Neighborhoods

Land contracts – also known as rent-to-own or lease-to-own agreements – have plagued local officials in the fight against blight and caused headaches for tenants who often struggle to stay afloat, local officials have said.

State Rep. Michele Lepore-Hagan of Youngstown, D-58th, introduced “The Fair Lending through Land Contracts Act” Wednesday, which aims to protect prospective homebuyers and communities where land contracts are prevalent. “Companies swooped into Ohio and other states devastated by the collapse of the housing market, bought homes for pennies on the dollar, inflated the value of the homes, then enticed borrowers to enter into high-interest, long-term loans they have little, if any, chance of repaying,” Lepore-Hagan said in a statement. Ian Beniston, executive director of Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp., said not all land contracts are bad, but the legislation would help prevent predatory models. The Vindicator documented the process in an article last year. 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 legal recourse, Lepore-Hagan’s legislation would require companies to make repairs to comply with local building codes prior to issuing land contracts. In Youngstown, many out-of-state companies purchase foreclosed homes and began marketing land contracts without making repairs.

To read the full story from The Vindicator, click here.

The Mahoning Valley Young Professionals, in partnership with the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, have announced the 2017-2018 honorees for the 25 Under 35 Awards.

The program is in its 13th year of honoring the Mahoning Valley’s best and brightest young professionals for excellence in their professional field and commitment to their community.

“This year we had an exceptional group of nominees, which is a testament to the quality of the dedicated young professionals we have in the Mahoning Valley,” said Rose Shaffer Saborse, 25 Under 35 chairperson. “We are excited to announce that this year we have 28 honorees, we had an outpouring of qualified nominations and we could not break the final tie between the top 28. We’re so excited to continue this excellent tradition of honoring this brilliant and motivated group of individuals.”

The honorees will be recognized at an awards ceremony set for Feb. 8, 2018, at Stambaugh Auditorium, 1000 Fifth Ave. During the ceremony, three honorees will be distinguished for special accolades as MVP Award winners. Both the 28 honorees and top three are selected by a panel of judges, formed by CFMV, MVYP, and community leaders. The nominations are judged on education, professional, and community service categories.

The 2017-2018 honorees:

• James Anderson, ADO Health Services

• Angelo Babbaro, Portfolio 22

• Ian Beniston, Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation

• Courtney Boyle, MS Consultants, Inc.

• Joshua Boyle, Public Library of Youngstown

• Sarah Braun, Eastern Ohio Education Partnership

• Dr. Patrick Brine, Mercy Health Youngstown

• Billie Daugherty, Ohio Living Home Health & Hospice

• Jack Daugherty, Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation

• Shannon Dudash, Briarfield Health Care Centers

• Jessica Foster, Cohen & Company

• Jim Freeze, Youngstown Area Goodwill Industries

• Jereme Frey, Confluence Advisors

• Dr. David Griswold, Youngstown State University

• Olivia Hiznay, Mercy Health Youngtown

• Lauren Johnson, Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber

• Nils Johnson, Johnson & Johnson Law Office

• Adam Keck, Modern Methods Brewing Company

• Annissa Neider, MS Consultants, Inc.

• Jessica Ann Oates, Comprehensive Behavioral Health Associates

• Mark Oles, Cardinal Mooney High School

• Dean Palombaro, Austintown Local Schools

• Lucas Politsky, Youngstown State University

• Karen Raghanti, Cohen & Company

• Dr. Jessica Reiter, Community Medical Associates

• Emily Rusu, Jet Creative

• Courtney Stryffeler, Mercy Health - St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital

• Andrew Thompson, Thompson Insurance Group

To read the full story from The Vindicator, click here.

Monday, October 9, 2017

On Friday, October 6, Tiffany Sokol, YNDC Housing Director and Tammi Neuscheler, YNDC Housing Client Manager were presented awards at the Ohio Community Development Corporation (OCDCA) Conference.

Tammi was presented the Stephanie Bevens Award, which honors a CDC staff member with an entrepreneurial spirit and is a strong advocate on behalf of low to moderate income people. Tiffany was presented the CDC Rising Star Award, which honors an outstanding staff member, who is under 30 and making a big impact in community development. The YNDC team congratulates Tammi and Tiffany on their well deserved recognition and the valuable contributions they make every day. REVITALIZE.

It took the combined efforts of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. and the city to wrest control of an abandoned home along Glenwood Avenue away from a negligent previous owner. 

