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Many thanks to the Post Standard’s Urban Affairs editor Maureen Sieh for writing the real story on vacant houses in our neighborhoods: the fact that their number is growing and that they endanger our neighbors. Thanks also to video/photo guy Peter Chen for filming it, as well!
I am happy to see this article, and participated more than I usually like to, because I have been on a crusade to roll back the false impression that a prior Post Standard article gave about vacant houses in our neighborhoods. In February of 2008, the Post-Standard featured a story on the front page of the Sunday paper entitled “Nobody’s Home.” The article was a puff piece on the alleged progress that the Driscoll administration had made on dealing with the large volume of vacant houses in the city.
The article led me to post a rebuttal entitled : “On Vacant Houses In Syracuse.” I think that this new coverage does the trick, erasing the false information contained in that article.
Our reward? More work! Now we have to create a Land Bank, toughen up Code Enforcement, create a vacant house maintenance ordinance. It never ends. But at least the truth’s out there!
New York State is on the cusp of approving legislation to create land banks, public authorities that are vested with the sole power to develop or demolish tax delinquent vacant properties in designated areas. The bill would authorize the creation of three land banks in the state, in sort of a pilot project.
The Metropolitan Development Association has received funding from the Ford Foundation to help design an Onondaga County/Syracuse land bank. In order to promote the land bank idea, the MDA brought Dan Kildee, the CEO and president of the Genesee County (Michigan) land bank, to Syracuse to discuss how Syracuse would benefit from the creation of its own land bank.
The land bank that Kildee runs includes the city of Flint Michigan and is considered amazingly successful, boasting some impressive figures in its seven years of operation: increasing the home values of area residents by $112 million, developing several commercial buildings in the downtown Flint area, helping 2,300 families avoid tax foreclosure and stay in their homes, rehabbing 50 homes and building 43 new homes on vacant lots.
The most impressive facet of the operation is how thoroughly the land bank controls development in Genesee County, taking over from rogue developers and house flippers. The byword for development is the health of the community, rather than the health of out-of-towners’ bankrolls. In a town that has lost 40% of its population, most of its economy (with the closing of the GM plant that once employed three-quarters of all Flint residents) and state takeover of the bankrupt city government, the Land Bank gives a measure of control back to the community.
Among the aspects of Genesee County’s land bank that would be helpful in Syracuse is the ability to self-finance demolitions (rather than relying on perpetually declining funds from the federal government), the creation of summer jobs for youth maintaining vacant lots/properties and a streamlined process to transfer vacant lots to adjacent owners for more green space, driveways etc.
There are two troubling problems with the Genesee County model that need to be discussed when weighing the benefits of opening a Syracuse land bank:
1) The ratio of demolitions to home rehabilitation and new construction. Flint knocked down over 900 vacant houses and have rehabbed or repaired a shade under 100. The goal is to find a way to preserve the amazing housing stock in Syracuse’s inner city, beautiful large wood frame houses. We do not want to demolish our way out of this problem.
2) Inability of the land bank to control vacant properties that are not tax delinquent. A majority of the 1200 vacant houses in Syracuse are not tax delinquent. How do we avoid the flipping, absentee landlords and deterioration of these properties? Kildee suggested beefing up code enforcement, creating a strict sanction and fine structure for vacant houses that will either see the home renovated or the owners give up the house for taxes, allowing the land bank to assume control.
The evening was full of interesting information and innovative ideas that can be used to help both the city of Syracuse and parts of Onondaga County deal with what has seemed like an intractable problem. So why wasn’t the event covered by the local newspaper and why did so few elected officials from the city and county attend? Props should be given to Common Council President Bea Gonzalez and County Legislators Tom Buckel and Kathleen Rapp for their attendance. The M.D.A. should also be given credit for spearheading an innovative project that could have an important effect on neighborhoods in the city and county traditionally ignored in our rush to address the concerns of downtown and University Hill.
Update: The Post Standard finally chimed in, two days late. This is getting to be standard practice. Evening meetings are either covered in absentia or not at all. This is a direct reflection of the continued downsizing of the P-S staff.
This photo is of the remains of a sewage backup that the absentee
landlords of 170 W. Brighton Ave. pumped out of
the basement into the adjoining yard. This apartment building tells
a years’ long tale of our neighborhood’s abuse
at the hands of slumlords and neglect at the hands of city officials.
The apartment building was owned for years by Harry Murphy, a
notorious Southside slumlord. The apartments
were actually two buildings–each containing 12 units. Tales of
drug trafficking, noise and gun shots were common
at this property, nicknamed Fort Apache by area residents. Many
members of the Brighton Brigades gang cycled
through the property. The properties taxes were unpaid for years.
This was actually a strategic move on the part of
Mr. Murphy, since the city decreed that it would not issue a
certificate of compliance–required of all multi-unit buildings
in the city–since the owner was tax delinquent. Was the logical
next step closure of the building until the taxes were
paid and the buildings inspected for code violations? No. The next
step was to do nothing. SUN complained to
Code Enforcement, the Community Development Commissioner, numerous
Common Councilors and the Mayor.
No response.
