Syracuse sells houses for $1

SYRACUSE NY - Last month city officials put 11 multifamily houses up for sale for only one dollar. The catch? They are falling apart. Some, if not most of them will have to be completely gutted. They are all vacant tax delinquent properties that the city has seized.

A classmate and I covered the story for our reporting class. It started with a meeting at 9 am where city officials answered the questions of interested developers. That was another catch - to buy one of these houses, you had to prove to the city that you had the financial means to finish the project.

At the meeting we talked to the city operations manager. He said that there are 250 tax delinquent houses in the city that are vacant. In total, there are 1,200 vacant properties in Syracuse. Qualified developers purchasing one of these 11 houses would be eligible for up to $45,000 in grants and several years of tax breaks.

After the meeting there were open houses all day for interested parties to have a look around...after signing a waiver saying the city wasn't responsible if you fell through the floor or something else bad happened. We went to 219 Grace street:

It's just a little bit of a fixer upper. The front steps are basically a few boards over cement blocks and the porch is falling off. It doesn't look much better inside.

This is the living room of the first floor apartment. You can see where parts of the drop ceiling are caving in and where the wall paper is peeling.

Here is what's left of the first floor kitchen. This was one of the worst rooms in the house. It was very dirty in here. Pieces of the linoleum flooring were coming up, and the floor in general seemed a little "soft." I love that old sink though!

Now you can really see the condition of the porch! This is the view from the second floor. We asked one of the contractors who walked through how much it would cost to fix this house. He estimated that it would be $80-90,000.

We are told this was one of the better houses. Some of my other classmates went to a house on W. Colvin Street. In that one you couldn't even go upstairs to the second floor because the stairs had rotted away. Probably a good thing...they were told that a family of raccoons lived up there.