30 minute read
Centennial Neighborhood's big bet on itself
BY DAVE BANGERT
PHOTOS PROVIDED
Residents in one of Lafayette’s oldest neighborhoods were so committed to preserving and rebuilding Centennial that they were willing to stake their personal savings on it. The bet keeps paying off.
There were no guarantees that night in August 2010, when 10 neighbors and business owners, checkbooks in hand, gathered in stuffed, antique chairs in the living room of Phyllis and Michael Hunt’s home and pondered a partnership with Lafayette city leaders.
But they understood the stakes: After poking and prodding city hall – and anyone else who would listen – for years to do something with a vacant, industrial block in the heart of their neighborhood, they were being asked to put their money where their mouths were about how much they really loved where they lived.
Those in the room had fought – some for decades and all with mixed results – to preserve housing stock and the historic feel in the Centennial Neighborhood. The neighborhood had been tenuous enough amid demolitions, century-old homes chopped into multiple apartments and the advance of big box apartment complexes to earn a spot on a local preservation group’s most endangered list in the late-ʼ90s.
A core of Centennial residents had been trying to rewrite a narrative for some of the city’s oldest blocks north of downtown Lafayette in a way that would draw a new generation to buy, restore and live there. They pitched historic preservation as an economic driver and neighborhood stabilizer.
In their sights now, right out the front window at the Hunts’ 19th century Greek Revival home: The remnant metal industrial warehouses, surrounded by chain link fences topped with barbed wire, left when Midwest Rentals had moved to the south side of Lafayette after six decades in Centennial Neighborhood.
In the Hunts’ front room, neighbors had drawings dry mounted – the edges creased and corners bent from years of toting around – of owner-occupied townhomes they thought would fit the surrounding architecture of a neighborhood first platted in the 1820s. They had dreams of new neighbors finding Centennial Neighborhood in similar ways they had. They had a newly formed Centennial Neighborhood Investment Group LLC that bound them as partners, beyond the dues and volunteer duties of a neighborhood association, in a vision for their neighborhood.
And now they had a proposal from the mayor’s office that put them on the spot.
The city’s redevelopment commission, along with the nonprofit Lafayette Urban Enterprise Association, would go in on the vacant Midwest Rentals property at 506 Brown St. and help find a developer – if neighbors and their investment group were willing to come up with one-third of the $380,000plus asking price.
The math? “That wasn’t hard to figure out,” Michael Hunt remembers.
As for coming up with $128,000 – or an average of $12,800 per neighbor/investor – that night? And for the prospect of breaking even, at least in straight cash terms, as the best possible outcome?
“It was a little bit of a gut check,” said Bill Bray, a doctor who moved to Centennial Neighborhood from Germany in 2006 after a career in the U.S. Air Force. “And a leap of faith.”
Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski said it was no sure bet, either, for the city or for the Lafayette Urban Enterprise Association, an independent nonprofit created in 1993 to encourage revitalization in neighborhoods closest to downtown Lafayette and had been working with the neighborhood to help achieve their vision.
The city had been contemplating new ways to spur business and residential development in its downtown – a plan that eventually, a decade later, would lead to tens of millions of dollars of private investment pouring into hundreds of new residential units and retail space. That meant paying attention to the neighborhoods that butted up against downtown for a comprehensive approach.
For Centennial, Roswarski said, it was hard to envision doing anything in the neighborhood with the future of the Midwest Rentals property up in the air.
“But let’s face it, that was a risk, once you consider the money we were going to have to put in, any cleanup of the site and finding a developer after all that,” Roswarski said.
“We were just starting to show people that revitalization could be done. So, we were still in the convincing stage,” Roswarski said. “Without Centennial neighbors putting up their own money, showing they believed in it first, not knowing they were going to get it back, I’m not sure how far we’re going to get.”
In the Hunts’ front room, at the corner of Fifth and Cincinnati streets, neighbors pledged what they could. Then they went person to person again to see how much more they were willing to dig into pockets and bank accounts.
“We literally went around the room raising the ante,” said Ken McCammon, who moved to the neighborhood in 2005 to be closer to places where he liked to eat and hang out in downtown. “It was one of those take-a-deep-breath moments.”
Phyllis Hunt, the longtime president of the Historic Centennial Neighborhood Association who died in September 2022, had said she and Michael warned everyone: Don’t put in what you can’t live without.
