Ever since alluding to the Dollar House program in a recent Paul Koenig post, various friends and neighbors have been telling me stories about people they know across the city of Minneapolis who have one of the actual dollar houses. I'm told that most or perhaps all of those homes are still standing, still occupied by the owners who bought through the program, and have been a springboard for other revitalization in their neighborhoods. For anyone unfamiliar with this initiative, it essentially boiled down to the city buying houses, selling them for a dollar "as is" to new homeowners who would then use their own funds or a mortgage to fix up the property.
I'd like more history on the Dollar House program, and the history could be either anecdotal from people who actually used it or wonkish and empirical so we can see how the public portion of the funding was structured. Of course, some items would have to be reworked to fit today's housing market, but those would be minor considerations if the program was fundamentally sound and successful.
If we brought the Dollar House program back tomorrow, what would it look like? Let's walk through a purely hypothetical example here. (Be forewarned, the numbers I'm going to use are both purely made up and also based on my knowledge and experience. Numbers that I'm completely guessing on will be highlighted in green.) We start with a vacant house that is on the market for $15,000, and would be bought by the city and demolished if not for this tremendously successful, yet currently hypothetical, program. The cost to demolish is roughly...
