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Thread: Special Report: Abandoned Homes

  1. #1
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    Special Report: Abandoned Homes

    It is helpful for Bflo News to refocus Bflo's massive problem of surplus & derelict housing, but there is little discussion about failed housing policy at multiple levels.

    As abandoned housing relentlessly increases, there is a frenzy of heavily subsidized new housing construction, often in places where nobody lived when Bflo was over twice as large. In effect, as fast as surplus housing is being demolished by taxpayers, taxpayer subsidies build new housing, creating more surplus housing. It is getting nowhere fast, as frighteningly little is done to rehab salvageable housing & neighborhoods. Bflo's too-many, too-small 'neighborhood housing agencies' lack both skill & capacity to do urgently needed rehab & remarketing of struggling neighborhoods.

    And BMHA (housing authority) continues to get the lion's share of city hall's low income housing funding, currently engaged in a major campaign of demolition & reconstruction of public housing . . . as low income home ownership plumets & ever more neighborhoods are empty.

    What are the proposed solutions to this major crisis by Bflo's "housing leaders"?

    What is Bflo HUD manager Steve Banko, who watches $100's of millions steadily pour into Bflo, fuelled by Bflo's poverty & blight, proposing?

    And BMHA Executive Dawn Sanders?

    And recently-appointed Deputy-Mayor-for-Poverty-&-Blight Donna Brown?

    http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/386633.html

    SPECIAL REPORT: ABANDONED HOMES
    Buffalo wants to tear down its abandoned homes

    Critics say the demolition effort is destined to fail, lacks plans for renovation
    Second of three parts

    By Phil Fairbanks NEWS STAFF REPORTER, Updated: 07/07/08 7:47 AM


    Peter Roetzer stumbled across the building at 454 Rhode Island St. during a tour of West Side homes last year. What some saw as a run-down, vacant house — a blight on the neighborhood — Roetzer saw as an intriguing brick structure full of character.

    The Amherst construction contractor liked it so much that he offered the owner $3,000, with the intention of spending another $100,000 or more to fix it up.


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    A database of vacant properties
    Maps pinpoint the city's vacant housing



    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Eight months later, the house was gone, demolished at a cost of $20,000. The owner? City Hall.

    “All of a sudden, it was down,” Roetzer said. “It’s too bad. The building had a lot of potential, a lot of character.”

    Housing activists say Roetzer’s tale — he and the city differ on who dropped the ball — speaks volumes about the failures of Buffalo’s strategy for dealing with its growing vacant housing crisis.

    There is too much demolition, critics say, and too little effort at saving and reusing one of the city’s best assets — its low-cost housing.

    “There’s no plan,” said Catherine Schweitzer of the Baird Foundation, a Buffalo group that the city approached for money to help pay for the demolitions. “Their strategy is a demolition-only strategy. There’s no sense of what should be saved.”

    An hour down the Thruway, Rochester city officials are using a different strategy — saving, fixing and reselling vacant homes.

    Every year, like clockwork, Rochester acquires and repairs 50 to 60 vacant homes and then sells them to first-time homebuyers.

    Buffalo, a city with an even bigger vacant-housing problem, revamps an average of about seven homes a year.

    “The numbers don’t lie,” said Aaron Bartley of PUSH — People United for Sustainable Housing — Buffalo, a West Side community group at the forefront of the housing crisis here.

    Buffalo’s answer to its vacant housing problems is to tear the buildings down, rather than fix them up, a strategy many think is destined to fail.

    Barely a year old, the city’s high-profile demolition effort — the goal of which is to tear down 5,000 homes in five years — is coming under attack. And the critics range from grass-roots neighborhood groups to the mainstream philanthropic community.

    “Right now, demolitions are scattershot,” said Michael Clarke, director of the Local Initiatives Support Corp. in Buffalo, a nonprofit group studying the city’s vacant-housing crisis.

    “There’s no systematic, thought-out approach. There’s no effort at making demolitions part of a larger redevelopment strategy.”

    ‘No choice,’ Brown says

    No one disputes the need to tear down vacant homes in Buffalo. The question rub is how many and where, and what many see as the city’s haphazard, willy-nilly approach.

    “People are calling for these demolitions, begging for them,” Mayor Byron

    W. Brown said. “You have to understand these buildings are often a nightmarish situation for a neighborhood.”

    Brown has made demolition — the “5 in 5” plan is his term for it — the focal point of his strategy for dealing with the city’s vacancy problem, now the third worst in the nation.