Still, the bidding went around the circle, upping that ante for those who could.
“I’m fairly sure no one there was convinced this wasn’t a good idea,” said Steve Belter, a founder of Wintek Corp., a high-tech solutions company based in Centennial, and a member of the investment group. “This was an investment in what the neighborhood around us could be, not necessarily a portfolio.”
“I think,” Bray said, “those of us living there just kind of had a feeling that if you build it, they will come.”
Still, Belter recalled: “There were comments, and not in jest: ‘This sure as hell better work out, because that’s my retirement.’”
As the money in the pot grew, Michael Hunt thought about the times the neighborhood’s ideas for a Centennial rebirth were met with: “Well, you know you can’t do that – it’s not reasonable.”
“I knew that if we didn’t bet on ourselves, we couldn’t expect anyone else to,” Michael Hunt said. “And here we were. Doing it.”
Three laps around the room later, one-third of the asking price was in hand. The next morning, the Hunts and other CNIG investors took a check to Lafayette City Hall.
Within seven years of that night of nervous bidding, the Centennial Townhomes would be built and filled, the owners of a dozen new homes moved in. Other projects, spurred in part by neighbors’ investments, followed.
And a model for persistent redevelopment in one of Lafayette’s oldest sections was in play.
NEW PLAN FOR AN OLD NEIGHBORHOOD
The vacant Midwest Rentals property was, as Dennis Carson, Lafayette’s economic development director, called it, “the huge elephant in the room” for the neighborhood. And even for the city’s ideas about a larger downtown plan.
But the scene of neighborhood investors pooling five-figure checks followed episodes spanning two decades marked by strategic moves, battles that played out on front pages and some unlikely alliances, all positioning Centennial Neighborhood for that night.
The Tippecanoe County Area Plan Commission lists Centennial as the city’s oldest urban neighborhood, one of a handful that touch parts of Lafayette’s downtown. Initially platted between the city’s founding in 1825 and 1866, bound by Ferry and Union streets and North Ninth Street and the Wabash River, Centennial from its earliest days featured a diverse collection of housing: “imposing residences of wealthy and prominent citizens, comfortable middle-class housing and humble dwellings of the working class,” noted by a 2012 APC report. The Wells Memorial Public Library, the city’s first library and now home of the Tippecanoe Arts Federation, is in Centennial.
The APC also listed Centennial as “a neighborhood of transitions,” a bridge between the commerce of the central business district to the south and primarily residential areas to the north and east, industrial uses closer to the river in the city’s first century and a scattering of churches, government offices and social service agencies throughout.
Centennial’s historic architecture “served as a core component of its identity” and “served as the primary catalyst for the neighborhood’s past revitalization effort,” APC planners wrote in 2012. More than 30 structures had been recognized with plaques by the Wabash Valley Trust for Historic Preservation, a Lafayette-based nonprofit group, since a budding, though sporadic, trend of rehabilitating neglected historic buildings emerged in the early 1980s.
The neighborhood plan APC assembled for Centennial pointed to 1993 and a revitalized Historic Centennial Neighborhood Association as “instrumental”: “These citizens are united in their desire to ward off threats to their neighborhood and their quality of life and have a shared goal to create opportunities for positive future growth and development.” (The historic bent of the neighborhood association was front and center in its logo, featuring the cupula of Centennial School, among Lafayette’s earliest grade schools, open from 1876 to 1971.)
The 1993 timeframe coincided with the Hunts’ purchase and renovation of their two-story home at Fifth and Cincinnati streets. Michael Hunt, a Purdue forestry professor, called gutting and rehabbing the house that dated to 1846 “my midlife crisis.”
“Some people, they get a Jaguar convertible,” he said. “Me, I was fool enough to take on this place. But I loved it. It also was a start, like dropping a rock in a pond and watching that ripple.”
In this case, the ripple he was hoping for was similar investment in the neighborhood by homeowners willing to take on housing stock that either had been divvied into multiple units – as evidenced by four, five and six mailboxes on a single porch –or too often had been left to rot, marking time until a developer came along willing to buy it as-is, tear down and put up apartments.
Centennial had others who had renovated older structures and had labored to encourage more of the same in the neighborhood, as the Area Plan Commission reports pointed out. In 1983, the 16 square blocks of Centennial Neighborhood were added to the National Register of Historic Places. The federal designation provided no special protections or building restrictions. But it offered some prestige, a selling point and a point of pride for the homes and church buildings in the neighborhood.
