Our Commitment to Code Enforcement: 2024 Recap

Housing and building code enforcement is one of local government’s most important tools to stabilize and strengthen neighborhoods. It also forms the foundation of other strategies to address vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties, including land banking.   

In 2024, Community Progress doubled down on its commitment to helping local governments use code enforcement to address VAD properties and sharing best practices to craft more equitable, efficient, and effective code enforcement systems.  

Reevaluating Code Enforcement: A New Approach to Addressing Problem Properties 

We created a new resource, Reevaluating Code Enforcement: A New Approach to Addressing Problem Properties, that describes how local governments can shift from traditional code enforcement—a reactive, punitive-based approach that treats all properties the same—to a more strategic approach that focuses on code compliance.  

Technical Assistance Scholarships 

We launched Technical Assistance scholarships focused on code enforcement. Community Progress awarded our first scholarships to the City of Lima, Ohio; the City of Birmingham, Alabama; and the City of Cleveland, Ohio:  

• In Lima, we identified practice and policy changes that could help the code enforcement department improve relationships with homeowners. We also used the City’s enforcement data to show how County-level policies limited the City’s ability to address vacant properties, spurring a push for policy changes.  

• In Birmingham, we helped the code enforcement department educate key internal and community stakeholders about a new state law tool the City can now use to address vacant properties—priority code lien foreclosure—and helped craft an action plan for implementation.   

• In Cleveland, we are helping the City develop a new training curriculum for code enforcement officers and staff centered around a strategic code compliance approach.  

Code Enforcement Roundtable at RVP 

At our Reclaiming Vacant Properties (RVP) conference in St. Louis, Missouri, we co-hosted a roundtable with the Strategic Code Enforcement Management Academy (SCEMA) that brought together leading practitioners and thinkers on code enforcement to discuss the current definition of strategic code enforcement. We shared key takeaways from the roundtable at one of SCEMA’s virtual lectures. These takeaways included: 

• Focusing on interdepartmental collaboration 

• Strengthening leadership 

• Deploying proactive and preventive measures 

• Using data to help shape responses and measure outcomes  

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Is your city is ready to make the shift to more equitable, efficient, and effective code enforcement in 2025? Contact our Technical Assistance team or apply for our second round of code enforcement Technical Assistance Scholarships. Applications are open through Friday, January 24, 2025. Apply here »