YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp., the Mahoning County Land Bank, city officials and other partners Thursday celebrated the ongoing renovation of a vacant home on Sheridan Road and the groundbreaking for a new home next door.
YNDC is working on several projects in the 7th Ward, constructing homes with at least three bedrooms and two bathrooms, part of a nine-home effort in the area. Homes will feature a kitchen and dining room, a first-floor laundry room, a front porch and two-car garages.
Workers are adding siding as part of the renovation of the four-bedroom, two-bathroom vacant home donated to YNDC by Huntington Bank. The donation allowed the property to be included in revitalization efforts in the Powerstown Neighborhood, said Ian Beniston, YNDC’s executive director.
Once completed, the homes will be listed for sale, and the purchasers will benefit from a 100%, 15-year property tax abatement on the newly constructed homes.
Beniston said the city has been actively engaged in the effort by upgrading utilities, improving sidewalks along the street and recently repaving the road in front of the homes. The city also received a residential economic development district grant to support infrastructure improvements in areas where new homes are being built.
Several neighbors were in attendance at Thursday’s groundbreaking, and Beniston said some have been involved for a long time, working with the YNDC when it could only board up abandoned homes instead of renovating them or building new homes on empty lots.
“There’s an extreme amount of appreciation for the neighbors in this neighborhood too, who have worked alongside us for years with the hopes that we would get to a moment like this,” Beniston said.
Within a few months, the renovation project will be complete, and a new home will begin rising from the large excavation at 3318 Sheridan Road.
“This will give us two different options at two different price points,” Beniston said. He added that the project is part of the multiple rungs on the housing ladder that Mayor Derrick McDowell has emphasized.
McDowell said the steps on the housing ladder include moving from unhoused to transitional housing, then to an affordable rental, a renovated home and, eventually, a new home.
“We are a community that has battled back from blight, from hopelessness and despair to a space of not perfection in our communities but progress,” McDowell said. “And it’s notable progress.”
Councilwoman Amber White, 7th Ward, said the project is one of several efforts underway to improve quality of life in neighborhoods throughout her ward, including infrastructure replacements, corridor cleanups, sidewalk improvements and trap-neuter-return programs. Soon, she added, there will be a groundbreaking ceremony for Homestead Crossing, a 120-unit affordable housing community planned for the 800 block of East Indianola Avenue.
Roger Smith, director of planning, acquisition and disposition at the Mahoning County Land Bank, said for the first time in a while, the agency is preparing to invest in a rehab project of its own, a home donated on Neilson Avenue, Youngstown.
“Another day, not that long ago, it probably would have been a demolition,” Smith said. “It’s in that kind of shape. But because of the confidence that Ian and the city have in new construction and investing in this neighborhood, between the rehabs and all the new construction here, it gave us the confidence to take what was maybe a 50-50 proposition and invest some land bank funds.”
Smith said the land bank will get help on the project from the Youngstown Foundation and First National Bank as it renovates the property only blocks from the Sheridan Road site.
Pictured at top: From left are Ian Beniston, executive director of YNDC; Councilwoman Amber White; Mayor Derrick McDowell; and Roger Smith, director of planning, acquisition and disposition at the Mahoning County Land Bank.