But Michael Hunt said that when their home was done, he and Phyllis had two homeowner neighbors in a three-block radius. U.S. Census records compiled by the Area Plan Commission showed owner-occupied units in the census blocks that included Centennial Neighborhood were at 7 percent in 1990. By 2010, county assessor figures put owner-occupancy in Centennial residences at roughly 30 percent, according to APC reports.
Even then, there wasn’t, Hunt said, a critical mass of owner-occupied homes to stabilize the neighborhood and make Centennial a destination for buyers looking to live there rather than landlords.
When they moved to Centennial, Phyllis and Michael Hunt were fresh from rallying help in a protracted fight with Purdue University officials who’d announced plans to tear down a century-old Entomology Hall in favor of something newer on the south campus at the West Lafayette school. Under pressure from preservationists, Purdue eventually backed away from that idea and renovated Entomology Hall, renaming it Pfendler Hall, instead.
“They told us that couldn’t be done, taking on Purdue when Purdue wanted to do something,” Michael Hunt said. “‘You can’t do that.’ Don’t tell us that. We did that. So, we had the same ideas about this neighborhood. We can’t do that? Watch us.”
Phyllis Hunt later would take on leading the neighborhood association. Michael Hunt walked Centennial’s blocks almost daily with a five-gallon bucket and trash picker, cleaning cigarette packs and fast food wrappers from curbs while recruiting property owners for social events as well as looming rezoning battles with developers.
“What Michael was interested in doing, we believed in,” Paul Dixon said. Paul and Barbara Dixon, both professors at Purdue, moved to Centennial across the street from the Hunts in 1998, drawn by a 19th century home close to downtown.
“We probably weren’t as gung-ho about it as Michael was,” Paul Dixon said. “I’m not sure anyone’s as gung-ho as Michael. But you needed that sort of gung-ho thing going on. Because what Michael was talking about doing, everyone understood, it never was going to be easy.”
PRESSURES MOUNT FOR CENTENNIAL
And it wasn’t, given a string of setbacks that followed for the neighborhood.
In 1994, a year after the Lafayette City Council cleared the way to establish historic districts in the city, the Historic Centennial Neighborhood Association pressed the city to designate the blocks bound by Fourth, Union, Ninth and Ferry streets, covering more than 200 properties. At that point, Centennial would have been the first historic district outside downtown Lafayette. The district would have required property owners to submit proposed renovations or demolitions – anything making conspicuous changes to exteriors – to the Lafayette Historic Preservation Commission before starting work.
The Lafayette City Council gave initial approval before rejecting it under a wave of protest from property owners, mostly landlords and businesses, who bristled at the proposed government oversight and what they called lost property rights and perceived lost property value. (“I don’t need their preservation,” Jim Schafer, a founding member of Midwest Rentals, told the Lafayette Journal & Courier at the time, saying he feared a district would crimp his company’s ability to expand. “I don’t want their preservation.”)
Preservationists and Centennial homeowners argued during a series of public hearings that the matter wasn’t a question of property rights but was about absentee landlords who wanted to invest the bare minimum in the structures they owned.
Those points weren’t enough to protect the neighborhood with historic district status. The city council voted 6-2 against the proposal.
And neighbors watched more homes come down.
From 1983, when Centennial was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, to 1996, 33 of the 216 buildings in the neighborhood district – dating from 1880 to 1940 – had been razed, according to neighborhood and city counts reported in the Journal & Courier. Of those, 24 were houses, making way for a mix of parking lots, business storage, a playground and ramps for Harrison Bridge during Lafayette’s railroad relocation project.
And of those 33 properties, 10 were replaced by apartment buildings, spurred in large part by the proximity to Purdue.
Part of the incentive to develop apartments in Centennial, Hunt was convinced, had to do with Purdue’s proximity – less than a mile to the edge of campus, across the Harrison Bridge – and the university’s policy on parking permits. Students living in West Lafayette couldn’t get permits. Those living east of the Wabash River could.
“That was our biggest threat, the neighborhood being taken over by big boxes, essentially dormitories for kids from the university,” Michael Hunt said. “Getting a ‘C’ parking permit, it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But it was. And once those apartments came, we knew we’d never get that part of the neighborhood back.”
