Archive for the ‘Foreclosure Crisis’ Category
“Restoring Properties, Rebuilding Communities,” a new report from theCenter for Community Progress, cites a Cleveland-based grassroots program as an example for other cities also struggling with widespread property vacancy. The report, released at the start of last week’s national Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference in Cleveland, outlines the longstanding problem, exacerbated in recent years by foreclosures and [...]
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka is testing a way to board up vacant houses so they don’t look like glaring neon signs saying nobody’s home. Pianka brought in a Chicago man who specializes in making plywood to look like doors and windows. He gets vacant homes to blend into the neighborhood [...]
The Cuyahoga County Land Bank was created to deal with the mass of abandoned properties in this area. Unlike the Cleveland Land Bank, the county landbank deals both with vacant land and land with residences still present. Their listsings make for some interesting reading… (go to article)
Perhaps the only instance of homeownership being posed as a solution to the Middle East crisis, this staggeringly presumptuous comment was recorded by Damon Rich for his two-channel video Mortgage Stakeholders (2008). Couch was one of several people Rich interviewed for the video, in which academics, mortgage brokers and housing advocates explain the current economic downturn, [...]
SOUTH EUCLID, Ohio — The petite South Euclid bungalow, located smack-dab in the middle of a modest street of nearly identical midcentury homes, was gag-inducingly stinky inside, encased in tired and fading siding and, as a coup de grace, had been a rental for years before going into foreclosure and sitting empty since 2008. The [...]
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — The city is going back to its roots to keep a neighborhood from going to seed. Shaker Heights plans to plant an orchard, mostly of apple trees, on a vacant lot where a rundown house used to stand. Orchards were a standard feature of Shaker religious settlements like the one established [...]
Right-sizing is an area Cleveland is getting good at with Re-imagining Cleveland as proof. Yet given the $25.5 million in neighborhood stabilization funds given to the city—with nearly 60% of it committed to demolitions—there is reason for concern that if we carelessly knock our past down it’ll only make the future less clear. As it were, it is [...]
(via Cuyahoga County Planning Commission Weblog) CLEVELAND WON’T BE reborn until it buries its dead. Empty, decaying houses haunt Cuyahoga County’s neighborhoods — 8,000 dispirited shells where yesterday’s factory workers, nurses, lawyers and mechanics lived. Today, those residents are deceased or bankrupt or they’ve started over in a new part of town, a different city, another [...]
Cleveland officials need to do more than just pass out ethics rules after the fact to neighborhood agency officials who use their agencies as private piggy banks. Heads should roll over the latest sweetheart deals in which officials of a West Side neighborhood development agency used their positions to sell homes to relatives for what [...]
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Mayor Frank Jackson has ordered a top-to-bottom review of Cleveland’s Department of Community Development following a Plain Dealer report detailing problems with a city mortgage assistance program. The FBI and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development also are investigating Cresthaven Development Inc., a developer that was the biggest seller of homes [...]
The new Cuyahoga County land bank and Fannie Mae have forged a unique agreement that could be a milestone for a region battered by the foreclosure crisis. Fannie Mae is selling foreclosedhomes to the land bank for $1 — and will contribute $3,500 towards demolition for each house that isn’t salvageable. The first 25 properties are slated [...]
The city of Cleveland has aggravated its vexing foreclosure problems and has lost millions in tax dollars by helping people buy homes they could not afford, a Plain Dealer investigation has found. The city provided mostly low-income buyers with down payment loans of up to $20,000 through the federally funded Afford-A-Home program, but did little [...]
CLEVELAND — Five real estate buyers involved in a mortgage fraud scheme that prosecutors say contributed significantly to foreclosure and blight in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood pleaded guilty Monday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court to multiple counts of corruption related charges. Pak Hor Lui, 55, Pak Chang Lui, 53, Keng Ming Wong, 46, and [...]
If anyone else had owned the two vacant and dilapidated houses on Friend Avenue, Maple Heights officials would have torn them down already. They’ve been plundered by vandals and left to languish. The front porch on one is so damaged a city official won’t risk walking on it. The other suffered months of water damage [...]
The post Forclosure Crisis Forum lunch yielded the most fitting of all cookie communiques I have ever received. It was so befitting the conversation that we were sure that someone with a typewriter was in the next room, eavesdropping and predicting. For those of you who can’t squint it reads: “The minute you settle for [...]
A piece of the living room ceiling has fallen to the floor. The basement is flooded, the carpet mildewed. A musty stench fills the long-vacant house, which is worth a fraction of what it was just six months ago. The bungalow on Verona Road represents the problems and need for federal stimulus funds allocated to [...]
acant lots leave neighborhoods looking a little bit like a hockey player’s smile. Instead of knocked-out teeth, there are all these empty spaces where homes once stood. Not a pretty sight. But a bunch of lots in Cleveland are about to get amazing makeovers, thanks to the Reimagining Cleveland Grant Program, which is bankrolled by [...]
Cuyahoga County’s new land bank is likely to acquire its first properties this week, starting a new phase in the local battle to combat an unprecedented foreclosure crisis. Up to six parcels in Cleveland and Brooklyn will be test cases for the nonprofit corporation, which expects to take title to roughly 250 parcels by the [...]
There are 5,000 parcels in Cleveland’s land bank. Five thousand opportunities to pump some stability, innovation and activism into city neighborhoods blighted by foreclosure. Act now and the offer may even be packaged with financial aid, courtesy of federal stimulus funds. The deadline is Friday, July 31, to apply for ReImagining Cleveland grants of up to [...]
“According to the PD, Judge Pianka has lifted the injunction against Wells Fargo but put a new twist on requirements for them and the vacant properties they own within the City limits. Apparently they were ordered to put up a million dollar bond which also apparently covers costs to demolish approximately 100 of their homes…” [...]
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