    Buffalo is home to at least 12,000 vacant buildings and maybe as many as 18,000 if you accept estimates from the 2006 census.

    “We’re targeting the worst,” Brown said of the 5,000 homes he wants to demolish in five years. “We’re convinced those structures must go. There’s really no choice.”

    The mayor is by no means alone in suggesting that thousands of houses need to come down, or in arguing that residents have suffered too long with the consequences.

    “The city is doing everything it can,” said Mark P. Reed, the Buffalo firefighter who nearly died while fighting a fire in a vacant house on Wende Street last year.

    Reed, who later lost a leg because of his injury, may be the poster boy for what’s wrong with Buffalo’s vacant buildings.

    Last year alone, 60 percent of the city’s arsons were set at vacant and abandoned buildings. Even worse, 27 firefighters were injured while battling those fires.

    “They know the dangers,” Reed said of city officials. “They’re the same dangers facing people living on those streets, the same dangers facing kids in those neighborhoods.”

    It’s a compelling tale, and arsons are just one chapter of the story.

    People who live near these houses, many of them owned by City Hall, tell horror stories about drug use, vandalism and violence.

    Sometimes, the houses even double as dumping grounds. Over the past two years, at least seven dead bodies, some of them crime victims, have been discovered in or around vacant buildings in Buffalo.

    Aid sought

    Patricia Almodovar, the state’s top affordable-housing official, thinks Brown is on the right track and is quick to remind people that the first-term mayor inherited the city’s housing crisis.

    She also knows that not everyone in Buffalo is happy with the city’s approach. That’s why the state is working closely with groups like PUSH.

    “We’re sensitive to the criticism,” Almodovar said.

    Late last fall, at a closed-door meeting, Brown met with the city’s wealthiest philanthropists and asked them for a no-strings-attached donation of $2.5 million to help with the demolitions.

    The answer wasn’t a flat out “no,” but Brown walked away empty-handed, one more sign that Buffalo’s answer to its vacant-housing crisis is viewed by many as shortsighted and heavy-handed.

    “We are demolishing the very places that could revitalize the city,” the Baird Foundation’s Schweitzer said.

    Publicly, the philanthropy community — more than eight foundations were at the November meeting with Brown — say the city’s request is still active.

    Privately, they’ll acknowledge that without a more comprehensive approach, providing the money is unlikely.

    “They wanted us to just give them a check,” said Robert Gioia, head of the Oishei Foundation. “We don’t work that way.”

    Brown is quick to note that his “5 in 5” plan — which is on track to tear down its first 1,000 homes this year — has been lauded by the people who live each day with the crime and blight that comes with vacant property.

    “I don’t think they have any concept or understanding of what conditions people are living with,” the mayor said of the foundations’s heads. “I would invite them to take a tour with me of some of these properties and see the magnitude of the problem.”

    No one questions the links between vacant housing and crime, or the impact these houses have on a neighborhood. The criticism of Brown’s approach is more about what City Hall isn’t doing.

    For many, it prompts begs a question: Can City Hall deal with the magnitude of its vacant housing crisis?

    “Categorically, the answer is no,” Bartley said.

    The city doesn’t have the staff or strategy to deal with a problem as big as vacant housing, he said. He also thinks the Brown administration suffers from “clinical paranoia” when it comes to dealing with outside groups, like PUSH, that could help.”

    ‘City has no plan’

    There’s a sense that Buffalo needs to focus, not just on tearing down buildings, but also on what will take their place once they’re gone.

    In some neighborhoods, it might be rehabilitated housing. In others, it might be green space.

    “We don’t think ahead,” said Michele Johnson, a neighborhood liaison to Buffalo’s Housing Court. “The demolitions are all scattershot. Obviously, the city has no plan.”

    City officials bristle at the suggestion that their demolitions are unfocused or that they’re closed to alternatives such as rehabilitation or land banking, a system of acquiring large chunks of property for redevelopment.

    “The mayor’s strategy is much more than just demolitions,” said Richard Tobe, former commissioner of economic development, permits and inspection services.

    To make his point, Tobe, who has since been let go by the city, pointed to two major East Side projects where demolitions are just one piece of a larger redevelopment plan.

    One of them, Crescent Village, was spurred by dozens of Muslim families moving into the neighborhood around the Darul-Uloom Mosque at Sobieski and Sycamore streets.

    The 16-block project started with the targeted demolition of vacant, derelict properties but includes plans to acquire, repair and resell other vacant homes.

