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The next feature takes us to historic homes around Detroit restored by the Detroit Land
Bank Authority.
We are in the fabulous Boston-Edison Historic District in Detroit. This neighborhood is
comprised of over 900 units, 36 blocks. It's one of the largest historic districts in the
nation and it's still in tact. You know, it's still in tact. You'd have to look really hard
to find vacant lots in this neighborhood, and that is a gem in and of itself inside
little old Detroit.
The stories you always hear about are always... everything is demolished, everything is vacant,
there's nothing there, there's no "there" there. Well, here's our "there." So we wanted
to preserve it.
In this area we rehabbed 13 homes and you're looking at two of them that we did and spent
a significant investment in. That property was bought under a mortgage foreclosure, and
this one was bought under tax foreclosure. So that's how we acquired all the properties.
A lot of people are interested in how we came to acquire the assets that we did, and pretty
much that's it. It was either a mortgage foreclosure or a tax foreclosure.
This house in particular was actually fire damaged very badly, to the extent that the
whole first floor on this side of the house had collapsed into the basement.
Families have a choice -- many choices -- to go outside the city of Detroit to get larger
homes, more elaborate homes, etcetera, in the suburbs. So we don't want to lose those
folks, and actually we want to entice those folks that are in the suburbs to come back.
The great way to do that is to save these properties that... you can't rebuild them
anymore. You're talking about a million dollars plus to rebuild some of these properties.
When I walk through and I see things like the dental molding, fabulous crown molding
that's a foot long, you know, it just excites me because it's visually stunning. You can't
get it anywhere else.
We've actually sold all of our properties in this neighborhood. So we brought in 13
new homeowners to this area.
When we do this work we want to create sustainable affordable housing. So not just earth friendly,
but friendly on the operations side for the families. We supplied all the properties with
Energy Star qualified appliances. We have a couple units here where we installed a geothermal
system. We reclaimed hardwood floors. Where we could we kept the original wood windows.
If we had to replace windows we replaced with wood windows.
So we looked at every component that we could and tried to make the smartest decision about
the end user and whether or not that product was friendly to the earth. Because we think
it all goes together. If you're going to preserve it, you can't just try to preserve it for
today or this month. You've got to try and preserve it for the next 100 years so that
this 100 year old asset continues to live on and continues to grow new generations and
new families.