Faustino Reyes recently laid a new, gleaming white tile floor with tiny black accents in the kitchen of the Dutch-styled Milwaukee house that he and his wife, Carmen, have called home for 23 years.
“I’m always puttering around,” says Reyes, 73, sitting in the neat and tidy living room filled with pictures of the couple’s five grown children and a bevy of grandchildren.
Painting and minor repairs he can handle. But for bigger jobs a new roof and a new garage door, for instance he needs a little help.
Help arrived in the form of a 15-year, $9,000 home improvement loan at 6 percent interest from the Near South Side Targeted Investment Neighborhood Program (TIN) and the Milwaukee Department of City Development.
The Reyeses are among the first to take advantage of the new TIN program, a partnership between the City of Milwaukee, Journey House and the Near South Side Neighborhood Council. Elements of the program include home improvement loans, intensive building code enforcement and organizing crime prevention activities, such as block watches.
Besides stabilizing the neighborhood and improving the housing stock, advocates also hope to increase home ownership in the area by 25 percent by the end of the three-year program, according to Nicolette Bautista, executive director of Journey House, a neighborhood organization that administers the program.
The 12-square-block area includes 219 homes, many of them dating back to the early 1900s. Some 52 percent of the homes in the area are owned by investors, while the rest are owner-occupied, says Bautista.
Journey House operates educational, recreational, child care, and youth services programs, and has worked in the largely Hispanic community for 29 years.
“For us it was a natural extension of everything else we do,” Bautista said.
“Most of the people who come to Journey House live in the neighborhood. Our goal is to educate people to help them better their lives and also improve the community,” she said. “We don’t want people to get educated and just move out of the neighborhood.”
Nearby commercial areas also will benefit from the program, says Bob Schlicht, residential and commercial rehabilitation manager for the Department of City Development (DCD).
Local businesses are pitching in their support in the form of financial grants and other donations. These include Firstar Bank, Badger Mutual Insurance Co., Pick ‘n Save and others.
One concern is the area’s high concentration of rooming houses, which sometimes are sites of prostitution and drug activity, said Bautista. There are 12 rooming houses in the neighborhood, more than in any other comparably sized area in the city, says Schlicht.
Journey House is trying to work with the owners of the rooming houses, the city building inspection department, and police to ensure compliance with city laws and ordinances, says Bautista.
Owners are receiving information on how they might be able to convert the rooming houses into four-family units, she says. And area-specific policing and increased patrols have caused some prostitution activity to move west.
Residents also have formed a task force to work with police on issues such as prostitution, car thefts, vandalism and drug problems, she says.
Pilar Gonzalez, who has been hired as the TIN coordinator for Journey House, plans to form a youth task force to work on various neighborhood issues and youth concerns.
“Kids know what’s going on and what they would like to see changed,” she says.
To get residents interested in TIN, Gonzalez goes door to door talking to neighbors in the area, advising them about home repair programs, and how to purchase a home in the neighborhood.
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“Fliers blow away and (going door to door) really takes that extra effort, but it soon snowballs,” she says.
Working with a city building inspector, residents can be made aware of code violations and what specific work needs to done to a property. Then Gonzalez goes to work to find the necessary financing for the project and helps the homeowner get the work completed.
She also helps link prospective home buyers and neighborhood housing agencies that assist first-time home buyers.
The DCD has budgeted $200,000 over the next two years to fund the program. Other public and private funds also are being utilized. The TIN program has an annual operating budget of $42,000 to cover salaries and other administrative costs.
Bautista and Gonzalez both hope that the Near South Side TIN is as successful as the one undertaken in a nearby neighborhood by the United Community Center in Walker’s Point, where home ownership zoomed from 45 percent to 85 percent over a three-year period.
Gonzalez feels a certain kinship to that project, she said. The TIN coordinator for that project was her sister, Eloisa Gomez.