Healthy Homes houses, built and renovated to be affordable, now selling for big numbers on South Side

To gauge the ongoing demand for houses on Columbus' South Side, and what people are willing to pay for them in the age of COVID, look no farther than Carpenter Street south of Livingston Avenue.

There you'll find a property that the city of Columbus bought for $17,000 in 2010. The 1,830-square-foot house was renovated then sold through the nonprofit Healthy Neighborhoods Healthy Homes collaborative, going for $132,000 in 2013, $250,000 in 2018 and $330,000 in 2020.

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A little farther north, Mayra Castillo bought her house that the Healthy Homes collaborative once renovated for $260,500 in 2020. Eleven years before that, it sold for $92,500. The city land bank bought it for $19,500 in 2008.

Castillo, a certified public accountant who works as an internal auditor for a company in the Arena District, said she wanted to live close to work in a house with at least two bedrooms and a backyard for her dog.

"I looked at the Short North. It was too much money for what you got," said Castillo, 27, who had been living in an apartment there, and Grandview Yard before that. 

Healthy Homes works to transform struggling Columbus neighborhood

The Healthy Homes program, a collaboration between Nationwide Children's Hospital and the nonprofit Community Development for All People, began more than a decade ago to transform the struggling neighborhood near the hospital just east of Downtown.

On its website, it still says its mission remains providing and preserving affordable housing for the South Side, and now Linden.

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But the market is the market. So some homes specifically developed to be affordable are now selling for prices officials never would have fathomed more than decade ago.

"When I started 14 years ago this June, you couldn't give houses away on Carpenter," said Rita Parise, the city's housing administrator.

Of the 103 new and renovated houses Healthy Homes has sold on the South Side, 26 have been on Carpenter Street.

Parise called Carpenter "the poster child for concentrated investment," with not only Healthy Homes involved there. It was one of the first streets where the Affordable Housing Trust of Columbus and Franklin County invested. Former Mayor Michael B. Coleman's Home Again program to rid neighborhoods of blight was involved there as well.

"There's some sense of accomplishment by focused investment changing the markets down here," she said.

John Turner, Columbus' land bank administrator, said the land trust program, run through the Franklin County land bank, aims to keep prices affordable by selling homes built on those properties between $150,000 and $199,000. So far, 19 of those homes have been sold on the South Side.

There's also a program where for 60 days, only those who plan on being owner-occupants can apply to renovate land bank homes. They will receive a 50% reduction in price if they promise to stay in them for five years.

Also, Parise said, Community Development for All People continues to develop affordable rental housing on land bank sites. And Turner said the land bank is holding 112 South Side lots for new for-sale and rental properties the Healthy Homes program will develop through 2024.

Gretchen West, the Healthy Homes executive director, said her for-sale homes have restrictive covenants that require homebuyers to own them for at least five years. But after that, they can sell them for whatever price they can get for them.

"No one anticipated home values going up as drastically as that," she said of some of the current prices. West said that when the Healthy Homes program began in 2008, one in four homes in the two census tracts in the Southern Orchards neighborhood south of the hospital were vacant, and others severely dilapidated.

A steep rise in housing costs in the area

Lindsey Cole bought a 1,646-square-foot Carpenter Street home with her husband, Evan Wolfe, for $262,500 in May 2020.

"We’re young and don't have any kids," said Cole, 25. They wanted to be close to Downtown and German Village, and restaurants and bars they could walk to.

They had been living in Columbus near Worthington and looked at homes in Dublin and Hilliard. Their real estate agent introduced them to the South Side.

"A lot of people our age were moving into the area," she said. 

And she and her husband would have reasonable distances commuting; he is a civil engineer who works in Grove City, she is a teacher in Westerville.

"We felt like we got more house than we were finding in other places," she said.

One South Side leader said the prices are just a reflection of the market.

Jim Griffin, who leads the Columbus South Side Area Commission, bought his house in the Vassor Village neighborhood east of Parsons Avenue for $55,000 in 1995. That price, he said, is affordable.

"I don't think $250,000 is affordable. It's not affordable housing. It's not anywhere close to that," Griffin said.

He said homes in his Vassor Village neighborhood are selling for $200,000. So he's not surprised at what the houses that Healthy Homes built or renovated are going for the prices they are.

"The bottom line is, people have decided for whatever reason to move and sell their house, and get pretty high prices," he said.

Pressures of gentrification in Columbus

The Rev. John Edgar, the executive director for Community Development for All People, said affordability for the neighborhood remains an important question.

"There certainly continue to be gentrification pressures," said Edgar, whose group began developing housing two years before the Healthy Homes program began.

"When we first started developing in 2006, the primary issue was decades of disinvestment," Edgar said. "We were confronting in the community many vacant and blighted properties,with low appraised values.

"Our priority back then was, how do we help to rebuild this neighborhood? Get every property back into use."

Today, there are new challenges.

"We’re trying to do everything we can to preserve a mixed-income community," he said. That includes developing affordable to those earning 80% of the area median income, which in 2020 was $47,150 for a one-person household and $60,650 for a three-person household.

Misty Linn, a real estate agent with Core Ohio Realty Advisors who is listing a Carpenter Street house, said it's just supply and demand.

"I've been doing this for 28 years," Linn said. "If you had told me this would become one of the hottest markets, I would have told you you were crazy."

mferench@dispatch.com

@MarkFerenchik