Cleveland resident Cedric Cowan didn’t expect to wake up to a home being demolished on the other side of Fairport Avenue, within a neighborhood hit hard by foreclosures.
“Somebody tearin’ the house down! I didn’t know it,” Cowan says, sitting on his front porch. “I thought someone was movin’ in there.”
Over the course of three hours, an excavator smashes, crushes, and pulls apart an abandoned two-family house. A worker sprays the rubble with a hose to keep the dust down.
Cowan says he can’t help but feel…relief.
“’Cuz I been seeing people movin’ in houses that is vacant. They don’t pay no rent. Then the house catch on fire. So I’m glad they’re demolishing this one,” he says.
Arsonists, vandals, and scrap metal thieves are often drawn to shuttered homes. Ohio attorney general Mike DeWine says they're a huge problem in the state, which is why he's setting aside $75 million from the state’s $340 million in mortgage settlement money for more demolitions.
“I wanted to make a bold statement, set an example,” explains DeWine. “And say that our state’s never going to be the great state we want it to be, when we have neighborhoods that are being eaten alive by these homes.”
Besides being a crime risk, crumbling old homes drive down property values. DeWine says demolition helps out those he considers the “real victims” of the foreclosure crisis: neighbors.
“If you live in a house and you’re paying your mortgage, and the value of your house was $120,000 and now it’s $60,000 because you live by a neighbor whose house is abandoned…you’re a victim.”
Back at Fairport Avenue, the excavator has gutted the old two-family home, and is crushing debris under its treads. Several locals gather to watch the remnants of the home crumble and fall.
A “root canal” is the way to describe this demolition says Gus Frangos of the Cuyahoga County Land Bank. In three years, his organization has torn down nearly 800 houses. Frangos says it would cost up to $80,000 to restore this house…more than ten times the cost of simply tearing it down.
“The siding and the wood is rotted…the interior walls are bad,” says Frangos, looking over an inspection report of the house. “All of the mechanicals…the electrical, the plumbing…everything is missing, stripped. This is one of those examples of thousands of properties that are decaying neighborhoods. And we need to try to stabilize the tax base by removing that decay, so that people don’t live next to the stuff.”
As for the City of Cleveland, it's spent more than $40 million in city and federal dollars to demolish 6,000 vacant homes since 2006. Attorney General DeWine is pushing cities to match the state’s demolition dollars in order to destroy the largest possible number of homes.
This pleases Jim Rokakis, director of the Thriving Communities Institute, a Cleveland-based group that helps set up land banks.
“If the AG’s $75-million leverages another $75-million, we’re talking $150-million,” says Rokakis. “$150-million will take down 20,000 structures in the state. That is a powerful impact.”
But others point out that even $150-million would still leave standing close to 80,000 abandoned houses.
“The money even matched by local governments would barely make a dent in what we already have in the backlog of vacant, abandoned housing and I suspect we’ll have a lot more in the future,” says Dennis Keating, a professor of urban planning and law at Cleveland State University. He says the first big wave of foreclosures peaked in 2009, due to unscrupulous lending practices. Now unemployment and underemployment are taking their toll.
“And for the last couple years, a lot of the lenders have been reluctant to foreclose, not wanting to be held liable for the maintenance of those vacant properties,” adds Keating.
“And we also had the national robo-signing scandal which halted a lot of bank foreclosures. Now that the attorney general agreement been signed, and is official, apparently a lot of those banks are now going to move ahead to foreclose homes that they were reluctant to do that, within the recent past.”
Attorney General DeWine says Ohio should receive its mortgage settlement money next month. Meanwhile, Cleveland officials and the Cuyahoga County Land Bank are working to raise $14 million, to help demolish hundreds more condemned homes in the county.