(C) Virginia Mercury
This story was originally published by Virginia Mercury and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Fighting blight: how cities across Virginia are addressing abandoned property [1]

['More From Author', 'January', 'Wyatt Gordon']

Date: 2024-01-31  

Last year’s implosion of the nine-story former Ramada Inn was more than the end of an era for one of Petersburg’s most prominent political footballs. The demolition of the long-abandoned hotel also proved to be a potent symbol of the city’s efforts to fight blight and revitalize its downtown. Despite the demise of “the granddaddy of blight,” cities and towns across the commonwealth from Danville to Richmond still struggle with blighted buildings’ impacts on property values, public health and criminal activity.

With little state support, localities from Southwest to Central Virginia are taking a practical approach to the problem and investing their own resources to fight blight. Still, local officials are calling for state policy to pivot towards preventative maintenance and addressing spot blight to undergird their efforts.

The burden of blight

The problems posed by abandoned properties are felt far beyond the borders of the commonwealth, but with more than one in five Americans now living in urban areas, there has never been more pressure on municipalities to demolish blight and restore unused parcels back to viable residential and retail spaces. Even notoriously downtrodden Detroit has a plan to “renovate or demolish every abandoned house” within the next four years.

Closer to home, the District of Columbia taxes vacant homes at $5 for every $100 of value and blighted properties at a rate of $10 per $100 of value. The standard tax rate for well-kept properties is just $1.65 per $100 of value. This spring, D.C.’s city council even considered a bill that would facilitate turning vacant properties into affordable housing or grocery stores. With more than 3,000 blighted properties, the District raised $9.4 million dollars off of its vacancy and blight taxes in 2016, the last year for which data is available.

D.C.’s success has even sparked Baltimore to explore the policy. Just a few weeks ago the city’s mayor put forward an $8 billion plan that would support “demolishing and beautifying at least 35,700 vacant and ‘at-risk’ properties, empty lots and occupied homes.” Permission from Maryland’s General Assembly to tax vacant properties could yield Baltimore $90 million alone and empower the city to tackle 14,000 blighted homes.

Local leaders’ dedication to demolishing blight isn’t based on aesthetics. Each abandoned property in an area pulls down the value of surrounding properties by anywhere from 0.4 to 3.5%, so removing blight from a community can help to stave off the threat of negative equity and foreclosures. Additionally, that lost revenue could have gone into city coffers to fund schools or other much-needed municipal infrastructure.

Blight also poses real risks to life and limb. A 2022 study found that the presence of tax delinquent properties was the strongest predictor of violence in all but four of Richmond’s 148 neighborhoods. Even just the visual presence of blight on a block has been shown to increase surrounding residents’ risk of stress, depression and self-harm.

Petersburg’s problem

When Ward 5 councilman Howard Meyers first moved to Petersburg in 2003, four in five homes in the city were vacant or blighted, he estimates. The last count conducted by city officials in 2019 yielded 297 abandoned properties, but Petersburg residents disagree on whether that count is too low or artificially high.

“I think the blight numbers are inflated,” said Petersburg Mayor Sam Parham. “We have torn down a tremendous amount of blight in the last few years, and now we have a bunch of vacant parcels in need of developers to build infill. Lots of folks are moving to Petersburg because the housing market is red hot in Richmond — we are actually running out of fixer-uppers to be remodeled.”

Since Meyers joined the city council in 2011, Petersburg officials have overseen the demolition of hundreds of blighted properties, sometimes with the assistance of soldiers from Fort Lee, in order to open up greenspace where vacant, deteriorating homes once stood. With the money for such efforts coming from the city’s general fund, however, there is a limit to how much the city can do by itself.

“The funding is always gobbled up as more and more houses fall into disrepair as families move out of town or aging residents can’t care for their property,” Meyer said. “The blight is 70% better than it was 20 years ago, and today you can see [Petersburg] booming. Folks are renovating, rebuilding and filling in the gaps where we demolished properties.”

