LYNN — The City Council voted Tuesday to sell an abandoned property on Parkland Avenue for $175,000, which will be redeveloped into a single-family home by the Linwood Development Corporation.
“We took another dilapidated piece of property and we’re getting it back out there. It’s been an eyesore for many years,” said Ward 2 Councilor Rick Starbard, chairman of the City Council’s Public Property and Parks Subcommittee.
The property sits on 344 Parkland Ave. near Breeds Pond, recognizable by its two red Xs on the side, signaling that it is unsafe and unenterable.
The doors are boarded up with plywood, and the paint on the side of the building is faded. The bottom of the garage door is eroded from years of disrepair. On the side of the building sits an abandoned Circuit City shopping cart.
“It’s one of these houses that’s got a big red X on it,” said Councilor-at-Large Brian LaPierre, who also serves on the subcommittee. “It’s uninhabitable and it’s been unoccupied for many years.”
The abandoned house came into the city’s possession through tax foreclosure.
“These are the properties where for various reasons people have stopped paying their taxes,” said Starbard, who has made getting many of these properties back into circulation a priority since he started chairing the subcommittee three years ago.
The council entertained three bids on the property at their meeting Tuesday night: from Meninno Construction, the Neighborhood Development Associates, which is the development arm of Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Development (LHAND), and Linwood Development Corporation.
Meninno proposed purchasing the house for $52,000 and demolishing the structure to build a new home.
The Neighborhood Development Associates would have purchased the home at $151,050 to rehab it and sell it as a single-family home.
The Linwood Development Corporation’s winning bid was $175,000 to rehabilitate the home for single-family use in a shorter time frame.
Starbard reported that the committee chose the Linwood bid because it was the highest offer, with the shortest turnaround time, and because of Linwood’s successful history with redeveloping properties.
“We wanted to make sure it was going to be owner-occupied. Linwood has got a great track record in the city with that,” said Starbard, citing a dilapidated three-family house in his district that was rehabilitated by the corporation.
“The money was right, and it’s good to give private companies in the city of Lynn opportunities to repair these properties,” he said.
The payment for the house will go directly into the city’s general fund, Starbard said.
In addition, the property is not on the city’s tax rolls in its current state, so getting it back into circulation will provide another source of income for the city.
“It’s more money being put on the tax rolls in Lynn,” said LaPierre. “We haven’t been collecting taxes on that for many years.”
LaPierre expects that a new home will be ready by the summer of 2021.
Guthrie Scrimgeour can be reached at [email protected].
