COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Lonney Stokes moved to the Near East Side of Columbus in 2013. He’s bought several properties and now lives on Berkeley Road. The neighborhood today is much different from it was when he moved in.

“It was, well, vacant pretty much and really violent,” he said. “Half the neighborhood was boarded up. To put it in perspective, when we first moved in here, you couldn’t get a pizza delivered here.”

Stokes is a builder. He used his skills to turn a neighborhood with overgrown sidewalks, crumbling fences, and boarded-up homes into a neighborhood he’s proud of. He started by cleaning up Blackburn Park, where he would go to teach a free yoga class every Sunday for about a year. He noticed the conditions children had to play.

“They’re playing in the dirt, you know, basically and it’s just bottles, you know, cap, bottle caps and glass and cigarette butts and little blunt tips,” Stokes said. “We have a really good neighborhood that we fought really hard for. I mean, it was, you know, a lot of gang violence.”

Now, a once-struggling neighborhood has several newly renovated homes with homeowners and tenants becoming a part of the neighborhood fabric. There are still several abandoned and boarded-up homes with several others being renovated.

There isn’t much “green space” in the neighborhood. There’s no park nearby, with the closest being a 15-minute walk away. Stokes saw this and turned the empty lot next to his home into a small oasis with a big honeysuckle tree and a small pond. 

“I always have to back the underdog for some reason and this, this neighborhood is the underdog,” Stokes said. “It’s the only way to make change, you know, if I don’t do it, then who’s going to do it?”

The City of Columbus has a well-documented affordable housing crisis. One way the city is trying to make a dent in the issue is through the Franklin County Land Bank and the Central Ohio Community Land Trust (COCLT), which is building ten single-family homes in the Near East, including one home next to Stokes on Berkeley Road.

The green space Stokes created is now dirt. The trees have been removed, and a new home will soon stand in that space. Stokes and neighbor Sheriff Benson are well aware of the housing needs of the neighborhood and what is needed to keep an upward trajectory.

“Part of that is density, which can bring business and other issues,” Benson, who serves on the city’s Near East Side Area Commission, said. “So that’s one of the pros is if we get denser neighborhoods, we can get more amenities, more businesses can come in and potentially thrive because they can have higher foot traffic.”

Speaking from a personal standpoint, Benson said he will miss the green space between his and Stokes’ homes.

“When I first moved in, there was actually a pond there that Lonney had put in himself with some trees that he was taking care of, and it was really gorgeous,” he said.

Benson pointed out that there are pros and cons to a development like the one the COCLT is doing in their neighborhood. 

“There are empty houses right next to Lonney is actually a home that looks to me to be abandoned and it would be nice to see some of those homes being fixed up, being, and, you know, being sold and/or rented by the folks, because that also increases density,” he said. 

The space between the homes is now blocked on one side after Stokes put up a privacy fence recently along his property line. He’s frustrated that nobody on the development team sought input from residents before they found out this home was being built. 

“By the time that they came and presented was, you know, as the projects were pretty far along, so not a lot of room for any neighborhood feedback in that,” Benson said.

Stokes and Benson would both like to see the existing homes and duplexes in the neighborhood get rehabbed before building new homes.

“They may be building a new home, they may be new neighbors and new people, but we’re losing one of the few green spaces that was here,” Benson said.