Jetora Carter’s commute is just a few steps, from her home on Ira Avenue to the Summit Lake Nature Center, where she works in outreach. She loves all of it — the house, the lake, the job.
Carter, who uses housing vouchers to pay her rent, almost lost this lifestyle. Her landlord this spring planned to sell the home she rented. But she connected him with a friend who purchased the property, allowing Carter to stay.
Still, she’s worried that a City of Akron plan to build on 50 lots in the neighborhood will make it harder for others to afford to live in Summit Lake. City leaders intend to use federal funds to make 10 of the home construction projects affordable for renters, but Carter is concerned that that isn’t enough — and that new construction in the area will raise the costs for people who are already there.
New construction in an area brings up property values, which can raise costs for existing residents in terms of rent and taxes. Carter and others worry that homes that are worth far more than what’s already in the area will have that effect in Summit Lake.
“I really think it should all be affordable housing,” Carter said. “There are so many people that are trying to make a living.”
The city controls about 200 lots in Summit Lake, said Kyle Julien, Akron’s planning director. Last month, the city put out a request for developers to propose plans to build homes on a quarter of them. Single-family houses, duplexes, small apartments — there are a lot of options to attract new residents.
“When we have land, this is what we do, we want it to be developed,” Julien said. “It’s a recognition that the neighborhood ultimately depends on productive reuse of land and bringing in more neighbors.”
Why Summit Lake?
The Summit Lake neighborhood has long been a focus of revitalization efforts. Its issues date back to the 1950s, said David Messner, development manager for the City of Akron. Then, the construction of Interstate 76 and other nearby highways isolated Summit Lake from other parts of the city.
“This neighborhood was more impacted than other ones,” Messner said.
Homes fell into disrepair. Starting in the 1970s, the city began to acquire tax-delinquent properties at sheriff’s sales. The city’s efforts to acquire Summit Lake land and houses picked up following the 2008 housing crisis, Messner said.
Now, the city plans to sell its first batch of 50 lots for 50 cents per square foot. It’s inexpensive, Messner said, but the price accounts for the fact that there are issues accessing water and sewer lines on some of the properties that could cost developers between $20,000 and $30,000. Some homes that were knocked down and buried may need to be excavated.
Suggested Reading
Messner hopes that keeping costs down for potential Summit Lake developers will lower the barriers for infill redevelopment, where new homes are built on empty lots in an existing residential neighborhood. Available lots in Summit Lake are “some of the best” for building on, Messner said.
Developers can propose buying any number of lots as long as they can complete construction in two years. The request for proposals says the city intends to put $350,000 toward ensuring 10 affordable properties can be developed, depending on continued federal funding.
Julien said the city has buy-in from the community. The Akron Civic Commons has been active in the area, working to improve communication and shepherd improvements in the neighborhood.
Will this lead to gentrification?
Some residents, like Carter, still have concerns. She wants to ensure low-income residents can afford to move into the area and stay there.
“I definitely don’t want them to put people in here who are just all rich,” she said. “I don’t want them to move people out. I want them to make this a better place for people who are already here.”
Carter would prefer the lots be maintained as green space until all of them could be developed as housing viable for low-income residents.
Her 21-year-old daughter, Alicia Diener, wishes she could afford to stay in Summit Lake. But she lives in East Akron because she couldn’t find a local landlord who would accept her rental assistance.
Julien, with the city, said he’s cognizant of residents’ concerns and takes them seriously. The proposal for 50 parcels “is not going to transform the neighborhood overnight,” he said.
“We’re taking a small chunk of land,” he said. “We’ll see how things go.”
‘How do you do development without gentrification?’
Elizabeth P. Roe has lived in Summit Lake for about a decade. She said a lot of the demolition that cleared lots in the neighborhood was needed, though it would have been nice if more houses could have been saved.
While the homes in Summit Lake are relatively inexpensive, Roe said people have to be rich to buy them. It’s hard to get a mortgage on homes that are worth less than $100,000, she said, and those properties often need a lot of work — costing even more money. She hopes the city’s plan will lead to housing that is truly affordable but worries that, instead, rents will go up for people who cannot afford them to.
She wonders if people who could buy market-value new construction would want to move into the community. Instead, she’d like the city to allow existing homeowners to buy the lots next to them to use as green space, or for more than the 10 planned properties to be affordable housing.
“Akron is not alone in finding this challenging,” said Roe, a professor of social work and director of the Center for Intercultural Studies at Malone University in Canton. “How do you do development without gentrification?”
Aiming for more local control
One way might be to let anyone who wants to build their own house do so, said Tom Ghinder, the board president of Build Akron. Ghinder said he’s pleased that the city’s request for proposals allows people to propose building on any number of lots, but he’s concerned that an experience requirement would prevent potential homeowners from coming in with their own contractor to build a house.
While Ghinder said he hopes the city is considering the effect of rising values on taxes for long-term homeowners, he doesn’t think it’s generally a problem if Summit Lake home values rise.
“I think our housing situation in this area is so lacking, gentrification is not yet a concern,” he said. “If we double the value of homes, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
The city’s priority, he said, should be ensuring more housing is available.
Creating “missing middle” duplexes and triplexes is one of the initiatives Messner said the city hopes to accomplish in Summit Lake. Those housing options fall between larger apartment buildings and single-family houses to provide more options in a community for where and how people want to live.
He said some of the parcels might be combined to create larger lots to allow that kind of construction.
One idea the city would like to prioritize is local control. There are a lot of absentee landlords, Julien said, and more Akron-based owners could mean more attention is paid to the community.
He said that, ultimately, the goal is to have houses on all the city-owned empty lots. If this process goes well, Akron might do two more rounds of requests for development.
“We need to have more quality houses,” Julien said. “We need to have more people in our neighborhoods.”
