A 12-story student housing tower rising directly across from Michigan State University has secured the financing it needs to keep climbing. Harbor Bay Ventures has lined up senior financing and institutional equity to build The Howard, a mass-timber high-rise planned at 401 E. Grand River Avenue in East Lansing, with construction already underway on the site of the old Student Book Store.
Banks Line Up Behind the Project
TSB Capital Advisors arranged the financing and equity on Harbor Bay's behalf, according to Global Student Living. Busey Bank and First National Bank of Omaha co-led the senior financing, with MSU Federal Credit Union and the East Lansing office of Indiana-based Horizon Bank also participating, as reported by Multi-Housing News. The outlet notes the deal marks Harbor Bay's first institutional equity raise, a milestone for a developer that has built a track record in the college town.
Harbor Bay is developing The Howard alongside the Ballein family, which has partnered with the firm before on Landmark on Grand River and Newman Lofts, the same report notes. The Howard's site carries its own local history: Howard Ballein opened the Student Book Store there in 1960, and the tower rising in its place sits along a CATA transit line, putting residents a short walk or bus ride from campus.
Beds, Stories and a Few Numbers in Dispute
Plans describe The Howard as a 12-story building, with nine stories of mass timber stacked above a three-story concrete podium, according to the same Multi-Housing News account, which also puts the project's size at 707 beds. The City of East Lansing's own construction-update page corroborates the 12-story figure, but other reporting has muddied the numbers: DLR Group, the project's architecture firm, describes The Howard as a 748-bed development, while a June NAI Mid-Michigan market report called it a 15-story project. The discrepancies remain unresolved across the available sources.
Once finished, The Howard is expected to be Downtown East Lansing's first mass-timber structure, per the city's project page, and the building has been pre-approved for LEED Gold certification, Multi-Housing News reports. Plans call for roughly 8,000 square feet of ground-floor retail alongside a library, fitness center, yoga studios and dedicated study areas — amenities aimed squarely at the student renters the tower is built to house.
Approval, Groundbreaking and a Possible Delay
The East Lansing City Council approved the project on July 21, 2026, and the city says construction work began the week of August 31. A city manager's memo from earlier in the year shows the path there wasn't entirely smooth: Harbor Bay had submitted and then withdrawn an earlier plan for the site after public notice went out, though the applicant still intended to bring the proposal back, with a public hearing on the renewed request set for May 13, according to the city's archived memo.
The city's construction-update page also flags a possible snag ahead: unexpectedly deep and large existing foundation footings on the site may push the schedule back by as much as a week, though it's not stated whether that delay has actually occurred. Completion is still slated for 2028. The project does not include on-site parking; East Lansing Info reported that the city instead required developers to lease 224 spaces from city parking lots.
A Tight Market Near Campus
The financing comes as Michigan State's student housing market stays snug. Yardi Matrix tracked 13,626 completed student housing beds serving the university as of September, with preleasing at 94.9 percent — down 190 basis points from a year earlier, according to Multi-Housing News. Average rent per bed climbed 3.2 percent year over year to $872, the same report notes, while the university's fall 2026 enrollment reached 50,941 students, including more than 40,800 undergraduates.
That enrollment topped 50,000 for a fifth straight year, even though it slipped slightly from 2025, according to the Lansing State Journal. Nationally, student housing occupancy across Yardi Matrix's tracked universities hit an estimated 95.1 percent for the 2025–2026 academic year, up from 93.6 percent the year before, per the NAI Mid-Michigan report. That same report pegged The Howard as a roughly $127 million investment expected to support nearly 1,000 construction jobs, and pointed to other activity nearby, including LaSalle Investment Management's acquisition of the 190-unit, 436-bed Red Cedar Flats and a competing 13-story, 505-bed proposal from Tareen Development Partners at 530 Albert Avenue that cleared the Planning Commission on a 6–2 vote earlier in the year.
