Extreme Home Makeover: Jewish Edition - story for news class

There is plenty of work to do, but before Nettie Goeler rolls up her sleeves to dig in she grabs a quick pick me up.

She plops a glazed donut-hole into her mouth and grabs a bottle of water to wash it down.

“I need to eat something because I didn’t eat enough for breakfast,” she said. “It’s been a long morning after Sunday school.”

It is Sunday, but it will not be a day of rest.

“Time to get to work,” she said.

Her husband grunts, “Good, because it’s almost time to go home,” as he works through his second hour of planting groundcover in the front yard, and it is not even his own home.

Goeler picks out the cleanest pair of gardening gloves from a bucket and joins the Congregation Beth Sholom-Chevra Shas’ kickoff of Extreme Home Makeover: Jewish Edition. The project: to enhance the curb appeal of a 2,560 square-foot vacated residence located at1408 Madison St. in Syracuse’s East Side.

About 15 synagogue members volunteered to begin the renovation process of the vacated home on Sept. 14. The group volunteered through Home HeadQuarters, a non-profit organization that rebuilds and resells local vacancies at market value.

“The idea is that before we renovate our own home, we renovate someone else’s,” said Erica Bern, director of youth and family programs who planned the event.

Volunteering to fix the vacant home is the beginning of a religious study program that will renovate the participating synagogue member’s spiritual selves.

“It’s a spiritual renovation,” said Marc Beckman, one of the volunteers and a synagogue member. “Physical labor helps the spiritual soul.”

And the vacated house will require a lot of physical labor to fix it up.

From the street view, the home stands dilapidated. Boards cover broken windows, overgrown grass needs a mowing and only paled remnants of the exterior’s yellow paint remain.

“It’s been vacated for quite a while, but it may not be as long as you think,” said Karen Schroeder, the marketing and resource development manager for Home HeadQuarters who coordinated the volunteer opportunity with Bern.

The city took this residence because the owner owed back taxes, Schroeder said. Common reasons for vacancies are foreclosures, employment losses, health issues or divorces, she added.

The owner could not afford to pay them after going through a divorce, said Shanah Williams, a neighbor who lives around the corner at 107 Bassett St.

“I’ve always wanted this home,” Williams said. “I’ve never been in it before, but I could see the potential.”

Home HeadQuarters, which owns over 200 properties in the city, saw potential in 1408 Madison St. as well and purchased the home for $1, Schroeder said. The city developed a program that allows non-profits to buy vacant homes for $1 last year, according to an article in The Post-Standard. There are around 1,000 vacant properties in the city, according to The Post-Standard.

“This neighborhood is on the upswing. It’s getting better,” said Brent Bleier, a volunteer and local for 30 years. “This neighborhood has gone through a few cycles.”

With Maple Heights, a townhouse project located on the other side of Madison, Bleier hopes the East Side gets good tenants to move in.

“One’s neighbors have an impact on the quality of your life,” he said.

When the non-profit completes a renovation, it looks for homeowners who can build up equity, Schroeder said.

“We don’t want someone who doesn’t do anything for 15 years,” she said.

Home HeadQuarters enrolls new owners in a 10-week homebuyer education course to make sure they know what it takes to keep up a home.

The non-profit receives renovation funds from local, state and federal government agencies and looks for donations from anywhere that might give, Schroeder said.

At the beginning of renovation processes, Home HeadQuarters occasionally offers volunteer opportunities to do simple chores like yard work, so it appears like the houses are occupied.

“It gives the façade of some one living here. Nothing good happens when there are break-ins,” said Alison Jackson, the marketing and resource development administrator for Home HeadQuarters.

The continuous break-ins at the vacant Madison property make Williams uncomfortable as a nearby resident.

When a street has a vacant home on it, the neighborhood’s value and morale go down with it, Schroeder said.

Often there are instances when vacancies go untended for too long and cannot be salvaged.
“Some are just too far gone and we demo them,” Schroeder said.

A demolition could cost anywhere from $12,000 to $36,000 depending on what condition the home is in, she said.

“It’s a waste for [a home] to be torn down for back taxes,” Williams said.

The Madison Street house, although salvageable, is going to be completely gutted. A roof leak caused the interior’s walls to rot, floor planks to lift out of place and the second floor’s ceiling to sink in. It will cost $130,000 to fix, Schroeder said.

“You wonder whether it’s better just to burn it down,” Beckman said.

Interior problems such as mold and asbestos sometimes prevent volunteers from being able to help with renovations. Home HeadQuarters ensures the site is safe enough for untrained people to work on it, which sometimes costs more than contractors just doing the whole job, Schroeder said.

“It is usually time-effective for volunteers to do the yard work,” she said.

The Extreme Home Makeover volunteers put in a new layer of groundcover, removed rotting trees and planted daffodil bulbs.

Young girls from the synagogue begged their mom to plant the daffodils.

“Volunteering is one way to let people be included in the beautification aesthetics before the contractors dive in and do the renovation,” Jackson said.

The volunteers picking up trash did one of the day’s dirtiest jobs. Soda cans, broken cassette tapes, soggy cereal boxes and fallen tree branches littered the back yard before the volunteers arrived.

“It looks like a dumping ground,” Bleier said. “You know what the say: out of sight, out of mind.”

Bleier organized the trash piles properly for city pick-up and sorted recyclables from the yard’s debree.

Around late afternoon disposals piled high on the property’s front curb and Goeler was hungry again.

This time though the whole crew took a break together and huddled around Bern’s Volkswagen bug, which doubled as a picnic table. A spread of peanut butter and jelly, bagels, cream cheese and hummus lined her trunk.

After all the work done, trying to wash up before eating proved to be the day’s biggest project.

“I forgot the Purell,” Bern said.