Neighborhoods

A handful of enterprising urban farmers in the city and close environs are reclaiming city lots in some of the city’s most economically-deprived neighborhoods and turning them into small working farms. 

As the city of Youngstown has shrunk from 170,000 residents to fewer than 65,000 from the 1950s until present day, according to Atlantic Magazine and numerous other sources, the housing stock has noticeably deteriorated. But now, occasional bright green spots are defiantly rearing up out of the urban decay. Individuals, families, nonprofits, the Ohio State extension and the city itself are all contributing to this movement, acting the same way on the city as microscopic change agents work on soil to make it fertile. “We have definitely seen growth in locally-produced food,” said Melissa Miller, who runs the Lake to Rive Food Cooperative. The co-op serves and draws from farmers in an eight-county area that includes Mahoning County.

“We have seen a rise in niche products,” coming from these small, lot-sized farms, Miller said. These include Avant Garden, a mushroom farm in downtown Youngstown, and Unabandoned, a two-lot herb farm that, among other products, makes essential oils out of their herbs and Avant’s mushrooms. “We called ourselves ‘Unabandoned’ because we took over two abandoned city lots,” said Emily Hayes, who works the lots with other family members. “We kind of started out as ‘street pirates’,” she said, growing on abandoned land that eventually became theirs “cheap. Like in the hundreds of dollars.” Hayes said that the farm works well in the neighborhood, spreading healthy food and information to local, inner-city residents. “They really like us being here,” she said. Unabandoned sells its products at various farmer’s markets in the area. Unabandoned is on Facebook. The Unabandoned family recently hosted 35 members of the Green Riders bike club, which traveled around the country this summer “to help make the world a greener and more sustainable place”. The Green Riders can be found here: http://robgreenfield.tv/greenriders.

Sophia Buggs has a full-scale farm on several south side city lots that she calls “Lady Buggs Farm.” Lady Buggs Farm sells a range of products beyond produce, including salad dressings. In an interview last year with Truthout, Buggs said "my mission is primarily to make the world a much more vibrant, healthy space, to make the soil better than when I found it and make the people better than when I discovered them." She explained how she is a fourth-generation grower with strong ancestral ties to the land. Lady Buggs Farm is on Facebook. That Truthout article also covered other communities who are seeing the revitalization of neighborhoods through urban farming from Baltimore to Oakland. To read the full story from the Akron legal News, click here. 

It’s been two years since Youngstown first started using new laws to take over abandoned properties through a program called spot blight eminent domain. 

The program has worked, for example, on a house on Glenwood Avenue that was dilapidated. Youngstown City Council took control from out-of-town owners, seized the property and turned it over to the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation (YNDC). YNDC spent a year fixing everything from the roof to the foundation, and it’s now on the market. “I was concerned about this whole project, but I’m really pleased with the overall outcome,” said Councilwoman Anita Davis, 6th Ward. “This is something that benefits the whole community. We don’t want something to be left behind, not taken care of and then it totally pulls down the entire area.” Tiffany Sokol, with YNDC, says the law worked well in this case. “It is certainly another opportunity for us to acquire vacant and blighted properties that are in the cycle of abandonment” Sokol said. To read the full story from WKBN, click here.

Friday, October 13, 2017

The PNC Foundation has awarded YNDC with $9,000 for the Community Financial Literacy Initiative. 

The funds will support YNDC's comprenhesive homeownership development services, including HUD-Certified Housing Counseling and Education, as well as the organization's small business development programming. We would like to thank the PNC Foundation for their continued support!

Friday, October 13, 2017

On Friday, October 13, YNDC Executive Director Ian Beniston joined
State Representative Michele Lepore-Hagan and community leaders at 226 East
Lucius Avenue to introduce House Bill 368, the Fair Lending through Land
Contracts Act.

Speaking alongside Beniston and Lepore-Hagan were Rose Carter,
Executive Director of ACTION, and Pastor Dave Kamphuis of Martin Luther Lutheran Church on Clearmount
Drive. The bill aims to regulate land contract agreements and cut down on
predatory practices by large, out-of-state firms. The property at 226 East
Lucius is owned by Vision Property Management, a predatory land contract company from
South Carolina.

The visual might be comical if it weren’t so sad. Behind the disintegrating front porch roof at 226 E. Lucius Ave., on the front door hangs a sign advising that the property has been winterized.

Just a few yards away, a tree grows through an attached trellis. The house, owned by Vision Property Management, a South Carolina company, provided the backdrop Friday for a news conference to outline legislation introduced by state Rep. Michele Lepore-Hagan to regulate land contracts. Vision, along with Harbour Portfolio Advisors in Texas and other out-of-town firms, own properties in Youngstown and elsewhere in the Mahoning Valley. Many of these properties are under land contracts that critics say offer predatory terms. “Companies have swooped into Ohio and other states devastated by the collapse of the housing market, bought homes for pennies on the dollar, inflated the values of the homes, then enticed borrowers into entering into a high-interest, long-term loan that they have little if any chance of ever repaying,” Lepore-Hagan said. “They employ a series of predatory tactics and practices,” said Ian Beniston, executive director of Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. “They require the occupant – the vendee – to make all of the repairs and they charge interest rates well above market, into the double digits.” The companies also inflate the values, selling a property they bought for $3,000 for $30,000. “These companies are picking up on the wreckage of the foreclosure crisis, buying properties and using unregulated predatory practices to take advantage of people, particularly low-income people,” he continued. “They target minority neighborhoods the most.” To read the full story from The Business Journal, click here. 

