I am in the process of moving to Baltimore and have been looking for a place to live. As I have been looking, I discovered a very cool neighborhood right next to downtown Baltimore called The Otterbein. The neighborhood is a great mix of historic town homes with new construction.



This neighborhood used to be a slum until the city set up an urban homesteading program where people could buy a house for $1 if they agreed to live there and fix it up.



http://www.livebaltimore.com/nb/list/otter/history/



http://www.theotterbein.com/



It would seem to me that this could be done in St. Louis, perhaps north St. Louis. What would be the best neighborhood/area to start this program? How do we convince city hall to make it happen?

I believe the land reutilization authority already does this, though the properties aren't always $1.

Here's a link to the St. Louis LRA Real Estate page. http://stlouis.missouri.org/development ... /purchase/



Buildings can be as low as $500 depending on the neighborhood.

So why did it work so well in Baltimore and it does not seem to have had much success in St. Louis?

I can't speak for Baltimore, but many of the places I've looked at on the St. Louis LRA list could easily be classified at functionally obsolete--too small, doesn't necessarily match the neighborhood architecturally, and probably wouldn't be that marketable or desirable to live in even after a gut rehab.



Of course, I've only looked at places in south city, perhaps its different story in north city.

So why did it work so well in Baltimore and it does not seem to have had much success in St. Louis?

Urban homesteading was big in eastern cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and the 1970s.



But there were similar urban pioneering efforts going on back in St. Louis, too. Plenty of Wash U students bought Lafayette Square buildings from the City back then.

Any graduate of the major universities here should be given St. Louis City houses that are abandoned for $100 or less. How many properties does the city own? thousands? are they trying to make money off of these or are they trying to attract new residents?

Any graduate of the major universities here should be given St. Louis City houses that are abandoned for $100 or less

.



Relatively few new graduates of major universities could afford to bring a property on LRA's inventory to code and live in it.

$100 houses take a lot of skill or money to rehab. The best bet for "homesteading" on the cheap for peopel with beginner's level rehab skills is to find a liveable house that needs work but is legal to occupy. While that option often means a mortgage, the mortgage payments can be pretty low. Such an approach is realistic, and opportunities not difficult to find. Elderly sellers, banks with foreclosed property and others are looking to unload old houses in decent shape even in places as stable as Old North St. Louis.

anyone interested in donating time/photos to help the city add photos to their for-sale property list



http://stlcin.missouri.org/forsale/



with the intention to promote urban-homesteading, try contact: sldc@stlouis.missouri.org



or use form: http://stlcin.missouri.org/index/contactelect.cfm?ID=28

It doesn't much matter whether the initial purchase price is $1 or $1,000.



It takes many thousands of dollars to rehab these properties. The averge student doesn't have the skills or money or mortgage borrowing power to do it.



If you put $150,000 into the property, considering the neighborhood, it's worth $45,000.



It wasn't all that long ago that a couple of houses in Lafayette Square were LRA properties that went for $5,000 each. Now, in Lafayette Square that seems cheap, but one rehabber put a lot of sweat into it and sold it for $105,000. That was about 2001. We figure he didn't make much of a profit. It wasn't until that buy sold it in 2004 for about $170,000 that real money was made.



All of that said, I really like Old Noth St. Louis and the energy up there.

I might buy property there, but only becuase I'm old and have got a fair amount of assests now and could afford to risk some of them.