Rehabbed Homes in Masten Neighborhood Come with a High Price Tag

My God! Who is making these kinds of stupid decisions?

What an utterly inappropriate and pathetic job they did. Give a 1/3 of the money to a ReUse Action or Buffalo ReUse and I bet you will see a much better result.

$350000.00 for a vinyl box that looks like s***. These look like crap compared to the original bones. For that kind of money one would think that they could save the structure's character.
Belmont should be arrested for this waste of money in the name of providing affordable housing.

What a crime-I'm no less offended just because it's federal dollars being flushed. 350k rehab and when done, they are worth...40k? 50k? Who approves these grants!!

that must be a typo - $350,000 each????

they look pathetic and not the type of rehabs that can help rebuild a neighborhood. what a waste.

Embarrassing and pathetic.

Each of these shit-boxes cost $350,000!

Imagine how much got kick-backed to Byron & Friends, ala' the "NPR Development" scandal.

Byron, time and again has betrayed the African American Community --- on crime (hiring a Police Chief with no college diploma), on schools (having done nothing but play political hot-potato), and housing (demanding bribes from developers in exchange for approvals).

These are unconscionable betrayals of an African American community that he claims as his own.

I would love to see Betty Jean Grant -- who actually cares about her community -- run for Mayor.

Blah - blah - blah....so answer me how many of you even know what the NSP program is, its details, and how the funding is used? How many here are commercial developers signing loans and guarantee risks to banks?

Now consider that the program requires generally deed restrictions in most cases for low-income or periods of affordability for 20-30 years, is subjected to commercial lending standards (including full environmental testing at properties), require above-average isnurance policies, requires a management company if rental, require compliance monitoring for the period of the house being maintained by the agency/owner, generally requires substantially higher and extended services of architects and engineers, reasonable developer fee, requires energy star upgrades to the houses to meet NEW standards (fyi - preservation tax credits do the opposite as they disregard energy codes as a reason to replace vs. rebuild), requires layers of lawyers nine miles thick for all involved from debt, equity and perm lending, and my personal favorite: Davis-Bacon Wages!

Its improper to compare this to a single owner who makes trips to Home Depot and is a do-it-yourself guy on his free time. He doesnt do or need 90% of the above items. Its also not right to compare to the suburban sprawl homes as those are built by non-union cheap labor slammed out with none of the above generally accept as applied to the general subdivision site.

I volunteer for a not-for-profit that accepts Buffalo homes that are on the precipice of falling into a landfill and we rehabilitate these homes for low income individuals willing to take on the responsibility of homeownership as well as a mortgage.

By the time I arrive, almost all architectural detailing has been either destroyed or harvested. However, on the rare occasions any item is remaining, we really do try to salvage it or encapsulate it so that a future owner may be willing to restore it someday.

The fly in the ointment is we are all volunteers with various skill levels but our completed projects look very much like these homes depicted here.

Love us or hate us we “rehabilitate” and do not “restore” based on above mentioned and because of funds which are always lacking.

Which is probably why I am stunned at the price tag of $350,000 per unit when I see a nicely renovated home for the 21st century but all of the architectural character has been obliterated.

Especially 291 Northampton Street with it’s non-damaged circa 1870’s stained glass window; where is it now and why was it not retained as part of the renovation project?

With all due respect to Belmont Housing but I suspect if their accounting books were placed under a microscope, you may see some signs of creative accounting.

yes they are hideous abominations of their original

but look who is doing the work.

I agree with Matthew.Ricchiazzi

This is one of those cases where the African American community is getting pushed out of Masten as the Center for Life Sciences Campus continues to expand. Masten will become like Allentown...with whatever is left.

Masten has great bones: Masten Park, City Fields, Masten Armory, City Honors, our Lady of Lourdes de Notre Dame, Light Rail access...so its only a matter of time before the gentrification attracts the type of restoration we see on the west village and westside.

one thing is for sure...it most likely wont be coming out of the african american community and their tamany hall political structure or corruption

Reading this makes me want to vomit. This needs to be front-page news (oh - we have only one newspaper). I really hope that there are more people who care about this travesty than those who do not. Maybe the balance between those who would find such antics offensive, and those who see it as business as usual, has shifted to the point where it has become acceptable to the populace. That is the true crime.