The building was sold in 2005 to an out-of-town developer based in
Long Island. The taxes remain unpaid, totaling
over $22, 000–not including the current years arrears. A fire
destroyed a good portion of one of the buildings, one
tenants manner of settling a dispute with another tenant. In 2007,
162 W. Brighton was torn down.
As a result of SUN’s complaints on Wednesday May 21st, city DPW came
out to the remaining building and stopped
the landlord’s hired men from pumping more sewage into the adjacent
lawn. City Code Enforcement and the County
Health Department both came out the next day as a result of our
complaints. The building was declared unfit for
habitation and the landlord hired a knowledgeable plumber to drain
the remaining sewage. County Health determined
that the sewage pumped onto the lawn could stay there, as the sun
would kill any toxins.
With the exception of Tim Carroll, Director of Operations, who
managed to get DPW out to the site and stop the pumping,
no one acted with concern or speed. Code did not
return phone calls on either Wednesday or Thursday evening. The
Health Department did not return Wednesday’s
phone message and when contacted on Thursday stated they would get to
the dumping site the next day
“if nothing big came up.”
Five families still remain in the unfit building. They do not
qualify under HUD guidelines for relocation assistance. The
agency the city used to help relocate families in unfit properties
went out of business and the city never replaced the
service, despite putting $10,000 into the CDBG budget for this
purpose two years ago.
Remember, when you say nobody gives a shit about us, you are
absolutely right!
Update June 2009: Please see the Post-Standard’s new article on this issue–“One In Five Homes Vacant In Syracuse.” They finally got it right. Also, check out the video!
It was strange to wake up on a recent Sunday, pick up my copy of the Post Standard and see that the lead story on the front page was about vacant houses. This is an issue that SUN has been working on for the past 14 years. I have invested more time, thought and research into this issue than any other in my community organizing career.
The article entitled “Nobody’s home” was highly misleading. According to the reporter Greg Munno the story unfolds this way: Vacant and abandoned houses are a nasty problem throughout the Northeast. Buffalo is a good example of a city hard-hit by the problems. Syracuse, while struggling with the problem, has made amazing progress and several new initiatives will actually help the city “turn the corner” on the problem.
Bullshit.
Who did the Post Standard interview from Syracuse for this story? A Tipp Hill resident, Kerry Quaglia, the executive director of Home Headquarters and Mayor Driscoll. All of the people in the article conform to the preconceived story line of eventual triumph over the problem: the resident on Tipp Hill lives near a house that has been rehabbed. Kerry Quaglia’s agency does rehabs and Mayor Driscoll is proposing the plans that will “turn the corner” on the problem.
The Post does admit that while Tipp Hill has avoided the fate of many vacant houses “other Syracuse neighborhoods haven’t been so lucky.” But no information about these poor neighborhoods is given. The story may not have fit the already set thesis if the focus of article had been the poor neighborhoods on the city’s south and near west sides–the epicenter of the problem with vacant and abandoned houses.
The Post is absolutely correct when it writes that “vacant homes tend to be clustered in the city’s poorest areas and are both a cause and consequence of poverty.” and “Even with that investment and more than 300 demolitions a year, the vacancy rate grew in the 1990s, according to the U.S. Census.” The 2000 U.S. census documents that the ten low-income census tracts on the south and near-west sides comprise 15% of the city’s households. City records show that these same neighborhoods harbor 45% of the city’s vacant houses.
Unfortunately, the specific details about the problems that vacant and abandoned houses cause is all taken from Buffalo. No mention of the crime, arson, vandalism, decreased home values and inability to get property insurance in Syracuse neighborhoods is mentioned in this article. Of course, that would violate the premise of the article–Syracuse is getting better all the time.
The Post also uses questionable information to back up its “turn the corner” premise:
1) “In the last six months, for instance, the number of vacant residential structures fell from about 1,300 to just over 1,000.”
According to a computer print out dated January 2, 2008 provided to SUN by the Department of Code Enforcement, the city listed 1,225 vacant houses in the city of Syracuse. This is an increase of 120 from a similar print out provided to SUN in January of 2007. The Post cites Home Headquarters for its figures of 1,033 current vacant houses and “about 1,300” six months ago. The Post overstates the top number of vacant houses and low balls the new number of vacant houses.
2) This decline is “partially due to several large demolitions, such as the razing of the Shady Willows Estates apartment complex on Onondaga Creek Boulevard.”
The Shady Willows development of dilapidated apartments was demolished many years ago. In fact, Home Headquarters received $1,000,000 in SNI funding for demolition of Shady Willows in 2002 and an additional $250,000 in SNI funding in 2003 for cleaning up the toxic oil spill found underneath the buildings. The Southside Charter school built their new building on that site in 2007.
3) “Nonprofit agencies have been snatching up homes to rehabilitate since Syracuse started a program last year of selling abandoned, tax-delinquent homes to nonprofits for a dollar.”
According to (PDF alert) the Mayor’s State of The City address, only 24 houses (two percent of the total number of vacants) have been bought–all by Home Headquarters. The reason they haven’t been “snatched up” is that the city may only collect a dollar, but they require the non-profit to set up a $10,000 escrow account, scaring off smaller non-profits.
So, are we turning the corner on vacant and abandoned houses in Syracuse? The city demolishes about 300 houses each year and another 20 or so vacant houses burn down each year. Despite these subtractions the overall number of vacant houses hovers between 1,100 and 1,200 every year. The city is proposing two programs–one for non-profits and one for private developers that may help rehab 60 houses next year. It is unclear if the participants will have the capacity to maintain that level of commitment after next year. That takes care of roughly five percent of the current number of vacant houses in the city.
As Robert Redford’s character stated in the great political movie “The Candidate”: “I don’t think we can see the corner, much less turn it.”
