Federal Funds to Help Ohio Neighborhoods

Columbus, Ohio officials plan on using federal funds to revitalize three neighborhoods that have been adversely affected by the foreclosure crisis. The plan includes demolishing some homes and repairing others.

Columbus will spend millions more dollars to tear down or fix up nearly 100 houses in three neighborhoods hit hard by foreclosure and blight, including a South Side area where a new health center will go up next year.

The city will receive $4.8 million in the latest round of federal Neighborhood Stabilization money and will spend the bulk of it in the Linden and Franklinton neighborhoods.

Some of the money will go to demolish houses or develop new ones in the South Side neighborhood near Parsons and Innis avenues. The city owns land along Parsons and will build a new $5 million health center there.

Construction will begin next year, and the center will open in spring 2013, said David Bush, a city assistant finance director.

The center will replace the John R. Maloney South Side Health Center, demolished in 2006. It will anchor redevelopment efforts in a struggling area long hurt by job losses and decline along the Parsons Avenue corridor, and perhaps draw interest to the new housing.

The city had received a total of $46 million in the first two rounds of Neighborhood Stabilization funding.

So far, 16 houses have been built or rehabilitated. And the city has purchased 264 properties to sell or demolish. The city still is deciding what to do with many of them.

The federal money also will pay to renovate or build 10 to 12 houses near the Linden-McKinley STEM Academy on the city’s North Side. The project is aimed at boosting the neighborhood around the school.

Donna Hicho, who leads the Greater Linden Development Corp., is working with the city, and said the goal is to cluster the homes along two streets in the neighborhood. She said the streets have yet to be identified.

Hicho said she hopes that clustering the houses can create a visible difference that will generate more redevelopment.