SitemapIn the nine years that Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. has been renovating abandoned houses, the end result has largely been the same.
But as employees and supporters celebrated the 100th house to be finished, the process has certainly been refined.
“I can’t say I’ve really thought about it but the short answer is no, I never imagined a hundred houses and definitely not this quickly,” said Ian Beniston, executive director of YNDC. “The bulk of these have been renovated in the past four or five years. We started with two or three a year. It’s much faster than I ever thought.”
When the community improvement organization started renovating houses shortly after its inception in 2010, YNDC was reliant on government subsidies to get work done, including hiring contractors for construction work.
“It was really expensive,” said YNDC housing director Tiffany Sokol. “Now, we’ve been able to hire an in-house construction team made up primarily of residents of the communities we serve. We have a lot more control of the projects. It certainly saves us on the overhead because we’re writing specs ourselves and doing the work ourselves.”
In 2018, YNDC acquired and rehabilitated 22 blighted properties across the city.
“With each project, it gets a bit easier because we have systems in place that we’re constantly revising to improve and streamline things. Even the time it takes from start to finish is much smaller,” Sokol added.
In many respects, the renovation of 4202 Rush was like most of the other projects undertaken over the years. It had been owned by someone out of state – New York, in this case – and had the occasional tenant here and there but was largely unoccupied and fell into disrepair. Over time, the owner fell behind on taxes, setting the stage for Mahoning County Land Bank to acquire the property. To read the full story from The Business Journal, click here.