In any case, mark your calendar for about five years from now: after these houses sell for $50,000 and are occupied and "maintained" for a period of time, expect to see at least half of them on the in rem foreclosure auction, selling for $3500 each.

These houses lost all of it's original charactor. Just slap on some plastic, new windows and call it a day, huh?

Prevailing wage. You have to pay the guy shoveling garbage on the site $55/hour, too. And no one else can do his job.

I can build custom homes down here in NC for around $90-95 per square foot. I can build those crap vinyl box homes at 75 per sq foot. With that 3.5 mil they should be able to build 30 vinyl boxes and although they still won't sell for more than it costs to build there would be that money more homes.

Davis Bacon Residential rates are affordable and are likely not the reason for the cost.

What a shame. A crime has been committed here.

WTF!? These houses look worse now than before!

Add in NYS asbestos costs, lead paint and the cost to do everything up to code and you start to see why demo is unfortunately the path most taken.

I would never have thought $350k for each. Man, I need a union job.

For that kind of money per home I know for a fact you could hire the best craftsmen in Buffalo to restore these homes utilizing all the original elements all while upgrading the mechanics to new efficient infrastructure. Or they could have just bought a dozen homes on Ashland or Norwood and sold them for $50k to low income folks and called it a day.

they really need to change the rules for lead paint in subsidized residential rehabs from stripping/removal to encapsulation...

Sad to see so much character lost on each of these rehabs.
Why do we try to imitate the vinyl Victorians in Lancaster? If people want the suburban style, they will move there... and pay a lot more money that what this area will pay.

Maintaining and supporting Buffalo's neighborhoods & housing options is very important because of their historic character & charm, the dense, "pre car" urban fabric still (mostly) intact and very unique (and very affordable!) housing options. We need to build on our assets, not destroy them to be like every other place built after 1975.

They just rang the dinner bell for the feeding trough!!! Unfortunately that neighborhood will never be "Allentown". When you loose so much of the character of a house and don't put anything back you get a box with windows.

H0w much does vinyl siding cost? I replaced a portion of the siding on my house this year, clear cedar clapboard was just under $1.50 a foot. While it is not as cheap as vinyl there is just no comparing the looks and it WILL last another 130 years!

I replaced a hideous canopy roof over my back door. I took existing design elements from the house and designed a new roof using 8/4 stock wood (2") and 2 3/8" stock. It has the look of old build but it is new.

Cost wise I put less than $10,000 into the projects. If I had $350,000 this 3,500 sqft house would be the show place of the neighborhood. No matter how you try to justify it putting that much into one of these houses and having them look like this?!?!?!?!? People walking away with big smiles on their faces to the bank! Seriously I think I'll write to my representatives this is BS.

The original house in the top photo looks beautiful. I love the porch... such a shame that these now look absolutely hideous. Each of these houses definitely had more potential and I don't feel that they all needed to be completely re-skinned with such a hideous gray vinyl. Yuck.

The smart way to do the vinyl siding would have been over the original clapboard.

Yes, for the $350,000 they could have more than restored and added architectural detail but thats why government programs and all this minority churchs are little more than arms of government programs.

Its really the stupidity and greed of the african american churches. Why? An old school catholic/protestant church program in the community would have treated the rehab of these houses as training in arts, crafts and construction. Shingle, clapboard, architectural detailing, etc...would have all created trained workers to enter the construction and remodeling field.

Instead they got vinyl sided houses and low skilled workers and pocketed the government money. Corruption at its finest!

looking at those before and after pictures made me puke a little bit in my mouth.

Hey folks, lets get Tamar and Aaron with PUSH together with Belmont and see some creative accounting in action. PUSH's first project wrecked many original, architecturally significant details and took three renovations, over the course of five years to complete, which BTW, the interior is depressingly awful (as any tenant will attest). I think the model is full of shit. Granted the Belmont houses are absolutely horrific and deplorable but hey, that's what we expect from Belmont. I'd like a public accountability summit with all the self-inflated non-profits that help the poor by hiring outside contractors, while showing pictures of black men doing the work. Bogus, at least Belmont isn't pretending to be GREEN, LOCAL or SUSTAINABLE.

