This article does mention demolishing homes as well but what I found interesting was the Local Govt using a grant to buy homes and renovate them. Could have possibly put people to work and saved some houses in the process in Springfield and around Duval.
http://www.middletownjournal.com/news/news/butler-county-makes-clean-sweep-of-blighted-homes/nYZkZ/
Butler County makes clean sweep of blighted homes
By Amanda Seitz
Staff Writer
Margie Coots never thought she would be able to afford her own home.
The 38-year-old single mom was renting a two-bedroom house with her brother and his child, though, when she came across a three-bedroom home in Trenton that she could afford.
It was a home that had once sat rotting on the neighborhood block until the county, using a federal grant, was able to renovate the house and sell it for cheap to a first-time homebuyer like Coots.
Her home is one of dozens that was previously foreclosed or abandoned in communities throughout Butler County, but now, thanks to a $4.2 million grant from the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, has been either rehabilitated or demolished completely since 2009.
The Butler County Economic Development Department will, by the end of this year, wrap up the four-year program, which has represented the largest effort in the county’s recent history to raze blighted properties across the region.
The county spent $257,000 of those federal funds to knock down roughly 50 homes that were once considered eyesores in neighborhoods. And, with the help of the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services of Hamilton Inc., found six low- to moderate-income homebuyers to occupy six other homes that were rehabilitated.
“If you just have one of these abandoned homes in your neighborhood, people say, ‘I can’t move off my street,’ †David Fehr, the Director of Economic Development for the county, said. “It decreases the property value of everyone.â€
The investment of a lifetime
Coots said she’s keeping up with her Trenton home, which once resembled the vacant properties that Fehr receives complaints about. She recently even saved enough money to install a wooden fence.
The county spent $1.05 million of the $4.2 million federal grant buying and flipping homes. Working with Neighborhood Housing Services of Hamilton, it rebuilt blighted homes in Trenton and New Miami, according to Fehr.
The housing program also put Coots, and the other homeowners, through training sessions focused on the home-owning and home-buying process, as well as preparing a budget to pay mortgage bills, said Lori DiStaola, the executive director of the Neighborhood Housing Services of Hamilton.
“Our goal and our mission is to help successfully obtain home ownership, but to maintain to it, too,†she said. “This is the biggest investment that most people will ever make in their lifetime, and they know so little about it.â€
‘Worst of the worst’
Typically, the county doesn’t get involved in the business of buying up or razing complaint-ridden properties, Fehr said. When it scored the federal grants in 2008, however, officials knew they could help a number of smaller communities struggling with high foreclosure rates.
In 2008, roughly 3,000 people per year were filing for foreclosures in the county. Butler County currently ranks 12th in the state for foreclosure rates.
“Historically, a lot of the townships have had these complaints with these vacant houses but haven’t had the funds to demolish them over the years,†said Desmond Maaytah, a community development specialist for the county.
Maaytah said the county demolished smaller homes with the federal funds, and those demolitions typically cost $7,000 each.
The county didn’t buy the homes it demolished and often, Maaytah said, property owners who had fallen behind on upkeep or payments agreed to let the county take down the eyesores.
The county focused demolition efforts on dozens of homes in New Miami, Fairfield Twp. and Trenton, where foreclosure rates were high.
Maaytah said he worked with local leaders to identify “the worst of the worst†properties in municipalities.
One Fairfield Twp. home had a tree growing through the living room, and many others were often makeshift homes for squatters or the source of small fires and criminal complaints, he said. In some cases, like the village of New Miami where 20 homes were razed, strips of houses were knocked out on one street alone.
‘Very fearful’
The county also used funds from the federal grant to focus on community projects meant to give a new face to certain areas struggling with foreclosure rates in Butler County.
For nearly 15 years, the village of Seven Mile had been scarred by an empty gas station with boarded up windows and cracked pavements that sat in the middle of its downtown.
Rumors spread, throughout the county, that the gas tanks were leaking and contaminating the water, Mayor Vivian Gorsuch said. Everywhere the mayor went it seemed someone had questions about the rusted gas station with the leaky roof.
“It was very fearful for a little,†Gorsuch said. “The gas station was dangerous for the people that lived around it.â€
Gorsuch knew the village would never be able to clean up the old gas tanks with its $300,000 annual operating budget, so he jumped at the opportunity when county officials offered up $276,000 in cash from the federal grant.
By the end of 2011, the rusty tanks were replaced with a small park and benches in the village of nearly 1,000 people. Gorsuch said the new public space has become a hot spot for village residents and she hopes to bring a farmer’s market to the park sometime soon.
“(The park) has become a meeting place for people,†Gorsuch said.
The county also worked on other community projects with the grant money: $1 million was spent on renovating a vacant building into a library for Monroe; about $1.1 million was spent on constructing handicap accessible residential facilities; and $112,200 was spent getting rid of 20 abandoned mobile homes that once sat on Ohio 4, according to Maaytah.
The funding made available from HERA in this article to do these redevelopment activities is known as the Neighborhood Stabilization Program1. It's interesting to see how other local governments have implemented it.
Jacksonville received funding under this program, but it's hard to get info on what all they have done exactly with the money. I know that they have had some homebuyer incentives targeted toward foreclosures, but hard to say how many of those have received rehab...and exactly where in the County this has been done. I think they have contracted out to other not for profits and developers...and some of it has been new construction, I believe. Also think the County has probably been funding demos with this as well.
I think it's a good program that helps accomplish several things: gives jobs to contractors and subs for repairs, which does generate permit fees for county; put someone in a previously vacant home with affordable payments (everyone that buys under this program is required by HUD to take a 8 hr homebuyer class); helps improve the neighborhood by getting vacant foreclosures back into use. Thanks for posting, Apache.