A TIPPING POINT FOR CENTENNIAL'S FIGHT
By 1997, the Wabash Valley Trust for Historic Preservation named Centennial Neighborhood to its annual most-endangered properties list. Generally, the Wabash Valley Trust’s list rounded up individual addresses.
That same year came a fight that proved to be a tipping point for the neighborhood.
The Historic Centennial Neighborhood Association joined the Wabash Valley Trust to fight the pending demolition of an abandoned Monon Railroad office building at Fifth and Salem streets, just north of Centennial’s boundaries. The Monon Railroad office, a two-story brick building that went up in 1878, had been vacant for more than 25 years near the base of Harrison Bridge. The Wabash Valley Trust had unsuccessfully tried to buy the property, hoping to lure someone for a historic reuse, since the late-‘80s, when railroad tracks still went down the center of Fifth Street, according to Journal & Courier reports. The Trust was denied then. And the new developer declined to sell the property after the Trust pledged to raise $400,000 to buy it. Now, with Fifth Street tracks gone since 1994 as part of Lafayette’s railroad relocation project, the office building’s property was slated for a 31-unit apartment complex.
The fight over the Monon building, Hunt said, was emblematic in a couple of ways. First, it involved a structure more than a century old targeted for demolition to make way for more apartments. Second, Centennial Neighborhood came out on the losing side.
The office building came down, its owner convincing the city the structure was beyond repair. The apartment complex went up the following year.
“We’d had it,” Hunt said.
A FOE TURNS ALLY
That’s about the time attorney Joe Bumbleburg’s phone rang at Ball Eggleston, a law firm in Lafayette.
“Michael was on the other end,” Bumbleburg said. “He said, ‘Bumbleburg, I’m sick and tired of fighting you. What’s it going to take to get you on my side?’”
Bumbleburg, who’d argued the case for the Monon office building demolition, was one of a small handful of Lafayette attorneys who handled the majority of rezoning and other public land-use plans in Lafayette and West Lafayette. That included several for apartment buildings in the most recent decade in and around Centennial Neighborhood.
Bumbleburg said he knew where he stood with Hunt and others in Centennial. During the Monon building debate, Bumbleburg had mentioned to city officials that the developer had found a doll in the vacant building, implying that children might have been playing in it. Bumbleburg said it was icing on the cake of his argument. But he knew Hunt thought that was a cheap tactic, earning a few icy meetings between the two during gatherings at mutual friends’ homes over time. (“Joe and that damn doll,” Hunt groused, nearly 25 years later.)
The question now was, Hunt said: If Centennial could get a grant from the Lafayette Urban Enterprise Association, would Bumbleburg be willing to move from adversary to counsel and represent the neighborhood as it navigated a comprehensive review of zoning in the neighborhood?
“They wanted to protect themselves – and I got that,” Bumbleburg said.
“They were looking at the whole neighborhood, but it was clear they saw what could happen at the Midwest Rental site someday,” Bumbleburg said.
“Because somebody would come along, clean that half-a-city-block down and put a big, brick box there for student housing. They’d seen it before. And they thought that was something akin to mortal sin.”
Hunt said: “That’s exactly what we were up to. Joe had made me madder than all get-out. But he was the guy who knew how it all worked. If you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em.”
Carson, Lafayette’s economic development director, was head of the Lafayette Urban Enterprise Association at the time.
“To our surprise, Joe took this on,” Carson said, “It was a big deal – an inflection point for Centennial.”
Working through the Area Plan Commission, the new zoning, followed by a land use plan that recommended future development goals, discouraged high-density apartment complexes that would chomp sections of Centennial’s historic accents, along with its hopes for more owner-occupied investments.
“We cleaned things up, so that if anyone wanted to build a big, brick box there, they were going to have to have that endless political fight in front of the city council,” Bumbleburg said. “And who wants that?”
Hunt described the effort as similar to the one that failed on a historic district. “Not for the faint of heart,” he said.
But after nearly two years of work and public hearings, the Lafayette City Council signed off on the Centennial Neighborhood zoning and land use plan in 1999.
“I think that developers and other people started looking at things differently,” Carson said. “We had kind of put them on notice that they’re not going to come into this neighborhood and do these tear downs and put up these student apartments anymore.”
A SAY IN WHAT CAME NEXT
That theory would be put to the test soon enough.
