The story below is from our September/October 2021 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
A local nonprofit restores historic dwellings to create affordable places to live.
Courtesy of Restoration Housing
Isabel Thornton first fell in love with the Rickrack that ran across the house’s ornamental front peak. She liked the Folk Victorian trim above the windows and the way the cornices below the roof’s eaves circled into a curl.
By the time she stepped inside this crumbling gem in Roanoke’s Belmont neighborhood, she was so smitten that not even the rotted ceilings and floors or the unstable load-bearing walls could keep her from doing everything in her power to return the 1,800-square-foot home, built around 1900, to its former glory.
“The house was threatening to close in on itself,” she explains, looking up at the spot where a tiny hole in the roof allowed rain to slowly destroy much of its framing. The first structural engineer to see it advised her to walk away. She found another who felt confident he could save the dwelling. When she landed a grant specifically for stabilizing an unsound home, she knew she could succeed.
“This is just a great little block,” she says wistfully, looking around at the other homes on Dale Avenue. And then, almost apologetically, she shares: “I have an instinct about houses.”
Thornton’s lifelong passion for historic homes has served her — and the Roanoke community — well. In the seven years since she founded Restoration Housing, a nonprofit dedicated to rescuing structures a step away from demolition and repurposing them into affordable housing, the organization has acquired six ailing properties. Restoration Housing combines historic tax credits with affordable housing and community-building grants to pay for high-quality renovations in struggling neighborhoods.
Her first two rehabbed homes were in the Old Southwest neighborhood. A third, a cheerful yellow building with a wrap-around porch and turret, is now occupied by four previously homeless individuals and sits a stone’s throw from the Rescue Mission of Roanoke. Houses four and five are located in Belmont, a neighborhood in Southeast, that city leaders have recently focused efforts on improving. She has also completed an award-winning renovation of Villa Heights in Northwest, once a stunning showplace-of-a-home now divided into community space for kids and offices for nonprofits.
Thornton, 39, sees her work as a way to invest in communities without gentrifying them. As a nonprofit, Restoration Housing can choose to save properties that would be too expensive for a developer trying to meet market prices.
“I really think we have the best tools in our tool kit to do this,” she explains. “Because we’re a nonprofit, we are never looking for a return on our investments.”
With housing increasingly understood as a basic human right that has the potential to end the cycle of poverty, Restoration Housing’s mission is viewed as more vital than ever.
“Isabel’s ability to talk with people and get them engaged is just amazing,” says Carol Tuning, a Restoration Housing board member who worked for 35 years in human services for the City of Roanoke. “She’s just made such a huge community impact.”
History Lessons
In Thornton’s mind, every house has a story to tell. And every story is worth saving.
She grew up in the heart of Raleigh Court, with parents who instilled a love of good design and a fascination with history.
She landed at the University of Virginia and chose architectural history as a major. A course on the history of design in ancient cities connected deeply with her.
“Rather than studying the architecture of one building, it was about the layers upon layers of how these older cities developed,” she remembers.
The class created a cornerstone in her thinking: How did the past impact the present? Could historic mistakes ever be corrected?
Thornton moved to New York City, then to Los Angeles to earn her Master’s of Historic Preservation at the University of Southern California.
In 2011, her dad invited her to take another look at the hometown she had been desperate to leave. She found herself in a meeting with a group of leaders working to renew Roanoke’s downtown. Thornton was introduced to local developer Lucas Thornton. The sparks were immediate. The couple was married in October 2013.
By 2014, Thornton had spent years learning the intricacies of applying for historic preservation and affordable housing monies. She’d worked with for-profit and nonprofit developers. She had studied housing for a variety of income levels in California and across the Southeast.
She felt ready to create a model in her own community for how to take blighted property in historic areas and transform it into something beautiful and functional, something that could lift the entire neighborhood. She wanted to turn eyesores into beacons.
“We have these historic neighborhoods that have really been neglected,” Thornton says. “They have these beautiful houses that reflect the region and they reflect a very specific aesthetic. That’s like our city’s calling card. I think it’s great to preserve and restore them.”
But Thornton’s first project sparked a backlash.
She found a Day Avenue property that had been vacant for a decade. It was a large structure, once subdivided into five apartments, but now zoned as a single family home. Thornton wanted to renovate it into a duplex. The city needed to approve an exception to the zoning. Neighbors showed up at meetings and complained that they did not want rental units or a duplex in their backyards.
“They didn’t have any idea what my intentions were at the time,” Thornton remembers. “I had nothing to show for what we could do.” In the end, she prevailed by reaching out to critics and explaining her ideals and her background.
“These big, old, grand dame houses, there’s not the same need for them. But if you can make them flexible for families and make them affordable … then suddenly they have this great new use and new purpose,” she explains. “This house was never going to get restored under a home-ownership economic model.”
Thornton learned from her mistake. In the years since, she has gotten to know — and even partnered with — area nonprofits focused on housing. And she reaches out to neighborhood groups long before renovations begin.
“I was very proud of the outcome,” she says of the Day Avenue property. “I think it convinced a lot of original skeptics that you can make rental housing very beneficial to the neighborhood.”
Enduring Architecture
For Thornton, every project begins with the house.
She knows the blueprint she has to follow: the property must be located in a designated historic district and it must be so damaged that no other nonprofit, homeowner or developer would touch it. Typically, it has sat vacant for years, making it a magnet for drug users.
She drives through neighborhoods, searching for a structure with something special: architectural details like the Dale Avenue home or a unique history like the yellow Queen Anne near the Rescue Mission that once housed a Roanoke mayor.
In her shiny black Volvo, Thornton ventures past failing fences and boarded windows and litter blowing through the streets. What she sees is possibility.
Once she’s picked her house, she doesn’t let go. She brings in a designer, an engineer, a contractor. Most have worked with Restoration Housing for years. The structure and the neighborhood reveal to the team the direction they should take: duplex, apartments, single-family home?
Thornton is always asking: how can this house best serve this community?
“If you just tear something down, you have a blank lot,” explains Chad Brown, owner of the contracting company, Square 1, Inc., which has worked on each of Restoration Housing’s projects.
“But if you pull a property back to something that is not only livable but the next level of livable, that’s major…. And when you walk through it, you can see the details on something that’s been there a hundred years.”
The windows, doors and frame must be preserved or returned to historic roots, according to historic credit guidelines. But kitchens, bathrooms and closets can be added and updated. As Thornton is planning, she thinks of who will be living in the house: single mothers with their children? A family with kids who play in the backyard?
Once it’s completed, the property is owned and managed by Restoration Housing. This way, the nonprofit continues its investment in the neighborhood.
To those who might say it’s a waste to save old, decrepit buildings, board member Tuning responds: “To the people that have lived and who still live in that community, keeping that history alive has value.”
For Thornton, her motivation circles back to that course she took in college. With each renovation, she’s hoping to atone for the neglect and disinvestment of the past.
“I have this interest in being a part of this layer upon layer of the city’s history and trying to reorient the investment,” she says. “That’s what really informs a lot of what we do.”
The story above is from our September/October 2021. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!