Bill Call wrote:No, actually, the rent is not high enough.
There is a strong demand in Lakewood for rentals. It's time to raise the rent.
If you feel the need to add aluminum siding spend the extra money an a quality design. An attractive rental is easier to rent.
Bill you are exactly right on this. Lakewood has once again, through some alignment of the stars, and minds and advertisers at the Scene, been selected as the best place to live, and
the place with the best schools in the region. This is the cornerstone of "Location, location, location," and we should be ready to capitalize on it. No amount of economic development outside of 40story sky scrapers will ever bring to the city what the RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS DO. Our industry, just as it has been for a century is homes, residents, and giving them exactly what they need to enjoy their home lives.
As such, we should be able to ask astronomical prices for our property, but we are lagging
in many areas, and the business sector, always the ugly stepchild of great homes and schools
seems to have attracted those that refuse to see the beauty and dollars in great safe clean
neighborhoods, instead pumping millions into our "miracle 8/10ths of a mile," aka
DowntowN, Lakewood Ohio. For the last ten years a majority of all funds we could use on
residents, homes, neighborhoods, etc. have been pumped into 11 blocks of retail, that
should have been a SID (Special Interest District) all along. This would enable the actual
busineeses in that area to seek grants, financial help, and dispensation. But instead, the
city and the civic leaders decided to risk our neighborhoods and residential area while they
focused everything on it. Today, it is still needing the help of residents to stay afloat with
the amazing amount of face lifting it got, while homes rotted, affecting our rents.
A friend of mine just moved here from Cleveland. Excited to move back to Lakewood, but
what they found was both disturbing and a real blackeye on this wonderful city.
"Everywhere we looked was not worth the rent people were asking." The place we settled
on was $750, and still needed to be cleaned, needed drapes, the back shared hallway
was filthy and needing painting, and the landlord said, it's Lakewood what do you expect?"
Well what we expect is the same high standard that it would seem others have in us. That
we can ask for the big rents, but only after we clean up the rentals.
Councilman, David Anderson and I have rentals on the same street. Both get big dollars,
and both have tenants that have been with us for years if not decades. It is because we
rent property that people are dying to get in. I have a list of renters looking for the house
as they saw it, and wanted it, but missed it last time. Quality, clean rentals in clean safe
neighborhoods, where people grow into and assimilate with the community.
OK is Lakewood's glass half empty of half full?
It is 90% filled, so instead of desperately trying to get visitors here, who normally end up
drunk, arrested or in trouble, how about for the next decade we concentrate on the real
industry Lakewood is number one in? LIVING! Let's allow the business areas to cool off and
fend for themselves, and now let's finally wake up City Hall to the future of Lakewood, and
the one thing that really makes Lakewood great, its residents!
.