In 2007, Midwest Rentals left Centennial Neighborhood for an expanded retail location on Old U.S. 231 South, about three miles south. Midwest Rentals had been on North Fifth Street, a half-city block between Brown and Cincinnati streets, for 53 years. It was built on ground first home to Saints Mary & Martha Church, constructed between 1844 and 1846 as Lafayette’s first Catholic Church and later used as a parish hall, an assembly hall and eventually as a machine shop, welding company and an auto repair business, according to a history compiled by former Journal & Courier reporter Kevin Cullen.
“What it was going to be, we didn’t know,” Michael Hunt said. “We weren’t about to sit around and wait to find out.”
He said he started going door-to-door among Historic Centennial Neighborhood Association members to gauge the prospects of neighbors raising the money for a down payment to buy the property – if for no other reason than to have a say in what came next for such a big property.
Hunt preached coming together around a mantra: Create appropriate owner-occupied, urban housing designed to complement the surrounding historic architecture.
Centennial had a fairly fresh case study in the demand for architecturally sensitive, owner-occupied homes in the neighborhood that didn’t require the sort of sweat equity and rehab money needed to take on a 19th century home.
After the city tore out the Fifth Street tracks after the last train in 1994, Hunt and others had pitched an idea for owner-occupied housing on vacant properties and commercial lots along two blocks of Fifth Street, including some used for storage by Midwest Rentals.
“Once again,” Michael Hunt said, “we heard, ‘Be practical, you can’t do that.’ But see what happened next?”
Lafayette Neighborhood Housing Services, a community nonprofit agency, bought into the notion in 1998. With the Lafayette Redevelopment Commission, Lafayette Neighborhood Housing Services used a mix of local, federal and private money to recruit a developer to build eight, twounit brownstones – two-story, owner-occupied townhomes over one-bedroom garden apartments below, built to complement the brick homes that bookended them – and six single-family row houses down the street.
When finished in October 2000, and finally fully sold a few years later, the projects added 14 new homeowners and eight rental units to Centennial’s mix.
McCammon, who bought one of the Fifth Street Brownstones and later helped found the Mosey Down Main Street festivals in downtown Lafayette, lived directly across from the now vacant Midwest Rentals site.
“I had a beautiful view of a 20-foot-tall metal wall,” McCammon said. “Michael came up with the concept of working together as a group to try to purchase and rebuild the site. It was ‘out there,’ but after a lot of conversation, several of us decided to try it.”
WE NEED HELP
By 2008, 10 homeowners and neighborhood business owners created what they dubbed Centennial Neighborhood Investment Group. They pronounced it "snig." No one was completely in their comfort zone.
“To one extent or another, we were of the mind that this should work – with the emphasis on the word ‘should,’” Belter said. “None of us were real estate developers at that point. We just knew we liked the area, liked being there, and thought we weren’t really alone on that. That should work, right?”
Michael Hunt said early efforts proved daunting. He said that with CNIG’s backing, the investment group was in position to get a bank loan to buy the property. But the initial appraisals and asking price swung between $700,000 and nearly $1 million. Hunt said that even if the price had come down, he believes, in retrospect, that CNIG likely would have been in over its head trying to carry a mortgage and find and hold onto a capable developer willing to build owner-occupied homes that looked something like the renderings the neighborhood group had drawn and had shown to anyone who would look at them.
“I think it would have been disastrous, looking back now,” Hunt said. “We needed help, as we soon realized.”
Bumbleburg said he knew that, too.
“Most neighborhoods don’t have 10 cents to put together, let alone have the drive to stick with it and do what they had in mind,” Bumbleburg said.
“Centennial didn’t have that problem,” Bumbleburg said. “But I knew others had to be interested in what was going to happen to that property. How about thinking about a partnership? You knew the city had to be interested. I told Michael, ‘Go find out how much.’”
Carson said the city was sympathetic to what Centennial wanted to do. He said the city had similar notions about that block. But the price, at the time, wasn’t something the city was ready to take on.
“It didn’t make sense for us,” Carson said. “So, the property sat there for a few years.”
In the background, another deal was in the works.
Jim Andrew, owner of Henry Poor Lumber and a former Lafayette board of works member under then-Mayor Dave Heath, was looking to get out of property just west of West Lafayette after closing a store there. He said the rental side of the building supply business had been good at the Klondike Road location. So, he said he approached Midwest Rentals about a deal that would include swapping commercial sites: Henry Poor’s West Lafayette property for Midwest Rentals’ land in Centennial Neighborhood and acreage on Sycamore Street, along the Wabash River near the downtown bridges into Lafayette.
