Rehabbers Work to Restore Aging Structures
Date Posted: October 6, 2022
Posted In: News, Projects,
From The St. Louis American: For Tenesia Brown, supervising broker with Keys Realty Group, the road to rehabilitating vacant, dilapidated properties in north St. Louis has been paved with mold, and costs that exceed sales.
Still, the real estate investor says she’s “not a quitter,” and is aiming to work with others to get vacant properties into the hands of homeowners, despite the hurdles.
“I literally lost on that [first St. Louis] project,” said Brown, referencing a home on Blair Avenue that cost $160,000 to rehab and sold in March for $93,000.
“But overall, it turned out awesome on the inside,” she said. “I think that regardless, it was … okay, it’s all worth it.
“The architecture and the brick properties in St. Louis are amazing and just to see them dilapidated the way that they are, it was like wow. They have beautiful homes here. What is going on around here?”
As of mid-August, St. Louis had nearly 10,000 structures that could be classified as vacant, according to the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, a coalition of community members, private and nonprofit organizations, and local government agencies working to reduce the value-draining effect of vacant property in St. Louis. An additional 872 buildings had at least one indicator of vacancy, according to the Collaborative’s website.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones acknowledged to The American and Type Investigations that residents could rightly complain that not enough has been done about the problem, which has festered in the northern stretches of the city for decades.
At least $37 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, sent from the feds to combat the pernicious impacts of COVID-19 — and potentially $150 million more — is expected to flow into north St. Louis neighborhoods, according to Jones and an official with St. Louis Development Corporation, the city’s development agency.
Meanwhile, rehabbers are attacking the problem from the ground up, and the inside out.