Inner-ring suburbs aid neighborhoods with older houses

In Columbia Heights, as well as St. Louis Park, Crystal and Brooklyn Park, programs are being put in place to give homeowners a helping hand with upkeep.

By Lora Pabst, Star Tribune

Last update: October 25, 2007 - 8:33 PM

When Lynette Thomson of Columbia Heights found out that the city would give her money to fix up her house, she started going door to door around her neighborhood telling everyone from the 93-year-old woman across the street to the first-time homeowner down the block.

Now, several people on Thomson's block are enrolling in a program that Columbia Heights officials hope will help maintain the neighborhoods full of modest 600-square-foot homes that were built around World War II and now need repair.

Several inner-ring suburbs across the metro, such as St. Louis Park, Crystal and Brooklyn Park, have been taking steps to keep up homes and maintain safe neighborhoods. Columbia Heights has combined elements from other cities' programs to develop their 10-year plan to provide money and resources to homeowners who want to keep up the city's mostly older homes but might need a little help.

Thomson used money from the program to fix the gutters on the home she moved into in 1969. Her 93-year-old neighbor is planning to put a new roof on with money from the city.

"I'm just trying to keep our neighborhood intact," Thomson said, of her door-to-door trips around the neighborhood. "There's no reason why Columbia Heights can't thrive and continue to be a good community."

Columbia Heights Community Development Director Bob Streetar said the city will spend about $1.7 million over 10 years for the plan. As part of the housing initiative, the City Council also began reviewing this week a new property maintenance code that will allow city staff to more strictly monitor rental and commercial properties.

"The housing stock that we have was modest when it was built, so it's very expensive to redevelop and it's less expensive to take care of what we have," Streetar said. "This says housing maintenance is a priority, and in order to be effective you can't just do it for one year, you have to do it for 10 or 15 years."

The different parts of the program tackle specific areas -- such as housing replacement, in which the city builds a new house in place of the most blighted house in a neighborhood, or the property maintenance code, which would target problem commercial properties that might hurt property values.

Other cities have similar initiatives that Columbia Heights officials looked to as they were designing their plan. This summer, St. Louis Park adopted an ordinance cracking down on illegal activity at rental properties; Brooklyn Park initiated a program that tries to create safer neighborhoods through law and housing enforcement; and Crystal updated its housing maintenance code.

Columbia Heights Fire Chief Gary Gorman said his department in the past few years has been cracking down on rental properties that don't pass inspection. The owners used to be able to drag out repairs for months but now have to fix problems within 30 days or face license revocation or assessment charges.

But before Gorman began revising the code, he couldn't do much about commercial properties. "What's really hard is you go out to your residential properties and you say you have to clean this up, and yet across the street is this commercial property that has junk all over," Gorman said.

In Crystal, city officials changed their code this summer to include commercial properties as well. They were also able to deal with owner-occupied homes, which are harder to regulate because they don't undergo regular inspections and often used to slip through loopholes in the code.

"The ordinance really has assisted us with owners who have put off meaningful improvements in their homes, or monthly maintenance issues like mowing grass," said Patrick Peters, Crystal's community development director. "Now we actually have some teeth to enforce city codes."

Thomson, of Columbia Heights, said she thinks homeowners sometimes need help to keep up the older homes, which face bigger problems.

"You have to learn how to own a home," she said.

Lora Pabst • 612-673-4628

Lora Pabst • lpabst@startribune.com

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