Richmond Times Dispatch
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Carol Hazard

David Herring begged the Richmond building commissioner to give him a few more months.  He knew the old brick house on Venable Street in Church Hill was a safety
hazard. It had nothing but four brick walls -- no roof and no interior walls. 

Still, Herring, property director for the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods, needed time to find a buyer for that and a boarded-up Victorian
house next door.  Almost all the houses on the 2200 block of Venable, including these two, were scheduled for demolition.  "Every property had notices on them," Herring said.

Along came an individual who scooped up two other houses on the block and later
restored them. A house here and there was touched up. With Herring's two saves,
the residential block remained intact.

ACORN deals with problem properties. Many are in such rough shape or encumbered with complicated title issues that most people don't want to bother with them.  In this case, the nonprofit was granted the option to find a buyer for the
houses. It paid $500 to the seller for the right to find a buyer.

The house with just the four walls, built in 1892, sold for $23,000. "Even though it only had four walls, if you put a level to it, it was completely plum," Herring said. "It was a wonderful ruin. You could see the potential."

The other, circa 1885 and with much of the original woodwork missing, went for
$55,000. "It is the only house of its kind on the street," Herring said. An Eastlake Victorian, the house details are more geometric than a traditional Victorian. 

As part of the deal, ACORN placed covenants on the properties, requiring the
buyer to restore the houses.  Three offers fell through because renovations would be costly and the prospective buyers did not have enough money to fix and refurbish the houses.

Three Strands Management, a local building company with experience in
renovations, won the bid for both houses.  A year later now, the redone 2,000-square-foot Victorian house at 2235½ Venable was just listed for $285,000. The house next door, at 2235 Venable with 2,600 square feet, will go on the market in about a month for more than $300,000.

"The whole street has come a long way in just a year," said Cynthia Oliver,
co-owner of Three Strands.  The renovation bug has spread to the next block and jumped across Venable, she said.

ACORN has used options to save about 25 houses in the Richmond area since the
program was initiated in 2001.  "We're not just facilitators on these properties," said Jennie Dotts, executive director of ACORN. "We control who we sell the properties to and we set the timetable and standards for renovations."

The organization receives $3,000 for each house it has an option on, regardless
of the selling price: $500 goes into a revolving fund for another option, $2,500
offsets overhead and administration costs. The fee is tacked onto the selling
price.

ACORN expects to close soon on a house, also saved from the wrecking ball, a few
blocks from the Venable houses. Eight heirs owned the property at 2116 Cedar St.
All had to agree to sell. The process took about eight months. 

"I was looking everywhere for a woman who lived outside Virginia," Herring said.   "One of the heirs said she was associated with a ballet in Florida."  Herring went through newspaper archives and a Department of Motor Vehicles office. "When I finally found her, she was there in Florida the whole time."  The area code had been changed, so when he called the telephone number the first time, he was told it was disconnected.

The two-story cottage with eight heirs was built in the 1840s with a basement,
which most likely was dug out when the road was leveled for a trolley, Herring
said.  "The house is a gut rehab," said Pete Bush, who is buying the house for $25,000.   "We'll put a new house in a new skin."

Walls will be exposed to get all the rot out and to install new electrical and
plumbing systems.  Historical trim patterns will be matched or redone. "I just follow the guy who figured it out in the first place," said Bush, whose specialty is restoring
houses with severe structural damage. "He was the smart one."

Bush plans to put a master suite on the second floor. To get there, you go up
two flights of stairs and that doesn't include the eight to 10 steps to get to
the yard.  The view will be worth the climb, Bush said. "It's impressive." 

A property that took years for ACORN to negotiate was the Peay House at 500 N.
29th St., also in Church Hill.  "We had been watching the house for a while," Dotts said. "It's an important house -- a surviving example of Greek revival from the Antebellum period.

"Every day, it seemed to get worse. We're not talking about peeling paint. The windows were getting ready to fall out. The back porch was about to fall off."  Yet, the taxes were paid and the house was inhabited. "That presented a different and new challenge for us, since our focus is vacant or abandoned houses."

Dotts introduced herself to the owner, who had been cited for code violations.
"You could see the sky from the second floor; pigeons nested there," she said.
"Water was leaking onto the first floor."  ACORN representatives went with the owner to court. "No one wanted to see him evicted," Dotts said.

The organization got the option on the house in 2003 and sold it to Matt Elmes, a restorer and builder, in 2004. It found an apartment in Highland Springs for the previous owner, who walked away with $70,000.  "These houses are irreplaceable; they are made with old-growth wood," Herring said. "All the effort is worth it -- every signature, every phone call."

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