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I presently live in Maine and am looking for a change of venue to an urban locale. I've been quite busy exploring urban real estate around the country and especially in Cincinnati, which seems cosmopolitan to my tastes and not too far gone from a post-modernization standpoint. Maine has worn a hole in my patience. Our kids are grown. And I've grown restless enough to look to a warmer climate, a more urban setting and an artistic project that can really put my life skills to work. I have a moral conscience about the future that is perhaps on a par with anyone else's more normal zeal for life. And, I've found a project I want to do. So, I'm seeking funding for that purpose.
I have money enough in the bank to live reasonably comfortably for the rest of my life, and more importantly for me, for my wife to do the same, if we keep working, which as everyone knows is the only way to keep on living. I've never had any debt less one of those student loans, for which I am grateful for the lesson such a thing taught me about debt. It is paid off. The lessons linger though. Debt is something to be avoided at all costs, is the very best advice anyone can impart to our youth today.
I've found an an apartment building in Cincinnati. It's a task for which I am equal. And, I'd like to spend the next couple of years applying my restoration art skills to it. It's an old bank building circa, 1890, complete with all the potential proud charm that was more commonplace in 1890 than it is in today's appalling McMansion architecture.
There are six vacant and dilapidated rental units over what used to be a bank and has since been turned into a small make-shift convenience-like retail store run by a young lady with admirable ambition. Later on you'll see a picture of this young lady. My interest is in helping her achieve her dreams, and restoring the six apartments into comfortable and affordable rental living spaces. Like so many other apartment buildings all across the country, this building will eventually fall victim to condo developers, if someone doesn't save it before then.
Condo developers can make a lot of money very quickly. Their efforts however, sterilize urban areas, foster wholesale gentrification, create less affordable and less desirable housing, and generally help to create a far more draconian municipal government bureaucracy intent upon reaping a harvest of a greater tax revenue from condo owners. A good old-fashioned apartment building maintained by an owner-occupant landlord, can lift up the people who live in the building, the surrounding community, as well as provide much needed population diversity in increasingly homogenized-condo-ized urban settings.
My intention with this building is to restore this building's apartments. My goals are modest. I intend to fully furnishing each unit so they're comfortable, including washers, dryers, air conditioning, high speed Internet access, a toll free telephone system driven by a PBX, and by providing virtually everything needed so tenants can just move in, stay, and, become part of the neighborhood. A quick analysis shows in an apartment building such as this, single-sourced utilities and whole-building billing is much more cost effective than if every tenant gets their own bill every month.
The historical problem with rental housing was that tenants cared little about the building because the absentee landlord cared even less about the tenants. It doesn't have to be that way though. And competetive single-source billing actually makes sense for the business model an apartment building can represent.
Making this building an owner-occupied apartment building in downtown Cincinnati will make it something of an anomoly. Such an anomoly can however, demonstrably outcompete a typically ubiquitous slum landlord by providing rental units that will cost only slightly more, but which will provide much more in terms of security, comfort, and pride in a neighborly urban domicile. One of my goals is to create an efficient business model for an owner-occupied apartment building business that will be a financial success because the tenants will take pride in their home and never desire to leave.
This is the building, 1732 Vine Street in Cincinnati.
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