Register Now for the Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference

From the Center for Community Progress:

REGISTRATION IS OPEN FOR OCTOBER’S RECLAIMING VACANT PROPERTIES CONFERENCE IN CLEVELAND!

Community Progress is pleased this year to partner with Neighborhood Progress, Inc. to bring you Reclaiming Vacant Properties: the Intersection of Sustainability, Revitalization, and Policy Reform. Join with us, and hundreds of your peers from communities across the country, to learn about the policies, tools, and strategies to catalyze long-term, sustainable revitalization. Share your experiences and insights, and become a part of the only national network focused on building the knowledge, leadership, and momentum to reclaim vacant and abandoned properties to foster thriving neighborhoods.

This engaging conference offers you three days of opportunities to build the skills and relationships to transform your communities:

• Pre-conference training seminars on key strategies, including land banking, re-imagining older industrial cities, data and research, selling houses in weak markets, and taking nuisance abatement to scale.
• Mobile workshops showcasing some of Cleveland’s successes, including adaptive reuse, community visioning, and legal tools in Slavic Village, historic preservation and brownfield revitalization in Detroit Shoreway, urban agriculture and green building throughout the city, and transit oriented development along the Euclid Corridor.
• 35 interactive breakout sessions covering the full range of issues related to revitalization, including assessing tax incentives, accessing REOs and other foreclosure innovations, state and federal policy, temporary uses on vacant land, creative financing, decision making for site reuse, municipal code enforcement, and much more.
• Plenaries highlighting innovative leadership and a keynote by Alex Kotlowitz (award-winning journalist and best-selling author.)
• Networking opportunities allowing you time to exchange ideas with and get to know peers.
• A new Poster Session designed so you can talk directly with even more experts.

We look forward to seeing you in October for this unique conference! Visit the conference web site to download the program and register.

A few additional notes about the conference:

• One more opportunity to present: There is still an opportunity to participate as a presenter through the Poster Session. The Poster Session will offer conference participants one more way to hear about interesting case studies, research efforts, or projects. Proposals are due July 15th so don’t delay. If you already submitted an idea for a poster through the program RFP, you do not need to resubmit. Visit the program page on the web site to find out the details.
• Scholarships: We hope to be able to post the application for registration scholarships soon. A limited number of scholarships will be available to nonprofit, public sector, or grassroots individuals. Watch for an update soon.

 

Shrinking Cities News Round-Up: Vacant Properties and Public Safety

In addition to being eyesores, vacant and abandoned properties also threaten public safety. These properties can become breeding grounds for criminal activity and arson, placing strain on the city’s resources and police and fire departments – as evidenced by these recent news stories from Detroit:

• Early Morning Arson Claims Vacant Properties
  Arson investigators are continuing their investigation of eight fires set early last Tuesday morning, all of which were vacant buildings.

• Police Officer Killed in Shootout at Vacant Duplex
  Earlier this month, one officer was killed and four others wounded while responding to a report of gunshots at a vacant property. According to neighbors, drugs were being sold out of the building.

• City Leaders Plan Demolitions to Cut Crime
  Buoyed by the police shootings, the Detroit City Council is working with Mayor David Bing to expedite a new city ordinance to hold property owners more accountable for their properties. The Mayor’s office is also using data to examine the correlation between crime and vacancies, which will inform the demolition of 3,000 rundown homes this year that will “cut crime and improve quality of life.”