Part of Petersburg’s success has stemmed from its unique ability in the commonwealth to tax blighted properties at a higher rate. Authority to institute a D.C.-style blight tax, wherein dilapidated buildings are charged 10-20 times more per $100 of assessed value, stems from a 2020 law carried by then-delegate and now-Sen. Lashrecse Aird. Meyers requested Aird patron HB 755 after hearing of the success of the blight tax in our nation’s capital.

Where Meyers believes the state could be more helpful is through the creation of a new first-time homebuyers renovation grant, as well as a program to assist residents with preventative maintenance so that their properties don’t slide into disrepair.

“It can be really hard to get the bank to loan you the money you need to make necessary repairs,” he said. “There are organizations that come down and make necessary repairs like project:HOMES, but I’d like to see something broader and more effective so we are not tapping out these nonprofits.”

Marion remodel

Deep in Southwest Virginia, the town of Marion had grown accustomed to pockets of blight, but the infusion of pandemic relief dollars gave local leaders the chance to both address blight and expand the growing area’s housing stock. Last year, Smyth County conducted a housing needs assessment and found that their jurisdiction (which includes Marion) needs an additional 1,000 housing units to keep up with the demand from Emory & Henry College’s expansion in the area.

Currently, Marion has just 3,000 housing units total, and not all of them are in truly habitable condition.

“We’ve had people living in houses where you could look through the bedroom floor and see the river running under the house,” said Ken Heath, executive director of Marion Downtown. “Hidden right in plain view there is a need for people to be able to rent something better. If we can eliminate blighted structures and help people achieve homeownership, then that is a win-win for the town.”

Heath worked with the mayor and town council to establish Marion’s Blighted, Abandoned, Underutilized and Derelict (BAUD) Program as a systemic way to rehab blighted residential, commercial and even publicly-owned properties. If a structure can be saved, BAUD prioritizes adaptive reuse, but all too often the only answer for many abandoned buildings is demolition.

Over the last year BAUD accumulated more than 50 properties through donations and purchases funded by tax sales and the local economic development authority. 90% of those vacant properties were tear-downs. After a blighted structure is demolished, Marion puts the empty lots on the market for realtors to sell to first-time homebuyers.

Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner awarded Marion a $1 million dollar grant to establish a revolving loan fund to support BAUD’s work, allowing the town to duplicate the success of their small business loan fund, which has quintupled the number of entrepreneurs in Marion.

“The pandemic funds were the gas in the car to get going, but the resale of properties is going to be the way to keep [BAUD] sustainable,” said Heath. “The end result is great housing for people in this community and boosted tax revenue for the town so we can go further.”

Marion’s next big challenge is how to address spot blight — one dilapidated property in an otherwise okay neighborhood. Traditional community development block grants allow localities to put forward an entire neighborhood for revitalization funding, but such programs aren’t designed to support targeted action across an entire town. If spot blight isn’t addressed, however, the problem can spiral out of control.

“You end up having a housing or commercial stock that is so dilapidated that people around them begin moving out and the problem cascades so that every third or fourth house in an area is run down,” Heath said. “Then the cancer spreads and the whole neighborhood is worn down.”

“Nothing new under the sun”

Two defeated bills from Hampton Democratic Del. Jeion Ward and Sen. Mamie Locke show that the fight against blight goes far beyond Central and Southwest Virginia. If passed during the 2023 General Assembly session, HB 1482 and SB 832 would have “permit[ted] any city and certain towns to require, by ordinance, the owner of any building that has been vacant for at least 12 months and that may endanger the public health, safety, or welfare to register such building annually.”

Both measures, unfortunately, failed; however, lawmakers could allow localities to create registries of derelict properties this year if a bill from Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield survives session.

Although additional assistance from the state in both policy and funding would be helpful, Petersburg and Marion show that resourceful localities can do much on their own to fight blight.

“There’s nothing really new under the sun,” Heath said. “It’s just someone taking the time to put all the pieces together. We haven’t found a reason not to do it except that it’s hard work.”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2024/01/31/fighting-blight-how-cities-across-virginia-are-addressing-abandoned-property/

Published and (C) by Virginia Mercury
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/virginiamercury/