Blog

Vacant Land Stewardship

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.

How Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Affect the Community

Vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties—referred to by some as “blighted properties”—pose significant costs to public health, property values, local taxpayers, and more.

How to Prevent and Reduce Illegal Dumping

Cities spend millions each year cleaning up illegal dumping. What if they tried to make vacant lots less appealing to dumping in the first place?

New Study Shows Land Bank Ownership of Vacant Lots Can Reduce Violent Crime

A vacant lot owned and cared for by a land bank sees a greater decrease in crime compared to privately owned lots, finds 2023 study in Flint, MI.

Transforming Cleveland Vacant Lots into an Urban Farm

How the Cuyahoga Land Bank and a community activist worked together to transform a block one property at a time.

Vacant Land is More Than a Single Lot—it’s a System.

Conceptualizing vacant land as a system makes it possible to identify where strategic interventions can push the system toward different, more desirable outcomes.

What Causes “Urban Prairies” in Shrinking Cities?

As cities shrink, once-urban land becomes available for other uses or reverts to nature, leading to the phenomenon of “urban prairies.”

Resources for Community Revitalization Leaders Adapting to Climate Change

A list of evidence-backed tools you can use to learn and think about community revitalization and climate adaptation for your community.

Resident Engagement in Vacant Lot Greening: Empowering Communities for Neighborhood Revitalization

This is an excerpt of Chapter 11 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….

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….

Lots to Love in Beall’s Hill

We’re pleased to share this guest post from Emily Hopkins with the Historic Macon Foundation about their participation in this year’s national #LoveThatLot campaign. A once-vacant lot in the Beall’s Hill neighborhood of Macon, Georgia, experienced a lot of love on Sunday, February 21. Parents and their children, couples with…

Vacant industrial spaces are reborn to support a new age of small-scale manufacturing

There’s a myth surrounding post-industrial economies, Dan Kinkead, acting executive director of Detroit Future City, shares in conversation about the rebirth of small-scale manufacturing in his hometown of Detroit. “The myth is that we need to build new economies around technology and innovation completely divorced from industry,” said Kinkead. “But…

Two new resources to inform short- and long-term vacant land reuse

When it comes to vacant land reuse, perhaps no other city in the nation faces as great of a challenge and as much of an opportunity as Detroit. Currently, Detroit has an inventory of more than 100,000 vacant parcels without buildings. In terms of land mass, that’s around 20 square…

On East Side of Detroit, managing vacant land takes collaboration

Cross-posted from Next City, this article is one of a ten-part series inspired by the 2015 Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference. The verdure of spring is on full display in Detroit — but so, too, are the challenges of maintaining open land in a fiscally challenged city where over 30 percent…

On World Food Day, a look at food justice & urban ag with Garden Justice Legal Initiative in Philadelphia

On World Food Day, which is themed “Family Farming: Feeding the World, Caring for the Earth” this year, we’re exploring how the reuse of vacant properties can be a critical component of achieving food security and justice. In order to successfully eliminate entrenched, systemic blight communities must support a wide array of…

Flint’s framework for the future

This article was originally published in the Summer 2014 issue of Breaking Ground, our quarterly newsletter. To receive Breaking Ground in your inbox, please join our email list. It might go without saying, but the City of Flint in 2014 is very different from the Flint of 1960. Decades of…

Webcast: Community Progress speaks on vacant properties and land banks at HUD

In conjunction with the release of HUD’s latest issue of “Evidence Matters,” Kim Graziani and Alan Mallach were invited to speak at HUD’s Quarterly Briefing last week. They were joined by U.S. Representative and Community Progress co-founder Dan Kildee (MI), Yolanda Chavez, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Grant Programs in HUD’s Office of…

From problems to possibility: Collaborative teams reshape brownfields planning in West Virginia

Kathy Wittner didn’t realize exactly what she was getting into when she agreed to be part of a small-town revitalization team organized by the West Virginia Redevelopment Collaborative, a subsidiary of the Northern West Virginia Brownfields Assistance Center (BAC). “I came in cold,” says Wittner, a professor of landscape architecture at West Virginia…

How the garden grows: A Q&A with Mark Covington

In our recent report, Placemaking in Legacy Cities: Opportunities and Good Practices, we share the story of Mark Covington, who, through his passion and hard work, was able to create the vibrant Georgia Street Community Collective on formerly vacant lots in Detroit. His story of how he was able to turn his…

Can we demolish our way to revitalization?

Originally posted on the National Housing Institute’s Rooflines blog While the answer to that question in the title of this piece is obvious, there’s a strong case to be made that a lot of the buildings that make up America’s older cities may have to go, if these cities are…