    The Crescent Village recipe also calls for other ingredients, most notably new housing and apartments, as well as home-improvement grants for low-income homeowners who are already living there.

    “No one aspect is a silver bullet,” said Marlies Wesolowski, director of the Matt Urban Center, the East Side group overseeing the Crescent Village project. “The fabric of the Broadway-Fillmore community is so threadbare, we need multiple approaches.”

    Even now, long before the real work is under way, the neighborhood is showing concrete signs of a turnaround. One of the most dramatic is the presence of seven Muslim doctors now living in and around nearby Sweet Avenue, once a hotbed of drugs and violence.

    “This was an abandoned neighborhood,” said Dr. Zulkharnain, one of the first to move there. “People were afraid to come here. Now, our ladies can walk at night. It’s a much safer place to be.”

    Peter Roetzer wanted to be part of the neighborhood turnaround on Rhode Island Street, but his dream ended when City Hall tore down the building he wanted to buy.

    City officials say the house was demolished because Roetzer never responded to their request for a formal rehabilitation and financing plan. Neighborhood leaders say it was City Hall that dropped the ball and that a top city official assured them Roetzer’s purchase would be approved.

    “This is typical,” said Harvey Garrett, executive director of the West Side Collaborative. “It’s just one more example of our neighborhood trying to work with city officials on saving a house and getting no help at all.”

    Next: Youngstown, Ohio, is planning to shrink, not grow. What are other Rust Belt cities doing to combat their vacant housing crises?

    pfairbanks@buffnews.com

  2. #2
    Member Linda_D's Avatar
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    I think that the charge that the city has no plan is absolutely dead on. Taking down 1,000 houses scattered around the city isn't going to make a big dent in a 12,000-18,000 "inventory" of abandoned buildings. However, taking down 1,000 bad houses in targeted neighborhoods could very well enable some neighborhoods to survive and/or relieve the city of providing services to neighborhoods that are no long viable while cutting crime and providing buffers around neighborhoods that are in better condition.
    Your right to buy a military weapon without hindrance, delay or training cannot trump Daniel Barden’s right to see his eighth birthday. -- Jim Himes

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    I think that the charge that the city has no plan is absolutely dead on. Taking down 1,000 houses scattered around the city isn't going to make a big dent in a 12,000-18,000 "inventory" of abandoned buildings. However, taking down 1,000 bad houses in targeted neighborhoods could very well enable some neighborhoods to survive and/or relieve the city of providing services to neighborhoods that are no long viable while cutting crime and providing buffers around neighborhoods that are in better condition.
    The city does have a demolition plan, it's just not one that addresses the needs of one neighborhood over the other. It's a smattering of east side and west side demolitions. So consequently, the neighbors on the east side get frustrated and some of them take matters into their own hands and torch these vacant, unsafe eyesores.
    “Never doubt that the work of a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

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    Member CSense's Avatar
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    Next: Youngstown, Ohio, is planning to shrink, not grow. What are other Rust Belt cities doing to combat their vacant housing crises?
    I've been stating this since I started on this friggin board. Shrink, damn it, Shrink!

  5. #5
    Member winfield31's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by CSense
    I've been stating this since I started on this friggin board. Shrink, damn it, Shrink!
    shrink but go "Metro".........
    Nothing gold can stay...............

    www.onlinebuffalo.com

  6. #6
    Member CSense's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by winfield31
    shrink but go "Metro".........

    Metro takes you where you want to go....

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    Three video's on Bflo vacancy & decline

    The Bflo News has produced three excellent video's to accompany their provocative three part series, ending today, on shrinking Bflo's vacancy crisis.

    Video: Ruhand Ave vacancy crisis, July 6, by Phil Fairbanks

    http://video.ap.org/v/Legacy.aspx?g=...=en-ap&fg=copy
    Tear them down, July 7, by Phil Fairbanks

    http://video.ap.org/v/Legacy.aspx?g=...&partner=en-ap
    Youngstown Ohio, the Shrinking City, July 8, by Derek Gee

    http://video.ap.org/v/Legacy.aspx?mk...&partner=en-ap

  8. #8
    Member citymouse's Avatar
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    I do have to take exception to their insinuation that the empty lots are not maintained.
    The streets department picks up the trash and cuts the lots on a regular rotating basis from May to September.
    "If you want to know what God thinks of money just look at the people he gave it to."

    By the way, what happened to biker? I miss the old coot.

  9. #9
    Member steven's Avatar
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    not on the west side.

