Southfield, Michigan. SK Lansing is, by parcel count, the single largest residential landlord inside the City of Lansing.

A MiCOURT search of the 54A District Court for “SK Lansing” returns 29 cases since June 2025, all 29 of them landlord-tenant evictions. The cases cluster in two batches: 5 evictions filed on September 5, 2025, and 14 evictions filed on a single day, January 29, 2026. The 14-case mass filing matches the operating pattern documented in the previous post in this series at Autumn Ridge, where OPV Partners filed 38 evictions in a 22-day window before selling the property. When a corporate landlord files 14 evictions on the same day, those filings are not 14 independent disputes; they are a portfolio-level decision.

The 29 eviction filings against approximately 209 parcels of former public housing represent a 14 percent filing rate in less than two years. The MiCOURT records do not include cause-of-filing data; the 14-case mass filing on January 29, 2026 is therefore documented as a portfolio-level filing event rather than as 14 independently-prompted disputes, but the underlying causes (nonpayment, lease violation, lease non-renewal, or other) are not visible at the docket level reviewed here. Tenants in these properties are project-based voucher holders. An eviction does not just remove the tenant from this unit; under HUD Section 8 program rules, a tenant evicted for cause from a project-based voucher unit can lose access to the underlying voucher subsidy, which makes finding any voucher-eligible unit during a tight Lansing rental market substantially harder. The annual HUD project-based-voucher payment to SK-owned former-LHC properties has been estimated at approximately $2.2 million (209 parcels × $879 per month per HUD Picture of Subsidized Households project-based-voucher rate × 12 months). None of that subsidy is conditioned on the eviction filing rate or on tenant retention.

What’s left at LHC

The remaining 66 public housing units consist primarily of Hildebrandt Park (3122 Turner Street) and Mt. Vernon (3338 N. Waverly Road), the original 1960s concentrated developments rather than the scattered-site homes the agency built later under HUD direction. The 2,252 vouchers in the LHC system in 2025 are a larger allocation than the agency held in 2020, but vouchers do not become housing without a voucher-eligible landlord willing to accept them, and the supply of voucher-eligible units in Lansing has shrunk as scattered-site public housing has moved to private ownership and rents on rehabilitated stock have risen above payment-standard limits.

At the June 26, 2024 LHC board meeting, Executive Director Douglas Fleming presented the FY2025 budget. Fleming told the board, on the record, that LHC’s administrative fees from properties had fallen from $785,000 to $200,000, that total assets had fallen from about $14 million to about $3.5 million, and that “the gap is being replaced by developer fees.” The agency that holds the public housing portfolio is increasingly funded by the development of new Low Income Housing Tax Credit projects rather than by managing the public housing units it still owns. Fleming appears as the agent or organizer on the LARA filings for at least two of the limited-partnership general-partner entities (Oliver Gardens II and the 220 Kalamazoo GP for Riverview 220) that receive developer fees on those LIHTC deals. Whether he personally receives any portion of those fees, or holds equity in the GP entities, is not documented in the public LARA record.

Who’s supposed to fix this

LHC Board of Commissioners. The Lansing Housing Commission’s Board approved the SK sale, approves the executive director’s bonuses, and reviews the development-fee revenue model. The Board chair through this period has been Emma Henry, who also serves as president of the Capital Area Housing Partnership (CAHP), a Lansing-area affordable-housing organization that has grown substantially over the same period in which LHC contracted, with CAHP’s IRS Form 990 reporting revenue of $839,000 in FY2017 and $10.2 million in FY2023. CAHP appears as a co-developer or service partner on multiple LHC LIHTC deals. Commissioner Ashlee Barker is vice president at Cinnaire, the CDFI whose title services held the SK earnest-money deposit in December 2021. The Board’s procedural choices on the scattered-site sale, on Fleming’s bonus structure, and on the LIHTC deal pipeline are reviewable through the LHC public-records process; whether and how individual commissioners participated in the SK approval vote is the subject of pending FOIA inquiry.

Mayor Andy Schor. Under the Lansing City Charter, the Mayor appoints the LHC Board of Commissioners. The Mayor has the power, prospectively, to nominate replacement commissioners with development-finance independence from the deals the Board is asked to approve, and to direct the City’s planning and economic-development offices to weigh that independence in advancing LIHTC PILOT applications before Council.

HUD Detroit Field Office and HUD Office of Inspector General. HUD Section 18 disposition rules (24 CFR Part 970) govern the sale of public housing units, including the requirements that the disposition serve the residents’ interests and that affordability covenants be monitored after sale. The 20-year affordability covenant on the SK scattered-site units runs through approximately 2042. No public reporting on tenant outcomes, post-sale inspection results, or covenant compliance has been issued. HUD’s Detroit Field Office has the administrative authority to require that reporting; HUD OIG has the authority to audit the disposition process itself.

City Council. The LDHA structure SK uses (SK Lansing LDHA LLC, LARA 802867162) is the corporate vehicle through which Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreements can be applied for under Michigan’s PILOT statute (linked in sources below), and any such PILOT application from the SK-owned scattered-site portfolio would come before Council. Council also has the authority to require, as a condition of any future municipal rental-licensing or PILOT approval, public disclosure of tenant retention rates, eviction filing rates, and unit-condition data on the former public housing portfolio.

