Cedar Rapids initiative seeks to improve Wellington Heights neighborhood

It's Wellington Heights' turn - especially for the children who live there.

This old core neighborhood in southeast Cedar Rapids has combated a perception problem for more than 15 years as being a place where bad behavior surfaces and police cars converge.

Terry Bilsland, the president of the well-established Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association and a 44-year resident of the neighborhood, has protested for years that his neighborhood is much better than the stigma attached to it.

But Bilsland this week said even he was surprised after the flood of 2008 with how few flood victims in need of replacement homes came looking for a new life on high ground in Wellington Heights.

“When the flood happened, we had some real good houses over here for sale, but we didn't hardly attract any flood people,” he said. “There's something wrong when that happens, when you have good housing and they don't even come and look.”

Perceptions and neighborhoods don't change on their own, but they can change with some attention, affection and thoughtful, targeted investment, said Jim Ernst, CEO of the non-profit Four Oaks children and family services agency with the Affordable Housing Network Inc. as one of its subsidiaries.

Thursday afternoon, Ernst, Bilsland and others will stand in front of an emptied, boarded-up 12-plex jammed into the Wellington Heights neighborhood at 1415 Bever Ave. SE to announce an ambitious housing and neighborhood-transformation initiative for an 18-block piece of the neighborhood between Washington and Sixth avenues and between 14th and 19th streets SE.

It's called the TotalChild Wellington Heights Initiative, founded on the bedrock belief that the quality of housing and of a neighborhood matter to the formation of a child just as the quality of the family and the child's school do.

“It's really important to me to help people understand that making the neighborhood stronger is not just a matter of the houses,” said Ernst. “And one of my fears in all this ...is that this is just a housing-recovery project and not a project for kids and families to be more successful.”

Quietly since November, Affordable Housing has been buying up distressed properties in the 18-block area, and now has 25 in its possession with plans to buy more. It also intends to manage other properties in the target area and it anticipates that some new homes eventually will be built there.

Most of the homes acquired by Affordable Housing will be renovated with the intent to convert many of them from rentals to owner-occupied homes through a rent-to-own program being used elsewhere in the city. The program, for those with household incomes at 80 percent or below of the area's average median income, sets aside a piece of the monthly rent for a future down payment on a mortgage while the renters take classes on topics related to homeownership and managing finances.

This week, Affordable Housing was finishing renovation on a single-family home at 1439 Bever Ave. SE as the agency sorts through applicants to move in. Across the street, the agency also was renovating a large corner house with apartments in it.

Joe Lock, Affordable Housing executive director,  explained that tenants in the homes now owned by the agency and ones it may manage will need to reapply and meet the agency's tenant standards. Those standards are the same ones Affordable Housing uses at its other affordable housing properties and include credit and criminal background checks. Some tenants will have to move on as a result, he said.

Affordabley Housing's approach as landlord in the neighborhood is a welcome sight for Bilsland and for many on the City Council who have been talking for some years and continue to talk about how to hold bad landlords and bad tenants accountable.

“We feel this is the only way to get some of these bad rental properties under control and under the control of somebody who cares what goes on in them,” said Bilsland.

Four Oaks' Ernst said Affordable Housing has been working with neighborhood leaders, city officials, the Police Department and others for more than six months to refine the goals of the agency's Total Child Wellington Heights Initiative. Along the way, the organization has worked to identify the most distressed properties in the 18-block area and the ones to which police most frequently are called. Affordable Housing now owns seven of the top 10 and 15 of the top 30 on the police-call list, Ernst said.

Both the neighborhood association and the Police Department also were asked to name the single property that most needed to change, and both said without blinking, the 12-plex at 1415 Bever Ave. SE.

Today's news conference at 5 p.m. out front will feature heavy equipment to bring down the building, which Ernst said has operated as something of a low-budget motel in the middle a densely packed block of homes.

“When we bought this, I think we showed the neighborhood association and the Police Department that we were serious,” he said.

He said the 12-plex and the first of the other properties that Affordable Housing has purchased were owned by landlords that were operating in “despicable” fashion, renting out places that had holes in floors and walls and mold and water in basements.

In fact, Ernst said that Affordable Housing paid too high a price for the rundown 12-plex, but gave in to the previous owner's argument that the property was valuable. Ernst estimated that the previous owner was bringing in $500 a month in rent for each unit with no questions asked of tenants and little of the money going back into the property for upkeep.

“In his mind it was a valuable property, so we had to pay more. He was right,” Ernst said.

Overall in Wellington Heights, which is bounded by 10th Street SE, 19th Street SE, Second Avenue SE and Mount Vernon Road SE, close to 70 percent of the homes are owner-occupied ones, while the percent is about 49 percent in the 18-block area in which Affordable Housing is focusing. The hope is to raise that figure to 63 percent over time by purchasing homes, renovating them and getting them into the hands of new owners.

Ernst's Four Oaks children and family services agency came to the rescue of the community's affordable-housing effort when the MidAmerica Housing Partnership failed in 2007. Ernst's organization stepped into the crisis for one simple reason: The children and families working with his agency lived in some of those apartments and homes.

The same is true now: Some of his agency's clients live in Wellington Heights, and to help them requires helping the neighborhood, too, Ernst said.

Last July, Four Oaks launched a pilot project called TotalChild, and made a commitment to 300 children in its programs to work with them until they reach the age of 18. The agency plans to add another 300 children to the program.

Three years ago, armed with large private donations, support from the state of Iowa and the help of volunteers, Four Oaks' Affordable Housing played a central role in the flood-hit neighborhoods in northwest and southwest Cedar Rapids as a partner in the Block by Block program along with Matthew 25 organization and, initially, the United Methodist Church. Block by Block has worked to renovate some 300 homes on 25 blocks there, along the way buying about 45 homes to renovate and sell. Affordable Housing has now ended its participation, using proceeds from the sale of houses there it to help finance the Total Child Wellington Heights Initiative.

“We believe Wellington Heights was left behind,” Ernst said. “Not for any reason. The city was devoted to flood recovery, and Wellington Heights wasn't flooded. But over the last five years, Wellington hasn't progressed as it should as a neighborhood.”