    Dont even try to argue. It would take me all of 20 minutes to be back on this board with a boat load of pictures
    People who wonder if the glass is half empty or full miss the point. The glass is refillable.

  10. #10
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    Abandoned Homes . . .the rest of the news?

    It is troubling to see devastating three part reports on the front page of the Bflo News . . . then silence . . . as there is need for massive reform of dramaticaly failed housing policy.

    Will anything change as a result of Bflo News reporter Phil Fairbanks hard work? Here is my response to the series, sent to community groups:


    From: KernwatchMN
    To: bfloissuealerts@yahoogroups.com
    Sent: 7/8/2008 9:16:40 A.M. Central Daylight Time
    Subj: Abandoned Homes . . .the rest of the news?

    The current provocative Bflo News three part series on Abandoned Homes once again does not mention other parts of dramatically failed housing policy, which is speeding neighborhood decline.

    Why is there so little debate about the wisdom of taxpayers paying for a frenzy of new housing construction in a shrinking city drowning in abandoned housing, for which the mayor is planning the massively costly demolition of 10,000 buildings?

    Why is HUD so silent, as Bflo's poverty fuels a steady stream of lucrative 'poverty housing' funding that too often makes things worse, not better? Isn't Steve Banko ashamed to preside over the second poorest & third most vacant US city as he has watched all those $100's of millions pour through Bflo? What does he propose his Department of HOUSING & URBAN DEVELOPMENT should do?

    And why is City Hall's flagship poverty agency BMHA engaged in an incredibly costly building frenzy as ever more of Bflo's poor live in dangerous half-empty neighborhoods? BMHA spends over half of City Hall's poverty housing funds on less than 10% of Bflo's poor. That is blatantly unjust. What is Dawn Sanders' vision for a virtually obsolete agency should more fairly reduce poverty & blight among Bflo's ever-growing ranks of the poor?

    And why are Bflo's too-many, too-small "neighborhood housing agencies" getting a free pass while being scandalously unproductive? For example, WSNHS (West Side Neighborhood Housing Service) has lost more clients in foreclosure over the past several years than it has rehabbed houses, generally slowly rehabbing at the rate of merely two per year. They currently are not rehabbing any houses & refuse to release any plan. Their websites do not appear to have been updated in several years.

    SEE: www.WSNHS.org & http://nfs.nw.org/report/nworeport_p...spx?orgid=8133

    A dramatic example of the problem is westside Massachusetts Avenue, where WSNHS has focused more resources than any other street except their Connecticut Ave 'backyard'. Their $50K-rehabbed 353 Mass Ave is currently in both mortgage & tax foreclosure, as WSNHS has been unable to sell their 807 Prospect (SE corner Mass Ave) for which they paid $7K in July 2002.

    Here is a list of 17 city-owned properties on Mass Ave . . & 20 more scheduled for tax auction in October.

    What does WSNHS plan, . . . . if they have a plan?

    COPY: 37 distressed properties on Massachusetts Ave (17 city-owned, 20 scheduled for tax auction)
    http://www.buffalonews.com/314/story...43102514345947

    Note: full addresses are city-owned properties, numbers alone are scheduled for tax auction


    Street Number Street Property Type Property Value

    36 (Mass Ave)
    86
    114

    151 Massachusetts Description unavailable Value unavailable

    154
    160
    162

    217 Massachusetts Apartments Value unavailable (Also on In-rem list)

    219 Massachusetts Vacant residential lot Value unavailable
    223 Massachusetts Description unavailable Value unavailable

    224

    229 Massachusetts Vacant residential lot $3,200

    247
    261

    264 Massachusetts Vacant residential lot $2,800

    274

    319 Massachusetts Single use small building Value unavailable
    330 Massachusetts Vacant residential lot $3,500
    335 Massachusetts Description unavailable Value unavailable
    336 Massachusetts Two-family residence Value unavailable
    339 Massachusetts Description unavailable Value unavailable
    341 Massachusetts Multiple residential building Value unavailable
    345 Massachusetts Vacant residential lot $3,800

    347
    353 (WSNHS $50K rehab)

    363 Massachusetts Vacant commercial building $3,200
    383 Massachusetts Vacant residential lot $2,900

    394

    397 Massachusetts Description unavailable Value unavailable
    398 Massachusetts Description unavailable Value unavailable

    416
    446
    457 (Osland-Sardella flip)