 

Initial impressions of Baltimore as a Shrinking City – It takes team work

Baltimore interest groups are using a range of initiatives to handle the pressing issues of a shrinking city. Many neighborhoods are facing the same problems – too many vacant properties and abandoned buildings – but they are dealing with them in different ways. For instance, we saw how the City’s Code Enforcement Department is dealing with the issue from an economic perspective, in which code enforcement fees will assist in repairing or demolishing some of the properties. This enforcement process will even help acquire some of the properties (through a receivership process), which can then be sold to private developers in attempts to revitalize certain distressed areas. In addition, we witnessed how grassroots efforts at the neighborhood level could create community spaces that beautify the neighborhood, help the environment, and raise surrounding property values when led by residents themselves, as was the case with the Homestead Harvest Community Garden . On a larger scale, we learned how a nonprofit public/private partnership, East Baltimore Development Inc., was transforming East Baltimore through community initiatives and economic development, with a new neighborhood school and in cooperation with developers and Johns Hopkins University to create a science and technology park. The range of actors involved is also very broad, ranging from community groups led by residents, to small non-profits, large partnerships, and the City of Baltimore itself.

The proposed Science & Technology Park in the East Baltimore neighborhood

(http://www.forestcityscience.net/hopkins/sciencepark.shtml)

The diversity of the groups involved has led to a diversity of solutions, and I think that in the end, it’s going to need to be a combination of all these initiatives and actors that will help Baltimore successfully tackle this issue. There doesn’t seem to be a one-size-fits-all approach to handle these problems between or within shrinking cities, so the combination of social, economic, and environmental initiatives is what will bring the greatest improvement to the city. The City of Baltimore should continue to embrace initiatives by these groups and encourage more ideas and projects to occur at the neighborhood level. Essentially, we learned that it takes team work to stabilize shrinking cities!

 

Making Green Infrastructure from Abandoned Property in Baltimore

Abandoned rowhouses, Baltimore. http://www.flickriver.com/photos/tags/northave/interesting/

Walking through East Baltimore’s blocks of abandoned rowhouses and vacant lots, it’s hard to imagine what was. In the 1950s, the city was a thriving port and manufacturing center, the landscape of smokestacks indicating prosperity. In the second half of the twentieth century, Baltimore struggled severely, losing thousands of middle class manufacturing jobs that had once propelled this strong economic engine. When the jobs left, so did people–to the tune of almost 300,000 people since 1970. This incredible loss of population and jobs is laid bare in the built environment, with 17,000 vacant homes and lots across Baltimore. The abandoned homes, in particular, provide a haven for drugs and other illegal activity, exacerbating the pervasive social problems that plague the city.

Much has been written about the East Baltimore Development, Inc. plan to completely reinvent Middle East Baltimore adjacent to Johns Hopkins University’s medical campus; this effort will certainly make inroads on the vacant property problem in Baltimore, but it’s not a solution that will work anywhere else. In my opinion, small, incremental efforts at the neighborhood scale will be key in reducing the number of abandoned homes and lots; I find the most compelling of these strategies to be creating parks, open space, urban farms, and community gardens. This green infrastructure doesn’t just reclaim vacant property; it also offers an opportunity to strengthen connections among residents, to improve the quality of the land and water in the city, to provide Baltimoreans with healthier food options, and to teach technical skills to an underdeveloped workforce.

Harvest, http://cdn0.mattters.com/photos/photos/1081251/salads.jpg

Parks and People is the foremost resource for those who want to create green space in their neighborhoods. They offer a number of tools on their web site, including the comprehensive Guide to Greening Neighborhoods: Creating and Caring for Neighborhood Open Space.  The guide gives detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to plan, design, build, and maintain community space, including technical details about what to plant, advice for organization roles in each step of the process, and instructions for navigating the legal aspects of using the property.

Once a community green space is established, Baltimore Green Space is one of the resources that can help protect the space from redevelopment in perpetuity. The organization is a new land trust that works with communities to preserve the green infrastructure they have built and maintained, even though according to existing zoning the green use might not be the fullest and best use of the land. The land trust approach allows the community to have control over their green space, doing the planting, weeding, and other work, while Baltimore Green Space handles the details like taxes, legal papers, and technical assistance.

The City of Baltimore has begun to show formal support for green infrastructure as a strategy for dealing with their vacant and abandoned property problem. The 2009 Sustainability Plan outlined an effort to modify the city’s zoning code to allow for urban agriculture, increasing the number of gardens, farms, and cultivated green space in the city. Furthermore, the plan calls for incentives for urban agriculture and a strong urban agriculture strategy that can respond to the underserved market for healthy foods in the city.

