Centennial neighborhood's big-money bet on itself pays off in Lafayette effort

They just couldn’t believe Teibel told them the place under construction was available – thanks to another couple who had backed out on the last of 12 Centennial Townhome units that had gone up in the past three years along that block of Fifth Street.

“We were willing to buy it sight unseen, basically, because we wanted to stay in this neighborhood so badly,” Herzog said. “He showed me a floorplan, and I said, ‘We’ll buy it right now.’”

But the backstory on their future home – ready this fall – is a good one. It’s one that squares up just how desperate they were to find that place with just how determined their new neighbors were to get them there.

Herzog and Rogers were about to become the final piece in that story. But it started something like this That night in summer 2011, in the North Fifth Street living room of Phyllis and Michael Hunt, was time to put up or shut up.

A group of homeowners and business owners in Centennial neighborhood, just north of downtown, for so long had poked and prodded Lafayette city officials about doing something with the vacant metal warehouses and barbed wire-topped fencing left after Midwest Rentals left for another location.

Now the city had called the neighborhood’s bluff with the promise of a partnership to buy 506 Brown St., with hopes that a developer could be recruited to put new homes on the half-block of near-downtown real estate in the middle of some of Lafayette’s oldest blocks, first platted in the 1820s. 

Here they were, 10 members of recently formed Centennial Neighborhood Investment Group LLC, trying to figure out how to come up with one-third of the $380,000 asking price.

“Were we nervous?” asked Ken McCammon, a Centennial neighborhood homeowner and one of the investors in the living room of the Greek Revival home the Hunts had started renovating in 1993.