I've noticed a few prospective microdevelopers posting questions here at UrbanOhio in individual threads. So maybe we have a one-stop shopping place for information with a new thread....

 

Small-Scale Developers, Big Dreams

By PENELOPE GREEN

Published: November 6, 2013

 

BUFFALO — It was the proverbial melting pot, festive, aromatic and polyphonic. There were young hipsters (identifiable by their wool caps and archaic facial hair) and local homesteaders, along with settlers from Myanmar, Bhutan, Pakistan and Africa, to name just a few of the cultures represented at this once-blighted city’s annual auction of foreclosed properties. Would-be homeowners and property moguls huddled over the listings for more than 4,300 parcels of vacant lots and houses, their hoped-for choices highlighted and starred.

 

Bernice Radle and Jason Wilson, both 27, brandished their own sheaf of marked-up listings. They were clearly old hands, hopping up to greet friends and mingling as if at a cocktail party. “Last year was so intense,” Ms. Radle said, “we had to go home and take a nap afterwards.”

 

This was their second auction; at their first, they bought a vacant lot ($500) and three century-old houses ($66,000), holdings to which they later added an 1870s cottage purchased directly from the owner for $1 after convincing him that it would be cheaper to let them assume his debts and fees (about $5,000) than to spend triple that amount razing the place.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/garden/small-scale-developers-big-dreams.html

When I was working in Buffalo a couple years ago I could feel and see that there were so many groups with a variety of missions popping up to make change to their city. I was impressed with some of the renovations in the Elmwood village area but also many others. It definitely felt like millenials were very much in control of the city's future.

 

The other point in the article someone mentioned about the need for gentrification and it has never really taken hold there.  My feeling is Buffalo has been slowly in decline over 50 years. There was no severe shock to the city like other rust belt cities had.  The people in the southtowns feel they had a shock when the steel plants closed. Maybe they did but they still have a massive Ford plant in the south and a fairly big Chevy plant i think it is in the north. They get a lot of Canadians coming in to increase tax coffers due to no VAT tax.  So a fairly diverse economy that did not place all its eggs in one industrial basket.

  Their biggest drop would've been in the '50s when the st Lawrence Seaway opened. At that point the erie canal ceased to relevant and all the warehouses in their harbor area were pretty much torn down.

This is pretty much the direction I'm planning to go into in Columbus eventually.  I have an opportunity in the US coming up that may just allow me financially to do this.  I would absolutely love to buy up older houses and other buildings in neighborhoods like Franklinton, the Near East and Near South sides and really get involved in bringing those areas back to life.  This is basically how the Short North was rebuilt... one building at a time.