The demolition dilemma

LIMA - It must have been a pretty house once. You can almost imagine what those first owners saw, a clean little faux-Craftsman with high windows to let in the morning light and a neat patch of yard where the children could play. It was a tidy little piece of the American dream.

Now, close to a half-century later, it's a neighbor's nightmare. The once tidy yard is patchy and scabbed with rises where grass has grown over long-abandoned toys. The once stately pillars stand warped and rotting, barely able to support the weeping porch roof. The only occupants are a family of raccoons who have taken up residence under the porch skirt. Even they seem a bit embarrassed by their surroundings.

This home is on Atlantic Avenue, but it's no different from a few hundred others planted in neighborhoods across the community. And while the talk these days increasingly focuses on finding money to tear them down, there are those out there who still see the home that was.

John Baker is one of those people. The former bricklayer spent the past 10 years fixing up homes around the region. But with the housing market in decline, the "flipping" business is on the back burner. Still, old habits are hard to break and looking at some of the homes on Lima's demolition list, he can't help but think of what could be.

"It's just a heartbreaker. You look at these homes and you think what they could look like with a little [tender, loving care]. These are houses you can't find anymore. It's a shame to see them coming down." Baker said.

Should they stay or should they go?

As sad as it may be, demolition is the new reality, particularly for the city of Lima. The reasons are varied - careless owners, lousy landlords, poverty, changing families and a substantial drop in population - but the city has an abundance of homes that are old, abandoned and beyond salvation.

"It's pretty basic really. It comes down to money. You take the price you pay for it, add on the time and money spent fixing it up and figure if you can get that much or, hopefully, more out of it. If you're fixing it up to live in then sure, you can put whatever you want into it. But for most people you have to be able to get your money back and with most of these places that's not going to happen," Baker said.

When it comes to old homes it's an issue of head over heart. People who decide to restore older homes usually do so out of a love for the classic structures or a passion for preserving the past. But as economic times win out, the head starts to win out. At some point it comes down to the price tag.

"The bottom line is, rehab requires additional work and that means additional costs. A lot of times it is more expensive to rehab than just to build new," said Tim Stanford, of Yocum Realty Co.

Those costs add to the city's problems as people increasingly decide to build their dream homes, more often than not on land outside the city. So as the population declines, our housing stock continues to grow.

"If we keep building houses, but there's no new population, how does that work out?" Stanford said. "We talk about the green movement and conservation. Well leaving an abandoned house is a fairly significant piece of litter."

Amy Odum is one of the people who has to decide what houses are worth saving. As Lima's director of community development, she oversees a department responsible for doing something about hundreds of vacant and abandoned homes. At this point there are about 600 homes that need to come down at a cost of about $3 million. She has about $100,000 to do it.

"The goal [in the community five-year plan] was to take down 200 houses in five years. We haven't come close to that goal," Odum said. "We just frankly have more houses that need to be demolished than we can get to with current resources."

There are plenty of people in the community who would second-guess the decision to tear down homes. They mention homelessness, neighborhood aesthetics and a slew of other issues. But for Odum it comes down to a simple equation, Lima has too many homes for the population and many of them are old and even dangerous.

"There's a lot to be said for rehabbing and maintaining a classic home," said Odum, whose own Cole Street home was built in 1920. "But you are also dealing with old plumbing, outdated electrical service, etc. At some point it comes down to, is it cost-effective for someone to renovate a home and in many cases it just isn't."

The demolition dilemma

There's a certain irony in the fact that the city administration is advocating for the demolition of homes. This is, after all, a mayor first elected 12 years ago based largely on his reputation for leadership with the home renovation program Project Rehab.

David Berger was just 23 when he was recruited to come to Lima and head the project with the lofty goal of rebuilding the city one house at a time. Less than a decade later he was receiving national awards and the program was considered a model for projects across the country.

Now, nearly to 30 years later, Berger is faced with a housing stick he can't fix up.

"We have hundreds of abandoned and vacant properties so, certainly, there has to be an acknowledgment that there is a surplus and the most deteriorated of that surplus has to come down," Berger said.

Much of the housing in Lima is old - more than 60 percent of it built before World War II. Couple that with a shrinking population, poverty and the landlocked city's need for new land and there are not a lot of options, Berger said.

"That is tough. I've been disappointed that we haven't been able to accomplish more with the broad-scale renovation of houses, but we have to face the reality that many of these houses are unsafe and must come down," Berger said.

There are others out there fighting to save older homes. Most of that work is being done by individuals who want a classic home and are willing to put in the work. For people like that, Lima is a goldmine.

"What you can afford to buy here is incredible. You can't find many homes like this out in the townships. You don't see craftsmanship and character like you see in the city until you get into the $500,000 and $600,000 range," said Tom Mazur, director of Lima-Allen County Regional Planning.

There are sections of town populated by the sort of homes renovators and housing historians consider particularly valuable. The Market Street Boulevard, with its mix of Revival, Tudor and Neoclassical homes, was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. There are grand, 100-year-old homes located throughout the city. Many of them have been maintained or restored through the years.

To Odum, those homes represent a valuable aesthetic for the community. But it's up to the community to decide just how valuable that aesthetic is.

"There are neighborhoods that have developed with a specific aesthetic. The community has to come to an agreement about what is of value and what can be preserved. Basically, this community has to decide what it feels is important," Odum said.

Even if there is a value to the city's historic homes, there may not be much that can be done to save them. There's no profit in preserving them, so there's little hope private enterprise will get involved. Families are finding it cheaper and easier to build the home they want in the suburbs. And the days of nonprofits such as Project Rehab may be past.

"Will there be a Rehab Project? No. This city does not have a long history of nonprofit community development organizations that are run like a business. I'm not talking bake sales and block parties. Organizations run like a business. That's what we need," Odum said.