COLUMBUS, Ohio ( WCMH ) — Lonney Stokes moved to the Near East Side of Columbus in 2013. He’s bought several properties and now lives on Berkeley Road. The neighborhood today is much different from it was when he moved in.
“It was, well, vacant pretty much and really violent,” he said. “Half the neighborhood was boarded up. To put it in perspective, when we first moved in here, you couldn’t get a pizza delivered here.”
Stokes is a builder. He used his skills to turn a neighborhood with overgrown sidewalks, crumbling fences, and boarded-up homes into a neighborhood he’s proud of. He started by cleaning up Blackburn Park, where he would go to teach a free yoga class every Sunday for about a year. He noticed the conditions children had to play…