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Code Enforcement System

How Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Affect Communities

Learn how vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties—referred to by some as “blighted properties”—pose significant costs to public health, property values, and local taxpayers.

What are Proactive Rental Inspection Programs?: Keeping Homes Occupied and Communities Healthy

Proactive rental inspection programs shift code enforcement from reactive to strategic, identifying health hazards like lead paint, mold, and broken heating before they harm tenants or push properties toward vacancy. Learn how local governments design effective programs, with examples from cities across the country.

Why Home Repair Programs Are Essential for Preventing Property Vacancy and Abandonment

Home repair is a core strategy to stop properties from becoming vacant in the first place.

Our Commitment to Code Enforcement: 2024 Recap

In 2024, Community Progress doubled down on its commitment to helping local governments use code enforcement to address VAD properties.

Celebrating Legislative Wins to Combat Vacancy in Missouri and Alabama

Effective legislation is a vital piece of equipping state and local governments to effectively address vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties (VAD). Through our Land Bank Incubator Scholarship Program, over the last three years Community Progress has been honored to support local efforts to craft and advance these pieces of legislation….

The Problem with Calling Neighborhoods with Vacant Properties “Blighted”

Blight is a shorthand term many people use to refer to properties they perceive as problematic in some way.

What is Code Enforcement?

Code enforcement from A to Z: when it works, when it doesn’t, and how local governments can make code enforcement systems more fair for all.

From Harm to Home: Replicating Detroit’s Make it Home Program

The City of Detroit’s innovative Make it Home program harnesses the power of the traditionally harmful property tax foreclosure process and uses it to increase affordable homeownership, improve housing conditions, and stabilize neighborhoods.

What does equitable code enforcement look like? How Louisville is taking steps to use its code enforcement process to advance racial equity

With technical assistance support from Community Progress, Louisville is reforming their housing and building code enforcement with equity in mind.

Approaches to Rural Property Vacancy in Law and Policy

This is an excerpt of Chapter 8 of Tackling Vacancy and Abandonment: Strategies and Impacts After the Great Recession, jointly produced by the Center for Community Progress, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. It has been lightly edited and condensed for the web….