 

Shrinking Cities News Round-Up: New Reports Target Universities in Shrinking Cities and Texas Communities

Two new reports have been added to the burgeoning literature on shrinking cities:

• Growing a University in a Shrinking City – Dr. David Sweet, president of Youngstown University (Ohio), played a critical role in the development of the Youngstown 2010 plan. During the process, thousands of residents and community leaders participated in the visioning and execution of the city’s new master plan.  (To learn more about the planning process, read Austin’s post, Citizens and Shrinking Cities – Youngstown 2010). In this new report, Dr. Sweet shares his experiences in helping to revision the community, and emphasizes the importance of campus-community partnerships.

• Texas Problem Properties Toolkit – For two years, the Community Development Clinic at the University of Texas Law School conducted research on the most effective strategies that cities in Texas, and around the country, are using to combat the problem of vacant and abandoned properties. The group’s research culminated in this toolkit, which outlines a number of strategies for Texas cities including, community engagement, vacant property registration, landbanking, and code enforcement.

 

Thoughts on Blots. Could ‘New Suburbanism’ = ‘Smart Decline’?

The use of ‘blots’, or ‘side lot expansions’, is a technique that gives homeowners with vacant land adjacent to their home the opportunity to purchase that property as an expansion to their own for a nominal cost. Essentially, this concept is an incentive to de-densify neighborhoods. This immediately strikes me as contrary to many smart growth principals, notably that in reducing density it makes transit less feasible and reduces the community attributes of neighborhoods.

Blot in Detroit

The article, “IMPROVE YOUR LOT!” from Cities Growing Smaller, analyzes the growing use of blots in Detroit and shows several photo examples of blots with high, unfriendly fences (like the example above). This privatization of urban space might be contrary to the community-oriented fundamentals of New Urbanism, but not to what they call “New Suburbanism” – a term for “the process through which entrepreneurial homeowners take, borrow, or buy adjacent land.” Their analysis points out the many suburban amenities these blots enable homeowners to develop, including: additions to their homes, garages, pools, playgrounds and gardens.

Diagram of various uses of blots

During a class visit to Cleveland in October, my thoughts on blots quickly began to evolve into something more positive. The density of many neighborhoods in the city, built for mid 20^th century industrial workers, no longer suits the city’s needs or many citizens’ ideology.  Cleveland’s metropolitan population statistics tell the tale; the city is shrinking but the region is sprawling (see map below). There are many reasons for this, but one is certainly the quest for more space and privacy…attributes that blots can help supply.

Cleveland Sprawl

Blots, or the New Suburbs, may not be part of smart growth, but they can serve as a valuable tool for “smart decline” as well as a way to combat urban sprawl. Setting aside certain neighborhoods with the best potential for successful density, mixed use and transit as “urban catchment hubs”, other areas can then be set aside for reducing density with the use of blots and other incentives, such as conservation easements, that set aside open space. Additionally, by attracting people seeking suburban values to stay in the city or move closer to urban hubs, this could also work to bring metropolitan growth back in to the city. This could be combined with many existing growth management tools that could be tweaked for shrinking cities, such as growth boundaries, impact fees and TDRs.

Creating a systematic way to use blots in this way is something that land trusts and land banks are already toying with, but perhaps government could take a stronger role. If nothing else, blots remove the burden of maintaining vacant lots and put that land back on the tax roll. Even modest shifts of population back towards the core would lead to many other positive outcomes that shrinking cities would definitely benefit from.

 

Portland Project Pushes the Envelope on Temporary Use

It turns out that one of my coworkers, Emily Rice – a recent graduate from the Urban and Regional Planning Program at Portland State University – has also studied strategies to address vacant and abandoned spaces in cities. As part of the LocusLab, she and three classmates partnered with the Central Eastside Industrial Council in Portland on the project No Vacancy! Exploring Temporary Use of Empty Space in the Central Eastside Industrial District. The project looked at how to enliven vacant spaces in the district with temporary activities and developments.

