Greenmount West organizes neighborhood vacants tour
Photo of Greenmount West homes courtesy of the New Greenmount West Community Association
Boosters in Baltimore's Greenmount West organized a tour last weekend that included homes that are far from neighborhood showpieces but -- they hope -- will get there in the foreseeable future.
The New Greenmount West Community Association organized the "Vacants to Value" event to drum up interest in the idea of buying a property in disrepair and breathing new life into it. The tour drew about 80 people, said Marian Weaver, a board member with the association.
Group leaders coordinated with several partners, including the city -- which launched the Vacants to Value program last fall to try to get more of Baltimore's thousands of abandoned homes back into productive use.
"When the Vacants to Value Program first went live, we recognized that this would be a great opportunity to leverage the city's willingness to sell vacants that they'd otherwise refused to for the past 30 years, and hope that we could funnel interest into turning these houses into the glorious homeowner occupied dwellings that they once were, rather than more inefficient and poorly managed apartments," Weaver said in an email.
Greenmount West -- next to Penn Station and I-83 -- is flush against North Avenue, bounded on the west by Hargrove Alley and on the east by Greenmount Avenue. The neighborhood is working to attract artists (it's in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District) and stamp out its vacancy problem. A March "vision plan" for the neighborhood says it has 150 vacant homes (about a third of which are city-owned) and 120 unimproved lots (mostly belonging to the city).
The weekend event showcased incentives for buying and rehabbing vacant homes. (The association is offering $6,000 apiece on eight properties it feels are best positioned to be fixed up by homeowners. That's separate from the Vacants to Value incentives the city is offering.) And, of course, it showcased the vacant homes.
"Since most of the available houses were in various stages of disrepair (some without roofs, some without walls) we decided that a key component of the tour would be to have rehabbed homes in the area on display along the walking tour, so that you could visit the 'before' and then visit the various 'after' possibilities," Weaver said in her email.
"We had an industrial-style rehabbed house open, a modern open floorplan house open, and a house that fulfilled the requirements for the Historic Tax Credit. Also had projected rehab costs for each house available on site from a Vacants to Value representative. ... Being able to see what can be done in these homes (some of the biggest in the city) really got everyone's creative juices flowing."
The average Greenmount West home is about 2,400 square feet, she says -- the size of the average new house. Many are three stories, she says.
Are you looking for a rehab project? Or will your next home need to be move-in ready before you sign on the dotted line?
Categories: Neighborhood and neighbors, Neighborhood improvement, Vacancies
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