Del and Kelli Grace mulled over buying a house in Maumee, Sylvania, or Perrysburg, but they settled on an area Mr. Grace once knew well for its crime and deterioration: the central Toledo neighborhood where he grew up.
By 1999, the blight had been replaced with a new subdivision with $150,000 homes, yards rivaling those in the suburbs, and steep discounts in property taxes. Compared to what they'd pay in the suburbs - and considering the area's dropping crime rate - it was an easy choice. See chart listing area home ownership rates
“The neighborhood is changing. I see it changing daily,” said Mr. Grace, 40, pausing to gaze at new homes being built. “We don't want to move out to the suburbs to feel safe.”
The Graces helped contribute to a new wave of home ownership in the central city, according to 2000 census data released last week. Three-fourths of the census tracts in the central city saw increases in the rate of home ownership - a key indicator of neighborhood stability. That helped keep Toledo the highest-rated big city in Ohio for home ownership.
But the census data revealed bad news as well. There were losses in home ownership across much of the rest of the Toledo, and that fueled an overall loss in the city's rate of home ownership - making Toledo the only major Ohio city to see a drop.
Even counting the suburbs, the Toledo metro area - defined as Lucas, Wood, and Fulton counties - had the lowest increase of home ownership among Ohio's five major metro areas between 1990 and 2000. Toledo was one of only two metro areas to see a drop in the percentage of minorities who owned homes - widening the racial gap in home ownership. “It's kind of a mixed bag,” said Dr. Sam Aryeetey-Attoh, a University of Toledo geography professor. “But overall, I think [the report] is positive.”
In the 1990s, an alphabet soup of agencies funneled tax credits, tax abatements, low-interest loans, and other incentives to transform blighted areas around downtown.
Their chief weapon: the single-family home.
Ownership promotes pride, they argued, and adds a responsible touch to neighborhoods where the bloom may have fallen off the rose.
Many groups took over empty tracts of land left from the “urban renewal” program of the 1960s and 1970s. They got help from a city administration that knocked down 300 vacant or substandard homes a year - more than 10 times what the city used to do. That provided more land for homes and helped drop the percentage of vacant homes in the city.
The Graces were among of the beneficiaries of this version of urban renewal. Moving from Detroit in 1999, the couple first considered the suburbs. But Mr. Grace wanted to open a hobby shop in central Toledo, where he had been raised. And he said he didn't want to solicit the community by day and leave it for the comfort of the suburbs at night.
They found the answer where he used to go to church - literally. The community development group ONYX - or Organized Neighbors Yielding eXcellence - was putting in a subdivision between Indiana and Nebraska avenues, west of Weiler Homes. One of the houses sat on the lot that used to house Mr. Grace's former church - Church of the Living God - before it was torn down as part of past urban renewal.
“My in-laws always say that this house was blessed,” Mrs. Grace said with a smile.
But it was not just divine intervention that steered them to the two-story house on Imani Circle. The house was brand new, and it had a 15-year tax abatement. The Graces pay only $20 a month in property taxes. And they say the neighborhood's reputation is much worse than the reality.
“I love it,” Mrs. Grace said. “To me, it is very peaceful.”
The central city was not the only place to benefit, census figures indicate.
In North Toledo, east of Cherry Street, north of the Maumee River, and south of Central, David Eddy faced a daunting task of keeping a historic neighborhood filled with 19th century houses relevant and vibrant. So NorthRiverDevelopment Corp. jumped in, acquiring cheap loans and government assistance to rehab and build homes.
For prospective owners, all it took was a minimal application fee. The down payment was covered, as were the typical closing costs that can confound even the wealthiest homebuyer.
“For 50 bucks, you could almost literally get in the house,” Mr. Eddy, NorthRiver executive director, said. “We thought that was a pretty good deal.”
Over the years, the agency helped add more than 230 homeowners to the neighborhood. The census has recorded those gains - two of the four tracts in NorthRiver gained in homeownership from 1990 to 2000.
The gains may have been more - except for changes in the atmosphere in the late 1990s.
Mr. Eddy said credit became harder to get and banks started making their lending decisions at their out-of-town headquarters. That made it more difficult for agencies to convince lenders to give borderline buyers a chance.
There was more of a struggle to get money to build the homes, too. Hugh Grefe, Toledo liaison of a national, nonprofit housing group called Local Initiatives Support Center, said the city began tightening restrictions on how these groups could use city grant money for homes.
Plus, some of the community development corporations that did the housing projects adopted a new wave of thinking - a philosophy that tilted toward building houses that would be rented, not sold.
