Valley sees home construction decline

By Ed Runyan

Officials are anticipating an upturn this or next year.

AUSTINTOWN — In nearly 27 years as zoning inspector in Austintown, Michael Kurilla Jr. can’t recall a construction-weather month in which no one applied for a zoning permit for a single-family home.

Until now.

“I don’t ever remember a spring month having a zero,” he said.

In 1997, during one of the peak years for single-family home construction, the township processed zoning permits for 140 new homes, with a large percentage of them in May through August.

But for the first five months of 2008, the township had only 11 permit applications and didn’t get a single one in May.

Counting applications of all kinds — including business, home additions, garages, accessory buildings, fences, pools and signs — the township had applications totaling $2.6 million so far this year.

That’s a far cry from the $10 million the township had this time last year.

Austintown had a robust construction year overall in 2007, because Wal-Mart spent $11.5 million to expand its store on Mahoning Avenue, and three other businesses — Harley-Davidson and Infocision on Interstate Boulevard, and the new Walgreens on North Meridian Road — invested more than $8 million.

But Kurilla said he isn’t aware so far of commercial projects that will give the township anything close to the $34.3 million in new construction seen in 2007.

He is hopeful that the current slump is temporary and that a rebound is likely next year, after the nation elects a new president.

Kurilla said he sees a lot of parallels between the current construction downturn and the period from 1978 through 1980, when Jimmy Carter’s presidency was at its end and President Reagan came into office. As when Reagan took office in early 1980, Kurilla said he expects a new administration to bring with it the kind of optimism that leads to economic expansion and growth.

One thing that makes today different from 1979 is the mortgage crisis, which has crippled the housing markets in some high-growth areas of the country and left many homes vacant across the Mahoning Valley, Kurilla said.

Jeff Uroseva, chief building official for Mahoning County, said the Mahoning Valley did not experience the huge swings in its housing market in recent years that places such as Florida and Nevada did, but it has still seen reductions in housing construction in recent years.

In the areas covered by his department — all of the county except Youngstown — housing starts are down about 50 percent this year over last, he estimated.

Statistics compiled by his department show that 126 building permits were processed for single-family homes worth $26.6 million in the first six months of 2007. In the first five months of 2008, those numbers are 51 homes valued at $10.8 million.

Uroseva says the mortgage crisis has left the market flooded with available homes and that has reduced the need for new construction. That coupled with higher prices for gasoline and other products has hurt the construction industry, he said.

“There are builders who would love to build a house even at cost just to stay busy,” Uroseva noted. “It’s tough out there for the residential guys.”

On the commercial end, things are not as bad across Mahoning County, Uroseva said.

Boardman Zoning Inspector Darren Crivelli says zoning permits for Boardman commercial construction are actually higher this year than in 2007 — with $7.7 million estimated for seven projects so far this year. The township saw $7.7 million worth of commercial permits in all of 2007 on 26 projects.

A large part of that is the two office buildings the Muransky Co. is building on Market Street near Southwoods Avenue. Their permit valuation is about $3.3 million, though the actual value of the buildings is much more, Crivelli said.

Boardman residential development remains slow this year, with just one residential building permit issued. The county building department says it processed five single-family home building permits for Boardman in the first six months of 2007.

Boardman doesn’t have a lot of residential development these days because there’s so little land left to develop, Crivelli noted.

Austintown has only one large commercial project on tap this year — a 4,400-square-foot, $1 million Huntington Bank branch on South Raccoon Road on the site of the former Lucianno’s Cafe just south of New Road.

Both Boardman and Austintown have reported this month that township employees are taking care of an increasing number of vacant homes in their townships — cutting grass and providing other maintenance.

Both townships say they have about 100 such nuisance properties — the result of homes being vacated after banks foreclosed on them.

The Trumbull County Building Inspection Department says it — like Mahoning County — is seeing a 50 percent drop in housing starts.

Mike Sliwinski, the county’s chief building official, says his department processed building permits for 59 new single-family homes worth $11.2 million during the first five months of 2007, compared with 33 homes worth $5.9 million during the first five months of 2008.

He has also noticed that the size of the new homes has dropped.

Instead of a 2,100-square-foot home a few years ago, the size of today’s new home is closer to 1,700, Sliwinski said.

Dave Morrison, Canfield Township zoning officer, said he doesn’t believe Canfield Township is seeing a significant drop in new housing starts early this year compared with early in 2007, but there has been a gradual decrease there over the past several years. There were 56 new homes in 2005, 38 in 2007 and 28 in 2007, he said.

In addition, many of the new homes being built in the township right now are single-family villas, which are generally smaller than a traditional single-family home. A single-family home is designated as villa, he said, when it is part of a planned unit development.

On the positive side, Uroseva says he thinks the recent news that the General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown will restart its third shift and get a new car in 2010 will help fill up vacant homes and lead to housing starts throughout the area.

“Lordstown drives a lot of the Valley,” he said.

runyan@vindy.com