Kanye West buys back his childhood home in Chicago for $225K after being named a billionaire
Rapper Kanye West has reportedly bought his childhood home in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood.
The news comes just days after Forbes magazine named him a billionaire. According to a real estate reporter, Dennis Rodkin, Kanye bought the house for around $225,000 and will need around $60,000 in repairs after it was left it in ruins, WGN9 reports.
The property had earlier been bought by a charity that was connected to Kanye. The 'Stronger' rapper had cut ties with the charity after a feud with his childhood friend, rapper Rhymefest who was the creative director.
The charity named 'Donda's House' bought the home in 2016 with the plan and aim of transforming the house into a community arts 'incubator' for at-risk youths.
Kanye's mother Donda had died in 2007 post complications with a cosmetic procedure. Rhymefest had revealed that the house would serve as the non-profit's headquarters that featured a recording studio and museum with the aim to inspire the next generation.
Ever since those plans fell apart, the house has been littered with post-its, old CDs, and beer bottles. According to reports, it would cost less to tear the house down than to spend time and money renovating it. Check the pictures of the house here
Donda had bought the home in the early 1980s and had sold it in 2004. Donda was an English professor at the Chicago State University and had mentored Rhymefest aka Che Smith (who had been the charity's creative director) while he was growing up with Kanye.
Kanye and Rhymefest's feud started in 2018 when the latter got into a social media feud with the 'Stronger' rapper's wife, Kim Kardashian. Kim had taken to Twitter to share, "You're over leveraging Kanye's name & asked Kanye to donate money to u so stop w your fake community politics & lies."
"Truth is you haven't been able to sustain the foundation. You better believe I will make it my mission to take Donda's House from you and let my children run it the way it should be run!" she had later shared. Rhymefest totally denied the allegations and stated that they would not be using the name 'Donda's House' for their organization.
It was also reported that Kanye was left unhappy with Forbes' research findings that stated his net worth to be $1.26 billion while he believes that his net worth is somewhere around $3.3 billion. "It's not a billion. It's $3.3 billion since no one at Forbes knows how to count," Kanye said.
We had previously reported that Kanye had provided documents that were analyzed resulting in Forbes declaring that the mogul is a billionaire. Forbes said Kanye's team had provided them an "an authentic numeric look into Kanye, Inc," allowing them to conclude that Kanye has a net worth of $1.3 billion.
According to Forbes, the rapper and fashion designers' net worth is mostly credited to his athletic wear brand, Yeezy, and its partnership with Adidas. Forbes reported, "West’s aggressive $3 billion self-appraisal is clearly based on the idea that the business is infinitely portable. It’s not. Taking Yeezy away from Adidas seems almost prohibitively cumbersome, if not contractually impossible."
"We tend to look at self-appraisals somewhat skeptically. Aside from the music, half of all this presumably belongs to his wife, although she’s no slouch and that math goes two ways. Given the illiquidity of these myriad assets and the lack of independent backup, we’re giving all of this a 50% haircut, leaving about $125 million in assets outside of his Yeezy crown jewel. Then, there’s debt: Between mortgages, advances, and other liabilities, we saw about $100 million that West is on the hook for."