To watch the video from The Business Journal, click here.

Glenwood Avenue in Youngstown will be getting a little greener this coming week. 

The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation (YNDC) unloaded about two trucks full of trees Friday morning. The organization will be planting 125 of them in vacant lots along Glenwood and in the surrounding areas. It’s part of YNDC’s Glenwood Neighbors Initiative, which involves beautifying the area for those who live in it. “What we’re trying to do is just comprehensively improve the corridor and make it a great place, a great destination for folks who live in the neighborhood and also just an attractive corridor here for the City of Youngstown,” said Neighborhood Stabilization Director Jack Daugherty. “It’s one of our gateways into the city and it’s also one of our gateways into Mill Creek Park.” The trees being planted are mainly native and American trees, some of which can grow to nearly 100 feet. Daugherty said this is a long-term investment in the community and one more step in revitalizing the city. YNDC is working on a number of projects, including replacing and cleaning up sidewalks and repurposing lots for gardening. To read the full story from WKBN, click here. 

At the crossroads of the East Side’s main thoroughfares is the Sharonline neighborhood that represents both the one-time vision of a vibrant, growing Youngstown and the reality of the city’s decline. 

McGuffey Road, connecting downtown Youngstown with the East Side, eventually ends in Coitsville. Running north and south is Jacobs Road, which starts at Campbell’s northern border, runs over McKelvey Lake and ends just outside the center of Hubbard. There, at the corner of the roads, is a brown sign, 5 feet high and bearing the image of a streetcar. It reads “The Sharonline Welcomes You.” In July 2016, the city enacted the “East Side Decommissioning Project.” Though the name is something of a misnomer – nothing was being shut down, but abandoned areas were allowed to return to nature – the project was the first intentional downsizing of the city’s developed lands. The project saw nearly 4 miles of streets in the Sharonline neighborhood closed off and nine homes demolished to curb illegal dumping and reduce city spending on the sparsely populated area. To understand why the Sharonline became the site of the downsizing project, it’s necessary to understand why the neighborhood was created in the first place. To read the full story from The Vindicator, click here. 

State Rep. Michele Lepore-Hagan and several community leaders gathered in front of a dilapidated house on the South Side to discuss her new legislation aimed at reining in the abuse of land contracts. 

Land contracts, also known as rent-to-own or lease-to-own agreements, have been used by several out-of-state companies in the city and have drawn the ire of community leaders. “A growing number of dishonest firms are using this practice to trap trusting buyers into predatory situations,” Lepore-Hagan, of Youngstown, D-58th, said Friday. Ian Beniston, executive director of Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp., said the bill Lepore-Hagan introduced in the Ohio House of Representatives last week is modeled on legislation in other states. Standing before a boarded-up house on Lucius Avenue with the roof falling in above a collapsing porch, Beniston said out-of-state companies are attempting to profit off the wreckage of the housing crisis. “This is part of the wreckage they leave for the cities to clean up,” Beniston said of the house. In a typical scenario, an investor will purchase a home for $3,000 and turn around and offer it to a buyer for $3,000 down and $200 a month over 10 years. The party issuing the land contract still holds the deed, so if the buyer under the contract defaults on a payment, the issuer keeps the money collected and the home. In addition to providing buyers with a legal recourse, Lepore-Hagan’s legislation would require companies to make repairs to comply with local building codes before issuing land contracts. YNDC plans to travel to Columbia, S.C., later this year to deliver a bill to Vision Property Management, the company that owns the house on Lucius, for work done on their properties across the city. It is in the thousands of dollars, Beniston said. To read the full story from The Vindicator, click here. 

A Valley lawmaker is taking aim at a potentially predatory lending practice — land contracts. 

State Sen. Michele Lepore-Hagan’s proposed law would prevent extremely run-down homes from being sold as land contracts. “A growing number of dishonest firms are using this agreement to trap trusting buyers into predatory situations,” she said. Problems include land contracts in condemned homes, being sold for ten times their value with hefty fines attached. Dozens of homes in Youngstown are owned by national land contract companies. Many of them are uninhabitable but the companies are still making money off the properties. “They require the occupant to make all the repairs. They charge interest rates well above market, sometimes in the double digits. We’re seeing grossly inflated prices,” said Ian Beniston, with the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation. The new law would require appraisals and cap annual interest rates that landlords can charge for the lease agreements.  It also prohibits landowners from selling houses with code violations under lease-to-own agreements. Pastor David Kamphuis, from Martin Luther Lutheran Church, said land contracts can be good for the community. “I’m not against land contracts. I want more people to own homes because I want neighborhoods to be vibrant and life-giving. But they can’t be vibrant and life-giving when other people are preying on those who are most vulnerable.” Rose Carter, with the Alliance for Congregational Transformation Influencing Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), said land contracts can be great. “I’ve did land contracts in my life but we want to make sure that it is not a land contract…left without inspections, left without appraisals.” Beniston agreed, saying land contracts can be another path to home ownership. “We’re not saying that all land contracts are bad,” he said. “What we’re saying is they do need to be fair and just.” To read the full story from WKBN, click here.