Columbus program still growing

Columbus has more distressed properties in its land bank than ever, and officials plan to sell more in the upcoming years for rehabilitation.

“We’ve kind of gone through a lot of the worst properties,” land bank administrator John Turner said. “We’ll determine our next step.”

Columbus now has 1,813 properties in its land bank, up almost 300 from two years ago. So far this year, it has sold 140 single-family homes, up from 119 for 2016 and 88 in 2015.

Mehran Moghaddas of Westerville has bought three of those properties on Wilson

Avenue on the South Side. He’s fixing them up; one is already in contract with a buyer. He said there is “absolutely” a market there and that he will continue to buy land bank properties.

“Instead of going out and building new builds, why not revitalize what we already have?” Moghaddas said. “Bring back what the neighborhoods were so many years ago.” He said he has a 20 percent to 50 percent profit margin when he sells a home.

Another property owner, Charley Engen of Amanda in Fairfield County, said a land-bank house he bought on Frebis Avenue on the South Side had water damage and was on the demolition list. He fixed it up and is now renting it out.

“It’s just worth saving,” he said.

Columbus now has 4,622 vacant and abandoned buildings, down from 6,274 in 2012.

Meanwhile, another Ohio land bank has set a specific goal in dealing with blight.

In Toledo and Lucas County in northwest Ohio, the land bank set a goal of demolishing or rehabilitating 1,500 properties over 1,500 days, hoping to reach that goal by late summer in 2020. It has already renovated or demolished 700 of them.

“We hope to eliminate most of the blighted properties,” said David Acquisitions Sales/transfers Demolitions Parcels

*Through Nov. 8 Mann, president of the Lucas County Land Bank. “Will it eliminate all blight? No.”

More land banks are being created across the state. Knox and Fayette counties are the latest, said Jim Rokakis, vice president of the Western Reserve Land Conservancy, which helps start county land banks in Ohio. That will bring the total number of county land banks to 48, involving counties as big as Franklin and Cuyahoga and as small as Jackson County, which has acquired about 50 properties in its land bank since it opened in May.

“We’re just getting started,” said Jackson County Treasurer Lee Hubbard.

Even Paulding County in western Ohio, population 18,865, created a land bank in August. “There are so many places with the windows boarded up,” said Lou Ann Wannemacher, the county treasurer.

Rokakis said the Neighborhood Initiative Program, which uses federal money for home demolitions, has been extremely effective. The Ohio Housing Finance Agency administers the program.

In October, the special inspector for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which oversees a federal program aimed at preventing foreclosures, said the Ohio Housing Finance Agency seems to be “heavily focused on blight demolition and less focused on helping homeowners.”

Christy Goldsmith Romero, the special inspector general, said her office wants federal programs to achieve their goals, in this case, by preserving homeownership.

But Rokakis of the Western Reserve group asked why someone would want to stay in a house in the midst of blight.

“You can give loans all day long to prevent foreclosure,” he said.

“Why keep out of foreclosure when you’re surrounded by vacant and abandoned properties?”