Andrew called the deal, struck in spring 2010, “all about survival” – for his business, for Midwest wanting to expand into a new market and for the various interests in the properties Midwest controlled. But he’d supported slow-rolling community efforts to develop trails and more along the Wabash River corridor. The swap allowed Midwest Rentals to move its port-a-pot storage from near the downtown bridge in Lafayette to Klondike Road in West Lafayette. And eventually, Andrew said he was lining up to sell the land for public use, as the Wabash River Enhancement Corp. collected pieces for future riverfront development.
“The fact that the city and neighborhood were interested in the Midwest Rentals property there,” Andrew said, “well, that just worked out pretty much the same way, too.”
TIME FOR US TO PUT UP OR SHUT UP
With a chance to pick up the Midwest Rentals property at roughly half the initial asking price, Roswarski and Carson went back to the Centennial Neighborhood Investment Group.
Roswarski said he agreed with CNIG that owner-occupied homes, rather than more apartments, would help stabilize the neighborhood and by getting people who wanted to be there long-term to move there.
The proposal: The city and the Lafayette Urban Enterprise Association each would put in one-third of the purchase price if the Centennial neighbors would pick up the other third. The city would cover demolition and any industrial cleanup necessary. And Carson’s economic development department would recruit a suitable developer.
The catch: The best the Centennial Neighborhood Investment Group could do on the deal was break even on its $128,000 investment.
“That’s the moment we’d been waiting for,” Michael Hunt said. “I had no idea the mayor would come up with the money the way he did. When he said, ‘Would you be partners?’ it took me a nano-second to say yes. Time for us to put up or shut up, as they say. And I can tell you, we weren’t done talking. So, we called a meeting.”
That was the night at the Hunts’ front room, when CNIG members kept going around the room, adding to the pot until they had the cash for the city’s offer.
“The night was both exhilarating and terrifying,” said Barbara Dixon, whose home looked over the back side of warehouses that once stored tents for wedding receptions and heavy equipment for rent.
“It was a lot of money for us – but I also knew that we were investing in the neighborhood, and that was important to us,” she said. “It was definitely an emotional investment and not a logical one. … That said, I had enormous confidence in the mayor and in Dennis Carson that they would do their best to be fair to all parties.”
The three partners closed the deal for the Midwest Rentals property in late 2011. Before the city started demolition in 2013, the Centennial neighbors held a party in the parking lot, in the shade of vacant warehouses for a band, beer and a toast.
“To good things to come,” Michael Hunt said. “Things were coming together.”
A CITY BLOCK REMADE
In 2014, the city sold the property to Lafayette developer John Teibel. And the 10 who chipped into to the Centennial Neighborhood Investment Group had their money paid back in full.
The question was: Would their assumption about the neighborhood – that there was a ready market of people looking to buy homes in a neighborhood like Centennial – come true?
Teibel, who had developed townhouses in Catherwood Gardens about a mile away in West Lafayette, had read about the Centennial partnership in the Journal & Courier. His first home in Lafayette had been on Fifth Street – “When the trains still ran down the middle of the street,” he said.
“Call me nostalgic,” Teibel said. “But I guess my heart is still there.”
Teibel said he sensed what was happening in downtown and what that was doing within a budding trend for downsizing to explore nearby, older neighborhoods. The neighbors’ investment didn’t hurt, either, he said.
“It was a huge factor,” Teibel said. “When you have neighbors that walk the talk of improving the neighborhood, then you know you have a solid foundation to start from.”
Teibel proposed building 14 attached townhomes in three phases over the next four years. The brick exterior took on the look of dog-eared architectural drawings Hunt had carried around for years. He designed spaces with roughly 1,500 square feet, two bedrooms and 2½ baths, with small backyards, walk-up front stoops and private garages. Prices were in the $175,000 range, just slightly above the average existing home price of $164,000 listed in Tippecanoe County in 2015, according to National Association of Realtors data.
“John got what we were after for that project pretty quickly,” Carson said.
The first townhome sold to Kay Conner and her husband, Dick Walton, in September 2015. They’d lived on rural acreage near West Lafayette for 25 years and were getting tired of the upkeep of the large property, Conner said. They’d been looking for a place near downtown Lafayette when they read newspaper articles about Centennial neighborhood’s Midwest Rentals saga. Conner and Walton asked Teibel if they could double up and turn two units into one. (Teibel’s response was that they could take four if they wanted. They settled for two.)
