America: ReFramed is a documentary series that runs on the PBS World Channel. Last week they repeated a previously shown program, "The Place That Makes Us," on redevelopment efforts in Youngstown, Ohio.
With the decline of the steel industry, Youngstown, about 75 miles southeast of Cleveland--has lost about 2/3 of its population.
Once a thriving city of great wealth, it still has a remarkable downtown core with many tall buildings.
But with that level of population decline, many of the neighborhoods are dotted with abandoned buildings or empty lots where once extant houses have been demolished ("Non-profit looks to demolish nearly 800 abandoned houses in Youngstown," WKBN-TV).
Youngstown is noteworthy in planning circles for the Youngstown 2010 initiative, which focused on planned shrinkage, recognizing that the city would not be able to re-attain the heights reached when it was a thriving industrial town in the 1960s ("As Its Population Declines, Youngstown Thinks Small," Wall Street Journal, 2007; "WDWVW?/WDWVN? | What do West Virginians want and need and Senator Joe Manchin," 2021).
The documentary focuses on four people, the director and housing programs manager of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a community development organization focused on rehabilitating houses to stabilize otherwise shrinking neighborhoods, as well as maintaining commercial buildings like the Foster Art Theatre ("YNDC buys Foster Art Theatre, Will Shut it Down," Youngstown Vindicator), Julius T. Oliver, a city councilmember interested in restoring the vacant South Field House complex (once part of South High School) as a thriving community center, and the woman who gets to buy one of the houses fixed by the YNDC, a beautiful historic house, for only $55,000!
The documentary is grim.
It shows people working on improving their community despite significant handicaps of population, business activity, and money. But at the same time, they're doing great work.
It's definitely worth watching.
Tampa Bay Times: St. Petersburg is transforming vacant lots into affordable housing.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.tampabay.com/news/business/2022/04/07/st-petersburg-is-transforming-vacant-lots-into-affordable-housing
In 2014, as the city emerged from the Great Recession, he began combining that passion with an approach to improving neighborhoods by dealing aggressively with owners of derelict houses and vacant properties. “I was not a tenured government employee, and I probably still don’t think like the average government employee,” he says. “I think like a businessperson.”
Corbett started compiling an inventory of the boarded- up and vacant properties that dotted the city. He counted 830 homes that either needed major repairs or had deteriorated so much that they needed to be demolished. ...
But as dilapidated houses were torn down or refurbished, many lots remained vacant and neglected, eroding surrounding property values and the local tax base. Basic maintenance often fell to city workers, draining time and resources. “In the summertime, we’d have to mow the grass twice a month religiously,” Corbett says. “We called them dead or zombie properties because no one wanted to touch them.”
Many cities deal with the zombie-lot problem with an approach that some call “file and forget” — they slap code-enforcement liens on neglected lots and hope that real estate values eventually rise enough to make the owners want to get out of arrears and either sell, develop or refinance the property.
Instead, Corbett went after the owners of the zombie lots more aggressively, using a tactic that cities typically shy away from — foreclosure. In 2016, he identified the owners of dozens of empty lots, mostly in historically black neighborhoods south of downtown. Often, the property owners owed more in taxes or fines than the properties were worth. “You might have $40,000 in liens on a lot that was worth $20,000,” he says. ...
Corbett reckoned that the firm never had any real interest in owning land in St. Petersburg. And as the company continued to pile up code violations, he proposed that the city foreclose on its properties.
“That’s how this whole thing started,” he says. “My thought was, let’s foreclose. It’s not like we’re kicking some family out of their house. This is literally a large company that doesn’t care anything about this city, and one of two things will happen: They’ll either pay their liens, or their properties will be sold and someone else will get them.” ...
The city responded by trying to turn some foreclosures into first homes for local residents instead of selling the lots to developers. Under the program, the city acquires an abandoned lot at auction, clears the title and gives it to a non-profit developer. The developer, in turn, builds a home and sells it to a lower-income family. So far, the city has acquired 50 lots this way, and nine houses have been built and sold to first time home buyers.