Posted March 10, 200916 yr Since so much of the current discussion of the housing market right now is so dour and depressing, I wanted to start a thread dedicated to the potential opportunities that could grow out of it, particularly for cities in Ohio and for industrial cities. I need my silver lining, damn it! :-)
March 10, 200916 yr Cleveland-area homes can be yours for $1 each -- 133 of them, at least Shaheen Samavati, Plain Dealer Reporter How low can real estate prices go? In some cases, a buck. Banks and mortgage companies that repossess homes are selling off the vacant, often neglected properties at unprecedented prices across Northeast Ohio. The cheapest are in Cleveland and East Cleveland, where at least 1,400 homes were snapped up for $1,000 or less in 2008 -- 133 for only a dollar, according to county records ... ... For more information, please visit http://blog.cleveland.com/business/2009/03/have_a_dollar_you_can_a_house.html
March 10, 200916 yr Wow. What a nice treatment. This article actually makes me want to get together some people and do something like this. For Sale: The $100 House By TOBY BARLOW, New York Times March 7, 2009 RECENTLY, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he’d never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here? Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world ... ... For more information, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08barlow.html
April 28, 200916 yr Artists vs. Blight By ALEXANDRA ALTER Wall Street Journal (Front Page!) April 17, 2009 Last month, artists Michael Di Liberto and Sunia Boneham moved into a two-story, three-bedroom house in Cleveland's Collinwood neighborhood, where about 220 homes out of 5,000 sit vacant and boarded up. They lined their walls with Ms. Boneham's large, neon-hued canvases, turned a spare bedroom into a graphic-design studio and made the attic a rehearsal space for their band, Arte Povera. The couple used to live in New York, but they were drawn to Cleveland by cheap rent and the creative possibilities of a city in transition. "It seemed real alive and cool," said Mr. Di Liberto. Their new house is one of nine previously foreclosed properties that a local community development corporation bought, some for as little as a few thousand dollars. The group aims to create a 10-block "artists village" in Collinwood, with residences for artists like Mr. Di Liberto, 31 years old, and Ms. Boneham, 34 ... ... For more information, please visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123992318352327147.html
April 28, 200916 yr Detroit House: $100. Bold New Ideas for the City: Priceless WALTER WASACZ ModelD 3/19/2009 The phone rings again and again and again. It hardly ever stops. On Gina Reichert's desk in the Design 99 shop, in Mitch Cope's pocket as he walks around his newly-acquired properties in the just-north-of-Hamtramck neighborhood where the couple lives, the phone keeps ringing. Who's calling? It's ABC's "20/20," National Public Radio, the Detroit News. It's researchers from the Netherlands, beekeepers from Berlin, a project collaborator from Sweden, artists from Chicago via San Francisco who will be closing on one of those properties this month ... ... For more information, please visit http://www.metromode.com/features/detroithouses0048.aspx
April 28, 200916 yr Resettle Youngstown http://www.resettleyoungstown.org/ is virtually giving properties away on Youngstown's north side, in the Wick Park historic district. Look down their page, and you will see a few "DIY Opportunities." These are properties that this organization owns. All a person has to do is pay for the deed transfer and other misc. fees. (about $1,000) I don't know if there are residency or renovation time table restrictions yet, but I'm in the early stages of possibly aquiring one of their properties. I wonder if they've considered marketing specifically towards artists?
April 29, 200916 yr Wow. There are actually some really beautiful houses in the DIY section, and with what look like some pretty massive floor plans. Unless there is some considerable hidden structural problems, those are steals!
April 29, 200916 yr These generally are steals. The houses on their website are just representative examples. Their current "inventory" is larger, and they are working on acquiring even more properties. Some of them are more decayed than others, and some do have leaking roofs or damage from fallen trees, though. One of the houses I hope to look at soon is 1012 Bryson. I think Resettle Youngstown is a newer organization, so they haven't found many people to match up with houses yet. Then there is the stigma of living in Youngstown that they have to fight against.
April 30, 200916 yr And you though Detroit had it bad... $30 house at center of controversy By LINDA MARTZ • News Journal • April 30, 2009 MANSFIELD -- City Planning Commission officials have told a Florida man legal recourse is an option after he bought a house for $30 without having been notified about a condemnation order pending on the property. [email protected] 419-521-7729
April 30, 200916 yr Not a bad deal. Paducah, Kentucky did a similar program nearly a decade ago (IIRC), to transform a blighted area south of downtown into a thriving arts community. Their gamble worked. Properties were sold for as little as $1, but the new owners were required to either restore or rehabilitate the property for occupancy, and then live in said property. It's actually a very folksy, cute arts district, many of the studios being in the homes themselves.
May 2, 200916 yr Here's a link to the Paducah Artist Relocation Program: http://www.paducaharts.com. This tiny town in central Kentucky (about 3 hours from any major metropolitan market) has been very successful with this strategy at a pretty minimal cost. IIRC, approximately 100 artists have moved in from more than 20 states. It was actually the inspiration for the above-referenced Cleveland's "From Rust Belt to Artist Belt", which is exploring similar concepts in Cleveland but with an attention to our specific amenities for artists. Pittsburgh also has a pretty amazing project that has been pretty successful there ... the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative: http://www.pennavenuearts.org/.
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