Affordable Housing Network transforms rundown Wellington eyesore

CEDAR RAPIDS - Down and out has given way to up and coming.

The Affordable Housing Network on Tuesday showed off its latest success story - the renovation of the century-old Rose Apartments, which sits on a prominent, lot at Third Avenue and Bever Avenue SE that is a gateway to Wellington Heights.

With the new face comes an old name. The apartment building is now called what it was at the start, Mead Flats. J.J. Mead, a gas company superintendent, built it in 1914 and 1915.

The 12-unit, three-story apartment complex with the stucco exterior had sat empty but for squatters and filth since before AHNI bought it in 2012.

'Nobody was going to pick this building up but us,” Liz Mathis, chief community officer for Four Oaks, AHNI's parent agency, said Tuesday during a tour.

AHNI couldn't resist.

Mead Flats is on the edge of the 18-block area of Wellington Heights where AHNI is on a 3-year-old mission to buy and improve 100 rundown properties. The underlying thought is that improving a place's housing stock can improve life in one of the city's older core neighborhoods.

Eighty-nine properties have been purchased by AHNI to date, with two more in the process of purchase, said Renie Neuberger, AHNI's executive director.

Sixty-six of the properties have been renovated, other renovations are in progress, and a handful of the worst have been demolished. The agency is selling some of the properties, including 17 through a rent-to-own program, and managing others.

Three new homes have been built and a fourth is in the works in this part of the neighborhood that hasn't seen a new home built for more than 50 years.

Neuberger said renovation is turning some residences that had been carved into apartments back to single-family homes as the agency works to increase homeownership from about 40 percent of the properties to 60 percent.

AHNI is a subsidiary of Four Oaks, the children and family services agency, and the 100-property effort is part of Four Oaks' TotalChild project, which has raised $6 million in private donations to help at-risk children and families. Half the money is going to residential projects in Wellington Heights, and half to provide long-term programming for children until they make their way to adulthood.

The $1.5 million renovation of Mead Flats is being paid for with help from the Iowa Finance Authority, Bankers Trust, federal Community Development Block Grant funds and AHNI funds. No TotalChild money is being used on this project, Mathis said.

To date, AHNI has leased four of the building's 12 apartments. There are three efficiency apartments, three two-bedroom apartments and six three-bedroom apartments with monthly rents ranging from $400 to $750. Tenants must meet certain low-income guidelines as required by the project's funding sources.

Mark Stoffer Hunter, research historian at The History Center in Cedar Rapids, said Mead Flats mostly attracted those who worked in downtown. He said the concept of the building was to bring some 'urban sophistication” and a big-city 'cosmopolitan” experience to Cedar Rapids.

In the last decade, he said the Rose Apartments had become a 'problem property” for the neighborhood and had 'sunk to a pretty low point” in use and safety.

Neuberger and Mathis said overall crime and the number of police calls are down in Wellington Heights while the housing stock is improving. New signs promoting the neighborhood as 'New Wellington” are going up in spots.

Neuberger said that when an episode of gunfire makes the news,” it makes me realize how important our work is.”

Mathis said Four Oaks and AHNI are in the business of helping families and children in crisis.

'In a moment of crisis, it makes us roll up our sleeves, and with the efforts we make, we get them to stable and we get them to success,” Mathis said.