Ingham County Treasurer. Several SK-owned parcels appear on the 2025 Ingham County tax-foreclosure-risk list under various LDHA naming variants. The Treasurer’s office operates the tax-forfeiture pipeline under MCL 211.78, including the discretion (as documented in the previous post in this series) over the pacing of the foreclosure timeline against multi-parcel portfolio operators with delinquency histories.

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Sources

Federal housing data: HUD Picture of Subsidized Households, PHA-level data for MI058 (Lansing Housing Commission), years 2020 through 2025, retrieved March 13, 2026 from huduser.gov. Unit-count trajectory (833 → 406 → 291 → 291 → 68 → 66) reflects column “Subsidized units available” for the Public Housing program; voucher counts reflect the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program for the same agency and years. Per-unit subsidy averages computed from annual program totals divided by 12 months and by occupied unit counts.

Property records: City of Lansing tax parcel system (BS&A UID 384), 2025 assessment year, returned 209 parcels titled to “SK LANSING LMTD DIV HOUSING ASSOC” at 23075 Laurel Valley Street, Southfield, MI. Ingham County Register of Deeds for the four sale closings totaling $14.62 million between April 2023 and February 2025, and for the assignment chain through Civic Financial Services LLC and Goldman Sachs Mortgage Company to U.S. Bank Trust National Association as trustee for Legacy Mortgage Asset Trust 2024 INV1.

Court records: Michigan state court case index (MiCOURT), 54A District Court eviction filings against SK Lansing under various entity names, 29 cases between June 2025 and February 2026, all classified as landlord-tenant matters. The 14-case mass filing on January 29, 2026 was confirmed by reviewing case-number sequence and filing-date stamps on the individual MiCOURT records.

Business registry: Michigan LARA Corporate Division. Key entities: Red Michigan Holdings LLC (LARA 802830624, formerly SK Investments Group LLC, organized March 24, 2022, renamed November 21, 2022, organizer Tzvi Koslowe); SK Lansing LDHA LLC (LARA 802867162, formed June 1, 2022, the title-holding limited-dividend-housing-association entity); SK Holding Group LLC (LARA 802113132, formed August 2017); SK Affordable Housing Company (LARA 802464667, nonprofit, formed June 18, 2020, no IRS 990 on file); Michigan Asset Group LLC (LARA 801534229, post-sale management contractor referenced by Fleming on the record). Florida principals (Yanir Hadan, Amnon Zakay) are reflected in Florida SunBiz filings for Figtree Holdings LLC (L09000086632) and Yard Holdings LLC (L09000097707), both at the same Sunrise, Florida address.

Municipal records: CivicClerk Event 8309 (Committee of the Whole, February 13, 2023) for Fleming’s on-the-record description of the pending sale; CivicClerk Event 9436 (LHC Board, June 26, 2024) for Fleming’s FY2025 budget presentation, including the on-the-record statement that administrative fees had fallen from $785,000 to $200,000 and that “the gap is being replaced by developer fees” (Fleming’s own unit-count figure at this meeting was 880 in 2020, while the HUD dataset records the 2020 figure as 833); CivicClerk events 9428, 9430, 9432, 9434, 9438, 9440, and 9442 for 2024 LHC board meetings showing the unit-count progression. The Kyle Richard public-correspondence email opposing the sale (April 26, 2022) is preserved in CivicClerk events 4795, 4738, and 5766. The City of Lansing 2022-2026 Consolidated Plan and Annual Action Plan, submitted to HUD in August 2022, contains the 254-scattered-site inventory and the explicit acknowledgment that the disposition was “reducing the overall amount of affordable housing stock under the jurisdiction of the public housing authority” (Consolidated Plan, page 44).

Historical sources: Fox 47 News, “The Legacy of Interstate 496,” for the 600-home and 200-business demolition counts and the 1966–1970 construction window; Segregation by Design, Lansing I-496, for the “over 600 families (approximately 2,200 individuals)” displacement figure and the redlining context; CEDA Michigan, “Redlining, I-496 and Lansing’s African-American Community,” April 2019, for additional context on the displacement and renter-versus-owner relocation-payment disparity; HUD Public Housing Timeline for the Turnkey-method dates and program description; HUD Public Housing Buildings dataset for the Project 8 (October 30, 1969) and Project 5 (November 29, 1970) date-of-full-availability records.

Reporting referenced: City Pulse, “Few tenants qualify to buy homes amid public housing shakeup,” May 19, 2022 (Kyle Kaminski), for the 375-entity invitation count, the 25 expressions of interest, the 2 formal bids, the 8-of-40 tenant qualification figure, and Council Member Hussain’s “perplexing” characterization of the post-sale management proposal; Fox 47 News, “$60M Renovation”; Fox 47 News, “Council Denies PILOTs”.

Michigan statutes cited: Michigan Housing Facilities Act, MCL 125.651 (Act 18 of 1933), the state-law authority under which Michigan housing commissions, including LHC, operate; MCL 211.7d, the PILOT statute applicable to LDHA-structured low-income housing; MCL 211.78 (General Property Tax Act). Federal regulations cited: 24 CFR Part 970, HUD Section 18 demolition and disposition of public housing.