SOUTH BEND — The Northeast Neighborhood Revitalization Organization and South Bend Heritage Foundation have partnered to build five new homes on Turnock Street that can only be sold or rented to local residents.
The two organizations put together a construction tour on June 5 with the city of South Bend and Lake City Bank to give residents an opportunity to walk through the properties before the homes enter the market.
The homes are in the form of two townhomes, a quadplex and a ranch-style single family home.
Heritage Foundation Executive Director Marco Mariani said he’s excited to bring affordable housing to the Northeast Neighborhood for working class families in the community.
“Each of these homes are in the community land trust, which is a setup where the land is always owned by the NNRO and then the home is owned by the purchaser,” Mariani said. “In order to be eligible to even buy this home, the household has to be at 80% of area median income.”
To ensure that future purchasers are income qualified means the homes can’t be sold to investment buyers, University of Notre Dame alumni or anyone that may want to turn one of the homes into an Airbnb, Mariani said.
The three-bedroom single-family home has already been sold, Mariani said, but the two townhomes and quadplex will likely be up on the market by the end of the year.
“Construction changes, [but] I would say that we’d ought to have certificates of occupancy on these [townhomes] by Aug. 1,” Mariani said. “September or October is when the quadplex will be finished.”
Both townhomes are 1,734 square feet, which includes three bedrooms and a basement. The quadplex will include four 700- to 806-square foot one-to-two-bedroom apartments for under $1,000 per month.
Each building is city-designed, Mariani said, and pulled from pre-approved packages of homes the city provides. South Bend Mayor James Mueller attended the construction tour and said the city’s planning team was excited about the project and hoped to see more affordable housing making its way across the city.
“It was part of the overall mission of, ‘How do we become the most housing-friendly city in the state?’” Mueller said.
Between a grant from the city of South Bend and a construction loan through Lake City Bank, the total investment, both through public and private means, is nearly $2.1 million.
NNRO Investment
Before the NNRO started in 2000, the neighborhood looked a lot different. NNRO board member Marguerite Taylor bought her house in 1964 for $8,500 and watched the neighborhood transition into what it is now.
“The neighborhood was really kind of gentrified on one end,” Taylor said. “You couldn’t afford to build a garage over here.”
The house next to Taylor’s sold for close to $1 million despite it being an 800-square-foot home that was torn down and rebuilt, she said. For years, Taylor saw Notre Dame students take over the neighborhood, which wasn’t really an issue in her eyes, she said, but there were plenty of lots that needed love from the right people.
It clearly became more important than ever to get affordable housing into the neighborhood and development into the right hands, and that’s where the NNRO got its start.
According to its website, the NNRO has helped to stabilize critical sections of the neighborhood for residential and commercial investment. As a board member, Taylor said, the board is full of residents who lived there all their lives and wanted to see it thrive.
“I think we all had a vision,” Taylor said. “None of us had a lot of money, but we, as grownups, knew what we wanted for our neighborhood.”
South Bend Heritage staffs the NNRO, serving as the operational manager and performing administrative, development, programmatic and technical support on behalf of the NNRO. When the organization first started, Mariani said, the NNRO and the city partnered to do planning that created a foundation for the growth the group has facilitated.
The city has also established the area as a TIF, or tax increment finance, district, which allows a funding source to help promote all of the new development, Mariani said.
“The neighborhood will always have the residents in mind at first, and we’re always looking to promote affordable housing opportunities so that we can ensure the Northeast Neighborhood is a shared neighborhood,” Mariani said. “It’s not just Notre Dame football homes or Airbnb’s. It’s actually people working and living in our community, and that’s the purpose of the NNRO.”
Email South Bend Tribune business reporter Jessica Velez at jvelez@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: NNRO partners with Heritage Foundation to build five new homes
Reporting by Jessica Velez, South Bend Tribune / South Bend Tribune
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By Jessica Velez, South Bend Tribune | USA TODAY Network