“It’s a perfect retirement home,” Conner said.
Within three years, and with no curbside for sale signs or advertising, that last townhome – another double unit, making it the 12th of what originally had been 14 – finished in 2017. That was a year ahead of schedule.
Mike Herzog and Kathie Rogers had been living in one of the Fifth Street rowhouses, where Rogers, who works at Purdue, had moved in the early 2000s. Herzog, a life coach and a writer, was planning to move from Austin, Texas, to Lafayette when the couple married in 2017. Herzog said they wanted to stay in Centennial Neighborhood.
“We looked at some historic homes, but that really wasn’t our lifestyle,” Herzog said. “We weren’t so much into home maintenance, where you have these basements that are terrifying and none of them have garages. Being around downtown, where we could walk everywhere to go out to eat or to work from coffeehouses like Star City in the morning, was ideal. But it just wasn’t going to work out.”
He said they were resigned to looking for homes closer to campus in West Lafayette. Herzog said he and Rogers told their situation to Hunt, saying they wished they could find something like the new townhomes going up across the street. Hunt introduced them to Teibel, who said a prospective buyer had just backed out of the last unit, then under construction.
“He showed us a floor plan, but we basically said, ‘We’ll take it, we don’t even need to see it,’” Herzog said. “Best decision we could have made.”
'WHAT NEXT' FOR A NEW MODEL
That final townhome sale capped a decade-long episode, starting when Midwest Rentals moved from Centennial Neighborhood.
“They said it couldn’t be done,” Michael Hunt said. “But we knew it could be done. And we did it. And then we looked at each other and asked: What next?”
The Centennial Neighborhood Investment Group kept intact, even as it shuffled a few members in and out and the group dipped to eight. But neighbors pledged to keep some of the money they’d put up for the Midwest Rentals property – and keep an eye out for other investment opportunities in the neighborhood.
“The fact that 12 units sold within a few months with zero advertising told us we had a winning concept,” McCammon said. “When some of those first units that were purchased resold for $20,000 to $30,000 more, we were hooked.”
In 2018, the city and CNIG used a similar formula to buy a home at 649 N. Seventh St. for $70,000. The house had been cut into four apartments and, as Hunt said, “the kindest thing to say was it had seen better days.” They hired Teibel to convert it into a single-family home. A year later, the house went for $215,000, according to county assessor records, with a restrictive covenant that required it to remain owner-occupied.
“It turned out to be a great house with a little TLC,” Teibel said. “And it served as a model for rehabbing an existing structure as a neighborhood effort.”
In April 2021, CNIG put up $25,000 and the Lafayette Urban Enterprise Association added $75,000 to help Teibel buy and rehab three properties that Bray had acquired in the past decade spanning the corner of North Ninth and Brown streets. Teibel said the plan over the next year was to rework the houses by opening floorplans and updating kitchen and baths – “bring back the properties to a condition that people want today” – and build two new homes on empty lots to fit the surrounding, 19th century architecture.
Teibel said the three existing homes have been converted from multi-family rentals to owner-occupied homes. A fourth owner-occupied home was built in 2023 near the corner, facing North Ninth Street.
“The market value of the block should be doubled with the capital and labor investment made,” Teibel said.
With the closing on those properties, CNIG members recouped their $25,000, plus an extra $5,000. Hunt said the group is looking for a fourth project.
“When we started, we were really in unchartered territory and didn’t know if the investment would be recouped,” Teibel said. “We took a risk, and it worked out.”
Roswarski said the projects, started with the Midwest Rentals property, turned into a catalyst he’d hoped for, as private development picks up in Centennial, downtown and other nearby neighborhoods.
“It wound up worth that risk,” Roswarski said. “I think it’s a model for how if you’re willing to cooperate, and people are all trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, you can get what for a long time people said would never be done. And it proves that you can actually build a model that’s also not just one and done.”
Michael Hunt said the neighbors did it because they believed in Centennial, feeling in their gut that staking those investments would pay off with new neighbors, stronger blocks and better property values, to boot.
“We did it, even though so many people told us, ‘Quit being unreasonable, now,’” Hunt said. “We weren’t being unreasonable. We were out to save our neighborhood. And you know what? We did. And so can others.” ★
