This excellent 2014 HUD report report titled Vacant and Abandoned Properties: Turning Liabilities Into Assets obviously isn’t new, but it came out a few months before REVITALIZATION was born, so it never got featured here. Now it has.
Excerpt:
Derelict houses, dormant factories, moribund strip malls, and other types of vacant and abandoned properties are among the most visible outward signs of a community’s reversing fortunes. Properties that have turned from productive use to disuse are found in cities, suburbs, and rural areas throughout the country, and they vary widely in size, shape, and former use. But these vacant and abandoned properties are more than just a symptom of larger economic forces at work in the community; their association with crime, increased risk to health and welfare, plunging property values, and escalating municipal costs make them problems in and of themselves, contributing to overall community decline and disinvestment.
Local government officials, community organizations, and residents, however, increasingly view vacant properties as opportunities for productive reuse, reimagining blight and dilapidation as urban farms, community gardens, and health facilities. To them, empty homes can become assets in neighborhood stabilization and revitalization that can be renovated and reoccupied.
Vacant and abandoned properties have long plagued the industrial cities of America’s Rust Belt, but the spike in foreclosures following the recent recession has compounded problems for these areas and has caused vacancy rates to surge nationwide, especially in recently booming Sun Belt states such as Florida, Arizona, and Nevada. These communities face mounting blight and physical deterioration of properties, declining tax revenues, and rising public costs. Although nationwide factors (in particular, the foreclosure crisis) helped create these vacancies, local factors — the condition of the properties, the health of the local housing market, and the strength of the regional economy — are what shape the range of options available for returning these properties to productive use.
The approach taken to reclaim one vacant property among many in a distressed Detroit neighborhood, for example, will be different from that taken to reclaim a property in a rebounding Phoenix suburb — or, for that matter, in another Detroit neighborhood with a healthy housing market.
Local political and economic contexts, as well as limitations of capacity and resources, shape the tools that local governments, nonprofits, and neighbors employ to address and reuse vacant and abandoned properties. The most desired outcome is to quickly return a property to its previous use — an owner-occupied residence or a thriving business. However, tight credit, weak markets, population loss, or other factors may require other solutions such as demolition, conversion of owner- occupied housing to rental housing, or replacement (such as constructing a solar farm on a former industrial site).
Strategies for reuse aim to stabilize and revitalize neighborhoods and may stimulate economic recovery and growth or, in the case of shrinking cities, manage decline in ways that improve quality of life for the remaining residents.
Photo shows an abandoned big box store that the community of McAllen, Texas subsequently reclaimed as a new home for its main public library. Photo courtesy of the McAllen Public Library.