Their scope of temporary use includes the usual urban gardens and public art, but also includes some creative and innovative uses, such as: live performances, food carts, mobile marketing, new technology demonstrations, and micro-enterprise developments. Also interesting is their broad definition of “temporary” – it’s not constrained to just a few years, but even as short as a month or a few hours.

Emily said that, “the experience proved to be extremely telling with respect to community dynamics, business motivations, and misinterpretations of intentions.”  And that she “realized early on that any temporary projects that could even remotely be linked to negative impacts on the District were not going to be easily accepted.”

So to help make the Central Eastside Industrial District (CEID) more open to unconventional temporary uses, the group produced two publications. One is a No Vacancy! Guide that serves as a how-to manual for planning temporary projects in the CEID, and includes step-by-step checklists for property owners and space users to ensure proper planning. The other is a Final Report that explores the temporary use of vacant spaces and the applicability to the Central Eastside Industrial District. The report examines the benefits of temporary use, identifies examples of other projects around the world, considers the opportunities and barriers present in the CEID, and makes recommendations to the Central Eastside Industrial Council for implementing a program that supports a variety of temporary uses.

When the group presented their work to the Portland community, they chose the most fitting location – a vacant space in the historic Ford Building.

 

Flint Garden Sprouts More Than Vegetables

There was a great story in The New York Times last week about neighbors in Flint, Michigan who transformed vacant lots into a vegetable garden and fruit orchard. And in turn, this garden has inspired them to revive their community.

The article touches upon several themes related to a ‘Shrinking City.’

Loss of manufacturing jobs – Flint suffered the loss of 70,000 jobs at General Motors; presently the city’s unemployment rate is about 25%.

Landbanking – the Genesee County Land Bank acquires foreclosed properties in Flint and throughout the rest of the county, then coordinates the reuse of abandoned buildings and vacant lots. In 2005, the Land Bank gave permission for this garden to be planted.

Returning land to productive use – neighbors removed litter and debris, and cleared the land to make way for the garden. According to the article, “The [garden] is really 10 contiguous lots where a row of houses once stood.”

Sustainability – The garden has improved the food security of this neighborhood by providing fresh, locally grown produce. Those who tend the garden reap the harvest, and they often also give food to neighbors in need. And now, Harry Ryan – who spearheaded the garden effort – is looking to further green the neighborhood by building a power-generating windmill in the garden.

Patchwork of decline and growth – Like many shrinking cities, some areas of Flint are thriving. Downtown Flint – just five miles away – has regained its vitality with several new commercial and residential developments.

All-in-all, it’s a heart-warming story about how a garden is helping to reverse the cycle of decline this neighborhood. The garden has rekindled a sense of community pride; neighbors have since pitched in to mow unkempt lawns and unearth sidewalks, because as one resident put it, “It needs to be done.”

Read the full story here, and also check out the related slide show.

 

Everything Old Is New Again: The Myth and Reality of Urban Homesteading.

From the old west, we have learned an iconic model for the homesteader – simple, hardy families far from their communities of origin, scraping a living together through hard work in an alien, unforgiving and empty landscape. In the process, they created civilization in the wilderness. These homesteaders came to embody essential American values such as thrift, toughness, stoicism and self-sufficiency.

The myth created around this archetype – and make no mistake, it is a myth – obscures a set of more interesting facts that are potentially valuable as we explore (exploit?) the possibilities of shrinking cities. What are the facts that the myth obscures?

The first is that people simply moved to the frontier for abstract notions of freedom and liberty. People moved to the frontier mostly for economic reasons – they wanted to make a decent living and decided the dangers, when weighed against the opportunities, were worth it. They were often escaping limited options in other countries or in established American urban areas, including racial and class discrimination against Eastern Europeans, the Irish and people from the Mediterranean countries in Europe. This is in addition to African Americans and poor whites from the Appalachian regions of the Northeast.

