, Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program
The Avenue, The New Republic
Though seemingly a purely local issue, Alan Mallach and I describe in a new brief how weak and antiquated state laws--on tax foreclosure, land banking, code enforcement, and other areas--can have huge influence on what properties get redeveloped (or at least mowed) under what time horizons.
While many of these laws may seem trifling or arcane, they can be a huge burden for the municipalities governed by them, as they can hamstring local leaders’ ability to minimize distressed properties’ costs--their drag on property values and their ongoing need for basic maintenance--as well as their ability to repurpose them for tax generating development or other uses.
For example, excessively long periods during which tax delinquent owners can redeem their properties by paying the back taxes--as many as five years in some states--and other procedural obstacles to responsible reuse mean that vacant properties can spend years in limbo with unclear, unmarketable title, while others pass from hand to hand through a revolving door of neglect. Even when a property has been long since abandoned by its owners, state laws can make local governments’ ability to acquire and/or dispose of it time-consuming, complicated, and expensive.
As state leaders continue to dig under their figurative couch cushions for spare change and cut the fat, and then some, out of their budgets, they should also look for ways to help their local (and thus ultimately state) economies through legal and policy reforms that don’t need to cost a dime. In economics, remember, land is one of the key factors--along with labor, capital, and for some, entrepreneurship--in the production of wealth.
States should start treating it accordingly.
, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program
, Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program
The Brookings Institution
MAY 03, 2011 —
Unfortunately, weak and antiquated state laws governing tax foreclosure, land banking, code enforcement, and other areas make it difficult for local governments to address vacancy and abandonment, and prevent them from unlocking properties’ productive potential. To give municipalities the tools the need to repurpose distressed land and buildings, states should:
- Reform inefficient tax foreclosure laws
- Create clear paths to public control of vacant and abandoned properties
- Empower effective code enforcement and nuisance abatement
- Enhance local government’s power to mitigate the harm created by mortgage foreclosure
Promoting Ungrowth
Updated March 30, 2011, 10:27 PM
Jennifer Bradley is a fellow with the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. Her work focuses on land use and economic development in Great Lakes metropolitan areas.
People in Cleveland, Detroit, Flint and Youngstown, and in Bilbao, Leipzig and Turin, have plenty of ideas about what cities can do with vacant and abandoned land: urban agriculture; watershed restoration and stream daylighting; side-lot programs; extensive park networks; public arts zones; new museums
What we need is a new mindset. Physical growth has been a powerful American narrative, embodied in huge public expenditures from the Louisiana Purchase to the Interstate Highway System and the mortgage interest deduction. The nation now needs a parallel commitment to physical ungrowth. Ungrowth is not surrender but a phase of urban evolution.
Remaking a city is breathtakingly expensive, and the market won’t do it. Indeed, the lack of a robust land market is part of the problem in shrinking cities. It costs about $10,000 to demolish a single-family home in Detroit; about 12,000 vacant homes there need demolition. And clearing the land is just the beginning. Philanthropy has stepped up in Detroit and elsewhere, but the need exceeds most foundations’ resources.
Last year, the federal government allocated $836 million to clean up and reuse old General Motors sites. That should be the first of many federal investments.
The federal government spends $104 billion a year subsidizing home-building through the mortgage interest deduction. What if it took 10 percent, or even 1 percent, of that money to help places unbuild and reinvent? At the very least, cities should be able to reallocate money they already get from the federal government and use it for unbuilding.
When the federal government poured money into shaping cities through highway building, urban renewal and public housing, the results were expert-approved, fast and brutal. Ungrowth needs to be bottom up, slow and exquisitely careful. It will take a long time to convince residents of battered cities that the new city landscapes dreamed up by their neighbors, city planners, foundations, academics and outsiders are worth uprooting their lives for. Americans have been spending for growth for centuries. Our commitment to ungrowth, and new ideas about how cities change and what they look like, needs to be sustained for decades.