Mr. Grefe said that traditional rehabilitation programs were expensive and time-consuming, and they didn't show immediate differences in the surrounding neighborhoods.
“Doing three houses in an ocean of blight isn't going to do anything,” he said.
But there was plenty of cash available for large-scale, rent-to-own developments. Federal tax laws made it possible for big-money investors to partner with community development corporations to build subdivisions of single-family homes.
The catch? The tax rules required that the homes be affordable for 15 years. That meant they had to be rented for that long. After that, the groups could sell the homes - theoretically at bargain rates - to the people who had been renting them.
Despite not creating immediate homeowners, many groups consider the rental-route a better cure to neighborhood ills.
“Now you could do scale,” Mr. Grefe said. “You could impact a neighborhood.”
Diana Schreiner does not need to be told that 9 percent of the homes in her census tract turned from owner-occupied to rental. She knows the reason: the University of Toledo.
“The landlords have found that they can buy these houses fairly cheap, get four or five or six kids in them, and make good money,” she said.
Ms. Schreiner lives in Bancroft Hills, just east of UT, and she said the battle now is to stabilize the loss of homeowners. She believes increased police and city code oversight are working, but she does not know if the measures will continue to stop the exodus of homeowners.
Ms. Schreiner's neighborhood was among the many across Toledo that saw losses in rates of homeownership.
Rentals gained inroads in much of the Polish Village area of North Toledo, with the area losing 3 to 5 percent of its owner-occupied households.
It was the same story in much of South Toledo. As far south as the Toledo Zoo and west to Byrne Road, more than a dozen census tracts lost home owners - with the tract by Libbey High School losing 7 percent.
Some neighborhoods remained stable - such as the upscale Old Orchard and Westmoreland areas. They continued to attract homeowners such as Jim and Erika Nickens.
The couple, both 31, bought their first home on Potomac Drive in Westmoreland just after the birth of their daughter, Kelsey - and after a five-month search that spanned several suburban and city neighborhoods
“We love the old houses,” Ms. Nickens said. “And this is a great neighborhood.”
The declines in other city neighborhoods led academics to name a key culprit: the city's continued loss of residents.
The city lost 5.8 percent of its people last decade, compared to the 6.1 percent in the 1980s and 7.6 percent in the 1970s, according to census data released earlier this year.
At least one researcher is surprised the drop in home ownership was not worse: Kelly Balistreri, state data center coordinator for the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University. “You would think you would have a steeper decline in the home-ownership rate based on such a steep decline in population,” she said.
Dr. Aryeetey-Attoh said many of the neighborhoods that lost in home ownership were the same ones that saw their property values remain stagnant in a 1993 UT study - prompting many homeowners to move out for bigger homes in more stable neighborhoods.
Most of the people moving out were whites. Taking their place were in minorities, who historically have lower incomes and are younger, on average, than the whites who left.
Ms. Balistreri said both factors could have played a part in the drop in homeownership rates.
“They [minorities] are less likely to be in a position where they can be a homeowner,” she said.
Dr. Aryeetey-Attoh said that “predatory” lenders were quick to give high-interest loans in the 1990s to poor homeowners, in exchange for the home being collateral. As some of those homeowners could not make payments, they lost their homes or sold them to real-estate companies, which turned them into rental units.
Still, there was little concern among academics about the Toledo area's poor faring against other Ohio areas. Dr. Aryeetey-Attoh said the fact that two-thirds of metro Toledoans own homes is “very strong.”
“Maybe some of the other metro areas [in Ohio] are finally catching up to Toledo,” he said.
But not everyone in Toledo is catching up.
The number of black homeowners increased nearly 2,000, or 20 percent - and the number of Hispanic homeowners increased nearly 500, or 27 percent. However, the number of minority renters increased by bigger percentages - washing out the gain in the numbers of minority homeowners.
The data showed the widening gap in the rates of home ownership between whites, blacks, and Hispanics. In the metro area, among white householders, the percentage who owned homes increased 1.9 percent to 72.2 percent. Home ownership for blacks and Hispanics dropped 0.7 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively, to 41.8 percent and 53.1 percent.
Dr. Aryeetey-Attoh calledthe widening gap “discouraging.”
Although he attributes some of the gap to differences in income, he believes some lenders and insurance companies are “red-lining” - discriminating against minorities for loans or insurance coverage in certain areas. “You've got to acknowledge that there are these institutional practices that are still prevalent,” he said.
First Published July 1, 2001, 12:18 p.m.