    458 Massachusetts Vacant residential lot $2,100

    518
    521
    526

    And here are the Mass Ave properties currently scheduled for auction in October:
    http://www.ci.buffalo.ny.us/applicat...g/default.aspx
    SBL House Number Street Primary Owner
    0995700001019000 36 MASSACHUSETTS COLON MIGDALIA & MIRANDA View Details
    0995700002021000 86 MASSACHUSETTS SNELL ASRIC K View Details
    0995800001008000 114 MASSACHUSETTS TONAWANDA LLC View Details
    0995000007023000 154 MASSACHUSETTS RIVERA DOMINIGO JR. View Details
    0995000007020000 160 MASSACHUSETTS KNOWLES JOSEPH F View Details
    0995000007019000 162 MASSACHUSETTS BROWN CLINTON L View Details
    0995000004004000 217 MASSACHUSETTS WERNER ROBERT E JR View Details
    0995000003027000 224 MASSACHUSETTS ESTEVEZ JOSE RAMON View Details
    0995100003001000 247 MASSACHUSETTS 842688 ONTARIO LTD. View Details
    0995100003005100 261 MASSACHUSETTS 261 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE View Details
    0995100001008000 274 MASSACHUSETTS DILL JAMES L View Details
    0994300004008000 347 MASSACHUSETTS GERVAIS FED View Details
    0994300004010000 353 MASSACHUSETTS CORREA CLARYBELL & JULIO View Details (WSNHS $50K rehab)
    0994300003034000 394 MASSACHUSETTS VERNON RYON View Details
    0994400001023000 416 MASSACHUSETTS WINNING DAVID View Details
    0994400002001000 446 MASSACHUSETTS TRI-STATE DEVELOPMENT, LLC View Details
    0994400004001000 457 MASSACHUSETTS CHANG GERARD View Details (Osland-Sardella flip)
    0993600005027000 518 MASSACHUSETTS DI JOSEPH LINDA View Details
    0993600007014000 521 MASSACHUSETTS DI JOSEPH LINDA M View Details
    0993600005023000 526 MASSACHUSETTS BRUNO DANIEL J View Details

  11. #11
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    Demolition and rebuilding blitz begins on East Side

    With every sweep of her broom, it was obvious Annie Felton takes pride in her East Side street.

    But as she tidied up outside the Woodlawn Avenue home where she has lived since 1981, Felton said it’s not always easy to keep a positive mind-set about a neighborhood she loves. Vacant structures have become the targets of vandals, thieves and other mischief-makers. One structure not far from her home has been empty for about two decades, she lamented.
    So when Felton spotted a group of city officials at Woodlawn and Kehr Street on Tuesday, then learned they were there to announce a massive demolition and rebuilding blitz, she was pleased.

    “They need to do something over here,” she said.

    From outside her home, she could hear a bulldozer pulling apart a decaying structure on Kehr. When crews are finished, Mayor Byron W. Brown said an entire city block — eight dilapidated structures in all — will have been razed.

    “That’s how extreme the problem is that we’ve inherited in the city,” said Brown.

    When the demolitions are finished, work will begin on four “West Coast suburban-style” homes that are being built by the development arm of True Bethel Baptist Church. The project represents the type of coordinated development that is being linked to demolition blitzes in many other parts of the city, Brown said.

    It was clear from the mayor’s opening remarks that he was using Tuesday’s event to defend Buffalo’s demolition program. A series of articles published in The Buffalo News this week documented widespread criticism of the city’s handling of vacant properties.

    Flanked by officials from the True Community Development Corp., Brown rattled off projects that are under way or being planned on the West Side, near numerous public schools, and in neighborhoods that include Cold Spring and the Fruit Belt.

    The mayor said the Woodlawn demolition is part of a much larger project for that neighborhood, which will include future demolitions and additional revitalization.

    By next year at this time, land currently occupied by six dilapidated houses on Woodlawn and two structures on Kehr will have been replaced with four single-family homes. They will have abundant green space and many other suburban-style amenities, said the Rev. Darius Pridgen of True Bethel Baptist Church. Some of the houses will be subsidized. He said the existing structures had too much asbestos and lead paint to make them viable prospects for rehabilitation. So the entire block is being demolished.

    http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/story/388066.html
    People who wonder if the glass is half empty or full miss the point. The glass is refillable.

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by citymouse
    I do have to take exception to their insinuation that the empty lots are not maintained.
    The streets department picks up the trash and cuts the lots on a regular rotating basis from May to September.
    Is this a joke? There are half a dozen properties within walking distance of my house on the West Side that look like dumps or are overgrown. Complaints to the city do nothing.

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