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Sean Kirst had an interesting post today about the need to preserve Syracuse’s historic buildings from the wrecking ball.
It’s interesting because just yesterday I went with the members of the community organization for whom I organize to a hearing of the city of Syracuse Landmark Preservation Board.
Our group went to the Board to protest how the city deals with vacant historic houses in our neighborhood and to request the demolition of an abandoned vacant house at 133 South Ave. This house has been vacant since 1992 and is a magnet for trash, drug dealers and prostitutes. (Check out a local TV station’s video!)
Our group’s take on preservation is a tad different from the typical preservation folks. We love the character of the older buildings in our neighborhoods too. But our neighborhoods harbor 45% of the city’s 1,200 vacant properties–even though we only comprise 15% of the city’s households. There is not even close to the amount of government money necessary to deal with the vacancies, so despite a very small number of rehabs by non-profits and about 200 demolitions a year, the total number of vacant houses hasn’t budged from the 1,100-1,200 range in over a decade.
So what do we do? The preservation types seem to think that we should be thankful for all the tony buildings and not complain about the fact that many vacant and abandoned buildings bring illegal trash dumping, make it hard for surrounding homeowners to purchase homeowners insurance or sell their homes for full value and harbor prostitutes and drug dealers.
The cost for non-profits to rehab a house is over $150,000 if they use money from the state or feds (red tape, ya know). Most have to since private credit for housing has dried up. Historic homes cost two to three times more to rehab than that because of regulations on designs and materials.
I agree that we need to find a solution to the current problem, but that solution needs to take into account the suffering that the low income residents of the city’s south and near west side face from these vacant and abandoned properties, historic or not. Our passion should be for people first, buildings second.
The House of Representatives passed H.R. 3221, the American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act by a final vote of 272 to 152. The Senate votes on their version on Saturday and President Bush has promised to sign the final combined bill.
Bush had threatened to veto the bill due to its provision of providing $4 billion to localities to buy and rehab (or demolish?) abandoned property. However, his Treasury Secretary said that this bill HAD to go through, specifically the provisions creating a new regulator for mortgage entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as its unlimited line of credit to the quasi-governmental agencies from the US Treasury, to reassure the financial markets that the government would spend whatever is necessary to keep Fannie and Freddie from failing.
The other major provision is $300 billion to help refinance homeowners out of sub-prime adjustable rate mortgages into fixed rate, government guaranteed FHA loans. This is estimated to help up to 400,000 homeowners.
Now it’s up to groups like SUN to kick our municipality in the tail and get some of that $4 billion to help rehab the 1,200 vacant houses in Syracuse.
Combine the new federal assistance with New York’s recent bill that requires a face-to-face mediation session between lender and borrower before foreclosure proceedings can begin and its beginning to look like someone is actually looking out for besieged homeowners.
