An effort to boost homeownership in Greater Cincinnati neighborhoods has hit a milestone, Hamilton County's development authority says. And it got there in part by buying back local housing from an institutional landlord.
The Port says it has sold 209 single-family houses since it began buying vacant properties and rehabilitating them a decade ago. It sold its first property in Evanston for $99,000 in 2015. At the time, the quasi-public development organization formed by the city of Cincinnati and Hamilton County in 2001 was focused on shoring up that struggling neighborhood and others like East and West Price Hill.
"Those neighborhoods are generally ones that have seen a lot of disinvestment over the years, and historically have had a lot of institutional investors come in and take up a lot of the housing stock," Vice President of Development Liz Eddy says. "Another big factor in those neighborhoods was the housing crisis."
The 2008 mortgage crisis and the Great Recession left those neighborhoods open to high levels of vacancy and large out-of-town landlords who sometimes didn't maintain rental properties appropriately. The legacy of that dynamic continues to play out in some Cincinnati neighborhoods today.
The Port took a unique next step in efforts to address those issues in late 2021, when it announced it would purchase 194 rental houses in places like Price Hill owned by California-based Raineth Housing. The move garnered national attention.
The Port has since sold 79 of those single-family homes. A 2023 partnership with the Greater Cincinnati Realtist Association aimed at increasing Black homeownership rates has helped with that, Eddy says.
Who is buying the homes
Many of the homes have gone to service industry workers, nurses and other professionals making moderate incomes.
"What we've seen is an insane amount of first-time homebuyers, which I think is cool," she says. "A lot of single moms with kids are being able to provide stability they've never had. Their kids aren't having to move from school district to school district based on the rental market."
That pattern has played out across The Port's homeownership efforts, Eddy says. About 60% of the houses The Port has listed have been restricted to people with moderate incomes. In those cases, funders like The Greater Cincinnati Foundation and the Cincinnati Development Fund have helped The Port bridge the gap between what it costs to build or rehab a home and what a moderate-income buyer can pay.
Other houses have been open to all bidders, but have been priced in such a way that they're affordable to moderate income buyers, Eddy says.
The program is continuing in neighborhoods it started in — the 209th sale was in Walnut Hills, not too far from that first home in Evanston.
But Senior Vice President of Real Estate Development Lindsay Florea says The Port also has been branching out. It's been focusing on new construction in Lincoln Heights and recently acquired 70 properties in Sedamsville, a West Side riverfront neighborhood in Cincinnati that has struggled with poor housing conditions.
"We are currently under construction on 18 houses," she says. "We'll have a couple structures left and the rest will be vacant lots. The hope is, private investment will come in and build on the vacant lots. And if not, we'll probably start on that process."
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