The second myth is the myth of the uninhabited landscape. Like every other area on the American continent, the west had been inhabited for centuries by Native Americans whose social and community structures were well-adapted to their environment. The sense of an alien landscape can be attributed to the common practice of European settlers applying habits of living developed in other places to the western landscape. The source of my discomfort is that the current conversation about shrinking cities mirrors some elements of the Manifest Destiny/Homesteader myth. A partial list includes:

• The discussion of “abandoned neighborhoods” that are still inhabited by long-time residents, residents who, often with no support from institutional structures, have made radical adaptations in their lifestyle in order to remain in their communities. • The planned consolidation of remaining residents in dense communities whose borders and locations are determined by governmental and institutional organizations, not people in the community.

• The previous two intellectual constructions are paired with plans to demolish large numbers of pre-existing structures and create new use zones in the now-abandoned areas. These are to be parks (wilderness), urban agriculture (farms) and, in plans such as the Detroit plan, “opportunity areas” where large parcels would be made available for future development. • The discussion of existing populations as groups that need to be re-educated and trained to fit into the new, greener city. This is while acknowledging the unique skill sets already extant in these communities, both job and survival skills.

• The published plans reveal dependence, both stated and inferred, on getting new people to move to the area. These people are supposed to be different from the people who live there now. They may be called high-tech workers or the creative class. Just as often, these people are referred to – with admiration – as “urban homesteaders.”

I believe that the danger lies in not fully recognizing that the plans proposed will create winners and losers, and that it is very possible that the winners will have greater social and class affiliations with the professionals making the plans than the existing population. If the Homesteader Myth creeps into the discussion without be recognized and debunked, all that has been accomplished is the inversion of Manifest Destiny: noble suburbanites will be occupying the unsettled wildernesses of our distressed urban cities, struggling stoically to bring civilization to the natives in the form of green infrastructure, free WiFi and 24-hour coffee bars.

Any useful conversation about this issue will reveal a larger truth to all groups: that all interest groups and their various resources are being employed by planners, designers and policy makers toward the larger goal of stabilizing major urban centers; that this is happening because these centers represent agglomerations of financial, cultural, infrastructural, institutional and social capital that our country can ill afford to lose; and that everyone is going to have to make sacrifices to accomplish this goal.

 

Bulldozer as Agent of Change

After people leave a city, what should happen to the physical reminders of their presence? The treasurer of Genessee County, Michigan – which includes the city of Flint – advocates bulldozing abandoned properties, and reframing the built environment around the residents who remain.

In a post in Good.Is Magazine, Treasurer Dan Kildee offers up a refreshing thesis: that a city should be judged on the quality of life for the people who live there, not compared against itself in another point in time. Through the Flint Land Bank, the city has already reclaimed about 9,000 abandoned properties – 14 percent of the land in Flint. Some of those properties have been bulldozed, and some await developers to be remade into something new. Others have been annexed by existing parcels, expanding side yards or city parks.

Kildee advocates framing a strategy of a vibrant city with diverse land uses, and a land bank is one tactic through which that can be achieved. Bulldozing is another. By adopting a dual-pronged strategy of clearing some land and redeveloping other parcels, Kildee argues, it not only helps to right-size the city, but it also gives residents a choice as to where they want to live.

Currently, many Flint residents are in close proximity to abandoned properties and blight, relics of the urban past. Under a new scheme, residents could choose whether they wanted to be in a dense neighborhood or in a more typical suburban (even, perhaps, rural) environment with larger lot sizes.

In a related post, Mayor Dayne Walling says the horizon for change is 2020. The Flint strategy is a thoughtful extension of simply bulldozing vacant properties (covered in many places, including this article in Inhabit). Flint has recognized that the 90,000 residents who’ve left may never come back. But instead of mourning their departure, the city is pushing ahead to make life great for the ones who remain.

What do you think? Can a city use bulldozers as an agent of change for improving quality of life?