If the alternative was demolition, I guess this is an upgrade. But just barely.

Government would have been better suited to give a local construction/contracting company the $1.2 million grant and let them rehab about 10 or 12 houses instead of four.

Buf2020... save the pro-Davis Bacon prevailing wage support. The wage paid is about double what the private sector pays for the same work. It's well known that govt jobs on residential and heavy highway are cash cows. IF these are prevailing wage jobs, a disproportionate amount of money went toward wages.

Interesting that any expert in their field is aware that the government get's less for their money than any other buyer, but when it comes to healthcare, it's going to be just great.

I can't believe this has not made an investigator news case yet. Highway robbery and they are getting away with it.

I can't speak to the bureaucracy that these kinds of re-hab projects require (although I disagree with the quasi-corporate takeover of housing rehabilitation projects by organizations pretending to act on behalf of low-income famlies and I fully support an action plan that clearly and easily identifies vacant properties available for sale by the city or banks; properties that might be made available to low-income and new-immigrant families as easily as the working or lower middle class people, including myself, who have been for twenty years or more, readily buying houses in my neighborhood and creating communities of homeowners who feel pride in their buildings and in the bonds developed by living closely with neighbors for several years). However, I have to ask, with $350,000 per project, WHY ARE THEY GETTING RID OF SO MANY WINDOWS?????? The vinyl siding is atrocious, of course, but houses that are so obviously lacking windows look like disposible, cheap, unpleasant housing designed without respect for the low-income people who are meant to live there. The poor don't deserve natural light? This boggles the mind and makes the houses look substandard and unbelievably unattractive.

This is an incredible waste of tax payer dollars if I've ever seen it. For an amazingly large amount of money, old houses are being rehabilitated in a way that hardly seems to respect the the integrity of the original architecture. What's the point of renovating something at that expense if this is what the results are? Somehow all that money is going to renovate houses into something that is the worst of both worlds. It isn't a good reuse of an old house, and at the same time manages to be worse than what gets built in Clarence and Orchard Park for that price.
I guess you could argue this is what happens when one tries to create a demand in an area where there isn't any, but it is hard to overlook how little sense this program seems to make. It seems designed to enrich the builders more than it does to create affordable housing. If we're looking for someway to try to revitalize neighborhoods in Buffalo, we need to look elsewhere. This isn't a good value for the money being spent

Someone is lining their pockets on this project...what a shame...

ludicrous waste of money. Crying shame.

350k? Wow...you could have went down to the Arts Council, selected 4 artists, handed them the 350k and the home and each one of them would have renovated the house, yard, the attic, the basement, the whole kit and kaboodle with custom handcrafting, gardens, stained-glass windows, sculptures, solar arrays, windmills, vegetable gardens, butterfly gardens, bird-feeders,wind chimes, a bed and breakfast business, a renovated classic car in the garage, a weekly poetry and coffee event-DANG; I bet the contractors than pinched the architectural finishes and returned these...sterile eye sore probably weren't even City contractors but peeled in from the burbs, right? 350k? You could have gone to UB School of Architecture, created a grant program and had students learn historic restoration and done the work themselves-important for project management skills. Facepalm.

Absolutely disgusting.

$350K.

http://www.2findyourhome.com/search/property/detail.cfm?search_mlnum=B391253&search_property_type=RES
http://www.2findyourhome.com/search/property/detail.cfm?search_mlnum=B419483&search_property_type=RES
http://www.2findyourhome.com/search/property/detail.cfm?search_mlnum=B391249&search_property_type=RES
http://www.2findyourhome.com/search/property/detail.cfm?search_mlnum=B391261&search_property_type=RES

Feelgood development at its finest, folks.

Ouch. Those before and afters are brutal.

I think the numbers are off on this. I remember bidding these properties at the start of the year through a general contractor and of the 4 of them bid on didnt even total 900k. The gerenal that bid them was off on his bid from the winning bid by over 150k. So working backwards with the math 750k/4= 187,500 each. And yes i dont agree with how they turned out.