A Birmingham student is taking a her senior project to a whole new level.
She wants to flip abandoned homes in Detroit and turn them into housing for the homeless.
Roeper Senior and Isabel Ivanescu has already raised thousands of dollars in hopes of purchasing a home.
She’s done her research and is ready to launch her efforts this summer making her this week's All Star.
“I remember seeing a homeless man standing outside an empty home when I was about 10 and it just seemed so very absurd. You can put those people into those empty homes and solve two problems at once,” Ivanescu said.
She’s spent months devising a plan to buy an abandoned house and restore it, creating a home for someone on the streets.
“It’s been proposed before, but it hasn’t been implemented and Detroit really is the most abandoned city in the U.S- there are 30,000 empty homes in Detroit,” she said.
As exceptional as the 16-year-old senior is, she says she still makes time for fun.
“I can’t say that I don’t, I wanted to do something a little more useful I would say – there seems to be time for everything so far,” Ivanescu said.
She has a goal of raising $80,000 and has already raised nearly $6,000 saying this is just the beginning. She wants to develop one home changing one family’s life creating the start of new plan for the city of Detroit.
“Once there is a case study to prove that this is a model that works there’s a lot of foundations in Detroit and a lot of local government regional government nation government grants that could be used to do this,” she said.
You can learn more about Ivanescu’s plan here: http://housedetroit.us/
