Resolving Vacancy: promoting urban vitality

Challenges remain for redeveloping vacant land. Community and city based organizations often attack the source with singular approaches. Instead, a more comprehensive approach should address a strategy to implement, while balancing the social, political, and environmental ramifications. In most cases, the main goal of city officials is to work for the community’s interests and well being. 

    Bowman and Pagano list three imperatives that influence cities’ decisions within the U.S. federal system:
 

    1.    the need to enhance the city’s fiscal state;
    2.    the need to limit social disruption and protect property values;
    3.    the need to maintain and enhance the community image6.
 

However, their actions are determined by other constraints both internal and external to city affairs. Actions on vacant properties are influenced by the context and setting. Cities can use vacancy to generate revenue, define communities, or enhance existing conditions.
 

    Cities may treat vacant land as a tax generating property. However, some developments may generate more revenue than others. For instance, a commercial storefront selling higher priced goods like jewelry may produce more tax revenue than a coffee shop. Maximizing revenue for the city, the “land-tax dynamic”, thus becomes a key strategy in deciding any vacancy outcome7.
 

    Vacant lots also serve as social indicators of defining neighborhoods – separating areas along income and class lines. Acting as social buffers, vacancy can protect property values by allowing groups to cluster together. Such is the case with New York City’s Central Park and its border properties8. City policy may dictate vacancy as planned parks, open space, or transportation corridors9. Therefore, the social makeup resulting from a city intervention should factor in any changes made.
 

    Finally, the act of developing vacant properties can improve a city’s image. Cities may appropriate public funds for generating economic activity – either through subsidization for developers, improved infrastructure, or other public works related projects that would encourage additional development. Chicago’s opening of Millennium Park resulted from the development of a downtown blighted eyesore - the transformation of exposed railroad tracks into a multifunctional public park. Its construction enhanced the city by providing additional public space, while drawing additional tourist traffic to its downtown lakefront with world-class architecture and art. The economic effects are both immediate - an improved streetscape - and long term – providing the opportunity to compete economically with other cities10.
 

    Overall, a city’s reaction to vacancy will address a combination of the three imperatives mentioned above – allowing for a sound fiscal position, providing social stability for its neighborhoods, and developing economic viability. 

6 Bowman, Ann O’M and Michael A. Pagano. “Vacant Land in Cities: An Urban Resource”. (The Brookings Institution, December 2000), 35.

7 Bowman, Ann O’M and Michael A. Pagano. “Vacant Land in Cities: An Urban Resource”. (The Brookings Institution, December 2000), 40-41.

8 Harden, Blaine. “Neighbors Give Central Park A Wealthy Glow”. New York Times, 22 November 1999.

9 Bowman, Ann O’M and Michael A. Pagano. “Vacant Land in Cities: An Urban Resource”. (The Brookings Institution, December 2000), 44.

10 Bowman, Ann O’M and Michael A. Pagano. “Vacant Land in Cities: An Urban Resource”. (The Brookings Institution, December 2000), 44-45.

Rethinking Vacancy

Vacant land litters American cities like the trash strewn along their streets. It could be a foreclosed home, or the empty business storefront. Perhaps it is the overgrown corner lot, filled with litter, or a future site awaiting development. In their many guises, they reside in rural, industrial, or urban settings. “Vacant” is the label used to describe these abandoned properties. Often, these properties, underutilized land within the built city, challenge a community with the task of trying to incorporate them into its well-being. 

    Although the scope of this phenomenon is nationwide, cities rarely have a central department that tracks their location. According to the Brookings Institute, vacant and abandoned properties account for 15 percent of the area of the typical large city, more than 12,000 acres on average1. Can they present the opportunity to be a resource, reprogrammed into the urban system? Large metropolitan cities such as Detroit, Michigan and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania have taken such steps to combat blight. 

    The term “vacant lot” conjures up negative images. It frequently is described as decaying, derelict, empty, or dangerous. These undesirable conditions result in its description as an “urban wasteland”:

[A] place may be considered derelict to the extent that the symbols of disinvestment, vacancy, and degradation dominate. Where disrepair, litter, emptiness, violation, and other signs of diminished habitat prevail, a derelict zone exists in mind if not reality2. As a result, decaying structures leave harmful impressions of deterioration. 

 

fig. 15
The Contagion Effect of Vacant Land: The Impact of Vacant Lots on Surrounding Properties
(source: Fairmont Ventures, Inc. “Vacant Land Management In Philadelphia Neighborhoods: Cost Benefit Analysis,” report prepared for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), April 1999. Reprinted by permission of PHS.

    Moreover, vacancy portends future abandonment through its spread by contagion. In the book, Terra Incognita, Bowman and Pagano use a declining commercial district as an example to describe this contagion effect3  [fig. 15]. First, store closings may result in less retail traffic, which can endanger remaining businesses. Less business threatens its economic viability and increases the rate of vacancy. Second, storefronts become boarded up, reinforcing a canyon of shuttered windows along a commercial corridor. Lastly, decreased maintenance of these structures may result in demolition, leaving permanent voids that become “dead space”. 

    What remains is a blighted area, stained by bleak, isolated lots lined with chain link and barbed wire. A study conducted by the Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project and the Temple University Center for Public Policy states that “estimates of the impact of abandonment on property values in a neighborhood provide a basis to project potential benefits from renovating abandoned properties4”. Properties closer to vacancies “had lower prices…than properties located farther from abandoned properties5”.

    Reasons vary for this perpetual cycle.  Many properties may have been abandoned for years. At some point, a landlord may decide that a rental property is too expensive to keep up and further decline follows. As a result, this decay and abandonment deters potential buyers or renters. A study conducted in Philadelphia, Pa. found that a vacant lot dampened the value of eight nearby properties [fig 3]. Moreover, multiple vacancies on a block can blight entire stretches of a street with undesirable effects.  

    Although most people perceive vacant land as a negative needing correction, can vacant land offer opportunity? Can available space become a resource, not a detractor?

    After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, much of the city’s ruinous rubble was dumped into Lake Michigan providing more vacant land for the city to grow. Similar stories of American cities filling in wetlands or shorelines were crucial to their initial growth. A growing city can view vacancy as an asset for development. Moreover, these available resources can be used to promote a planned vision.

    Three typologies, that this paper will investigate, track the cycle of a property’s development: the abandoned lot, the construction site, and the empty storefront or building. The abandoned lot is a cleared parcel that waits to be infilled by a program or structure. Properties that are under construction may be considered buildings under development or renovation. Empty buildings or storefronts are, typically, spaces temporarily unoccupied. All three types above address the cyclical nature of a given property’s life.

1 Bowman, Ann O’M and Michael A. Pagano. “Vacant Land in Cities: An Urban Resource”. (The Brookings Institution, December 2000), 1.

2 Jakle, John A. and David Wilson. Derelict Landscapes: The Wasting of America’s Built Environment (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), 9.

3 Bowman, Ann O’M and Michael A. Pagano. “Vacant Land in Cities: An Urban Resource”. (The Brookings Institution, December 2000), 2.

4 Gordon Whitman, Anne Shlay, Steve Honeyman, and Roy Diamond. “Blight Free Philadelphia: A Public-Private Strategy to Create and Enhance Neighborhood Value”. (Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Center for Public Policy and Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project, with assistance from Diamond & Associates, 2001), 20.

5 Gordon Whitman, Anne Shlay, Steve Honeyman, and Roy Diamond. “Blight Free Philadelphia: A Public-Private Strategy to Create and Enhance Neighborhood Value”. (Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Center for Public Policy and Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project, with assistance from Diamond & Associates, 2001), 21.