Wellington Heights housing initiative scoring victories

CEDAR RAPIDS - To get the concept, think Cameron Proctor.

Without seeking it, Proctor - a 21-year-old master welder and brand-new homeowner with a good credit history and a 30-year mortgage - has become something of a poster boy for a multimillion-dollar neighborhood transformation.

It is a change fueled by Four Oaks' Affordable Housing Network Inc., which is buying up 100 or more residential properties in 18 challenged blocks of the Wellington Heights neighborhood with the plan to renovate the homes and sell them at attainable prices to families and individuals like Proctor.

“I've got a three-stall garage, a pool table in my dining room and I'm paying $200 a month less to own than I'd pay to rent,” said Proctor, 1439 Bever Ave. SE, who grew up in Springville and has called Wellington Heights home since February. He says he has friends interested in following his lead.

“Everybody who could would. Everybody who could should,” he said.

Targeted intervention

The intent of AHNI - and those who are donating some $5 million in private funds and the banks that are extending some $6 million in debt to the project - is to sell to people like Proctor who will live in the home, keep it up and help increase the percentage of homes in neighborhood that are owner-occupied, rather than rentals.

The program believes that the neighborhood needs a targeted intervention, which includes, in part, attempting to buy homes from what Jim Ernst, longtime president/CEO of Four Oaks, calls “a small segment of slumlords” while beating them to the punch when troubled properties come up for sale.

One year ago this month, Ernst and Joe Lock, AHNI's executive director, and city, community and neighborhood leaders celebrated the start of AHNI's Wellington Heights initiative in front of an excavator as it tore down a rundown, 12-plex apartment building at 1415 Bever Ave. SE that had become a focal point of police calls, arrests and neighborhood instability.

A year later, the program has purchased 54 properties, with 11 more purchases now pending. Of those, 28 have been fully renovated, eight other renovations are in the works and another eight are scheduled. Four have been demolished, another will be and five properties are vacant lots.

Of the renovated homes, five have been sold to owner-occupiers like Proctor; seven are occupied by families in a rent-to-own program; and another 10 or so are available for sale or for the rent-to-own program. Eleven properties, including four multifamily ones, are operating as rentals.

Ernst and Lock have their eyes on an additional 36 properties to buy, though some of the landlord owners won't sell to them or are demanding too much for the homes.

Neighborhood support

Justin Wasson, the new, 25-year-old president of the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association, says the association “generally has a pretty positive feeling” about the AHNI initiative. He says it has “a lot of potential.” In particular, he says the association has wanted to see the “density” in the neighborhood reduced, and he says AHNI's effort to covert big old homes that had multiple apartments into single-family homes is achieving that goal.

Wasson, who is vice president of operations for a power-washing firm and who ran for the City Council in 2011, says AHNI's initial effort in the 1400 block of Bever Avenue SE has resulted in a reduction in police calls to that block by 50 percent in the last year.

“Look at the crime stats,” says Wasson. “To say there hasn't been an impact would be a ridiculous statement.”

Wasson, who now owns his home at 1621 Washington Ave. SE after fewer than four years of payments, says AHNI is active in the neighborhood and those moving into AHNI renovated properties are coming to neighborhood meetings.

“Those are the people we want in the neighborhood,” he says.

At the same time, Clark Rieke, a board member in the Mound View neighborhood across First Avenue East from Wellington Heights, has some reservations about the AHNI effort and its scope. He says he would prefer smaller grants, in the $20,000 range, going to existing property owners to fix up properties rather than AHNI's approach.

AHNI's Lock says the agency typically is spending $65,000 on a property renovation, has about $100,000 in it in total, and sells for $70,000 to $75,000. Yes, the Wellington Heights neighborhood is in “crisis,” says Rieke, a retired Realtor and landlord. But he says the AHNI investment distorts the housing market and will make non-AHNI properties more difficult to sell.

Four Oaks' Ernst says he agrees that some fix-up money for existing property owners in the neighborhood makes sense, and he says AHNI's program will include money for that. Cedar Valley Habitat for Humanity's Brush with Kindness program, he said, also is working in the neighborhood with a plan to improve the exteriors of 40 homes over the next two summers.

However, Ernst notes that other housing agencies in their day have tried to take on blighted housing, a house or two at a time, without success. Private market forces haven't helped either, he says.

“If the market was going to take care of Wellington Heights, it's had 30 years to do it,” says Ernst. “And it hasn't.”

“What we're trying to do is to stop it before it has to be taken to the ground,” Ernst continues. “So we literally made the decision, that the way this neighborhood was going to turn was we were going to do 100 houses, and we were going to change the spirit of the neighborhood to say, ‘We have hope now, we're not just trying to survive.'”

Ernst and Lock this week showed off one of AHNI's newly renovated houses at 513 16th St. SE and one they recently purchased at 1422 Fourth Ave. SE. It was day and night.

The Fourth Avenue SE property, which a previous landlord had carved into three apartments, was empty but for litter on the floors, smells of dog feces, cat urine and filth in the air and a message written in pencil on a wall for the new owner, AHNI. It called AHNI “dream stealers,” “money mongers” and more.

TotalChild project

The AHNI housing initiative is part of Four Oaks' TotalChild project, and Four Oaks has gotten itself involved in affordable housing because the agency doesn't want families and children it works with living in squalor like that 1422 Fourth Ave. SE.

“It's a travesty that kids are living in places like this, have landlords that don't keep it up to city code,” Lock says.

The long-term hope beyond Four Oaks' AHNI effort in Wellington Heights, Ernst says, is a brand-new City Hall nuisance abatement ordinance, championed by City Council members Pat Shey and Monica Vernon, which will put five new nuisance-abatement employees on the city payroll. The new law also will require tenant background checks and fines for landlords whose properties attract too many police and nuisance calls.

Ernst says the city for too long has permitted slum landlords to thrive with an economic model that allows them to rent without checking on tenants and to take rent money without putting any of it back into the property for repairs.

The city's new nuisance abatement law must make sure the slumlord model no longer can work in Cedar Rapids, he says.

“We own fixing this neighborhood up,” says Ernst. “The city's nuisance abatement has to prevent the rest. We're not taking responsibility for that.”