After months of renovations, the YNDC hosted an open house Tuesday for the reclaimed property at 3726 Glenwood Ave. on the city’s South Side. The historic five-bedroom, 3,663-square-foot home – built in 1929 – is the largest home the YNDC has rehabilitated for resale. Listed for sale at $150,000, the brick house is situated along the edge of Mill Creek Park and overlooks Lake Newport. The home has an attached two-car garage, a fireplace in the living room, a backyard deck, a second-floor balcony deck and an attached mother-in-law suite in the back. The YNDC updated much of the house, including the windows, boilers, lights, paint and hardwood floors, and installed new countertops. Tiffany Sokol, YNDC’s housing director, said rehabilitating the house was an important part of the group’s broader efforts in the neighborhood. “It’s a major asset along Glenwood Avenue,” she said. “We’ve been focused for a long time on revitalizing that corridor.” YNDC acquired the home through the city’s use of spot-blight eminent domain, a power that allows the city to take ownership of individual, abandoned properties. The city gained control of the home from Harbour Portfolio Advisors, a property company that bought up foreclosed homes in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis and resold them to individuals with low-income using land contracts with high interest rates. The homes they did not sell sat abandoned and without maintenance. To read the full story from The Vindicator, click here. 

If you’re in the market for a historic home in Youngstown, a newly-revitalized one on Glenwood Avenue may be for you. 

The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation finished renovations on its Glenwood project. It is the largest single-family home the organization has ever tackled. The house was taken by the city through spot blight laws and is part of a much larger vision. “Really just one small part of what we’re doing on the Glenwood Corridor, with the City of Youngstown, with the Mahoning County Land Bank, the Raymond John Wean Foundation, Mill Creek MetroParks,” said Tiffany Sokol, with YNDC. The house is open to vistors Tuesday evening from 5:30 to 7. It’s also available by appointment. To read the full story from WKBN, click here.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

On Tuesday, October 10, YNDC held a public open house at the newly revitalized home at 3726 Glenwood Avenue.

The historic 5 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom home was available to tour from 5:30pm-6:30pm and over 100 people attended to view the finished product of YNDC’s largest home rehabilitation project to date. The house is currently for sale and is listed at $150,000. Those interested in purchasing the property should call Tammi at 330.480.0423 for more information. 

Legislation introduced by state Rep. Michele Lepore-Hagan would target predatory land contracts that often leave would-be home buyers without the rights and protections of holders of traditional mortgages or leases. 

It’s a problem that plagues inner-city neighborhoods here and across the country where out-of-town companies offer “lease option purchase contracts” that often contain deceptive — and extremely costly — home repair agreements, activists say. Lepore-Hagan, D-58 Youngstown, says her legislation would require property owners to correct any code violations and pay any outstanding taxes, fines or fees on a property before entering into a land contract agreement. It also would require the seller to be responsible for insurance premiums and a home inspection. “When there are predatory situations like this, we have to help people,” she says. The legislation has five cosponsors, including state Reps. Michael O’Brien, D-64, Warren, and Glenn Holmes, D-63, McDonald. The Fair Lending Through Land Contracts Act, which Lepore-Hagan introduced Oct. 2 and will discuss at a news conference tomorrow, was referred Tuesday to the Financial Institutions, Housing and Urban Development Committee. The press event will take place at 226 E. Lucius Ave., which is pictured above. The property is owned by Vision Property Management of South Carolina and is dilapidated to the degree that a tree is growing through it. The issue of predatory land contracts was highlighted earlier this week in a post on the Working-Class Perspectives blog co-authored by Gary Davenport, project director at the Mahoning County Land Bank, and Wade Rathke, founder of Acorn. The post discussed efforts by organizers with the Acorn Home Savers Campaign to work with Vision Property Management, which has come under fire nationwide, and address predatory land contracts. Vision operates in more than a dozen states and was the subject of several New York Times stories last year detailing problems with its rent-to-own program. Following the articles, Fannie Mae announced it had stopped selling properties to Vision. Just yesterday a court in Wisconsin effectively ended its right to operate in that state. The company did not respond to The Business Journal’s request for comment Wednesday. “This is the follow-up to the foreclosure crisis,” Davenport said. Companies purchased properties and entered into agreements with buyers to purchase them with no appraisal at prices often 10 times or more higher than what they purchased them for, and priced so homeowners are underwater from the time they start. To read the full story from The Business Journal, click here.

Contributed photo - Home Savings Charitable Foundation recently donated $25,000 to Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation.

The funds will be used for the Community Financial Literacy Initiative. The initiative is designed to provide free services and financial counseling to people who are seeking to own a home or start a business. For more information regarding YNDC, call 330.480.0423 or visit www.yndc.org. At right, from left, are Ian Beniston, YNDC executive director; Tammi Neuscheler, housing client manager, YNDC; June Johnson, CRA assistant, Home Savings; and Tiffany Sokol, housing director, YNDC. To view the photo from The Vindicator, click here.

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.