May 23, 2017
It was September 2013, and I was in a conference room somewhere in the City of Syracuse with about twenty other individuals from across New York State for our first meeting of New York land bank leaders. At the time, I was the Director of Planning, Housing and Community Development for the City of Binghamton, and I was there on behalf of the Broome County Land Bank, one of the first eight land banks created under the state’s 2011 state enabling legislation.
The small group was comprised of practitioners and elected officials. All of us were still trying to figure out how to run a land bank, let alone how to communicate to residents and partners what a land bank even does. None of our land banks had been in operation for more than a year.
And yet at the front of the room, here were these wonderful people from the Center for Community Progress politely encouraging us to create and sustain a statewide association of land banks.
There was general quiet in the room when they asked who would be willing to lead the effort. All I could think of was my “to-do list” back at City Hall, eighty miles away, and nearly that long with a seemingly endless list of tasks and action-items. “These people are crazy,” I thought. “Nice, but crazy.”
Katelyn Wright, there representing the Greater Syracuse Land Bank, finally spoke up and agreed to lead the effort of this informal network of New York’s land bank pioneers. The collective sigh from the rest of us was audible.
Fast forward to May 2017, and the land bank movement in New York has gone from a network of fledgling upstarts to a leader in the national field of practice.
Yes, I imagine the reader may find my bold pronouncement a bit biased. Fortunately, you needn’t take my word.
This month, the New York Land Bank Association (NYLBA)—now a strong, active professional association of dues-paying members—released a report that documents the origins, growth, and successes of the land bank movement in New York. (Full disclosure: Community Progress took the lead on preparing the report on behalf of NYLBA.)
As far as we know, the report is the first of its kind in the field, and it provides a compelling case of how land banks—when properly funded, guided by thoughtful leaders, and tailored appropriately to address local needs—can serve as powerful tools for returning vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties to productive use.
It’s not just a document of soaring rhetoric and neatly packaged anecdotes. The report also quantifies the positive fiscal and economic impacts of land bank interventions, making a solid case to local, county and state leaders (and community partners) that reliable funding can generate returns that exceed even some of the most ambitious projections.
Check out some of the metrics–which represent the total output of the ten land banks that received awards from Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s $32 million dollar Community Revitalization Initiative—featured in the report:
The report also chronicles the impressive success NYLBA has had with its annual legislative agenda, offers a collage of local snapshots of success (from supporting transformative trailway projects in Chautauqua County in western New York to reactivating long dormant and tax-delinquent brownfields in Suffolk County, Long Island), and hints at what’s next for land banking in New York. For anybody in the field of practice or with interest in land banks, this report is an excellent read.
As somebody who has been involved with land banking in New York since its inception, and who can draw on perspectives as both practitioner and now one of the nice, crazy folks from Community Progress (I fit in perfectly), I offer a few key takeaways for land bank leaders and advocates to consider:
For land bank leaders out there, consider this one of the most important lessons from New York: never stop educating the community about the significance of your work. Where possible, work with partners to quantify the costs of blight. Feature the stories of neighbors, tenants, and owners positively impacted by your work. Celebrate your successes. As politicians come and go, and budgets ebb and flow, it’s critical to be constantly building a wider and deeper network of allies that understand the value and efficacy of your work.
Congratulations to our good friends across New York who have made the first five years of land banking in New York such a remarkable success. Together, you’ve all set a new bar of excellence for others to emulate, and this new report offers a rich account of your first five years.
So keep up the fine work. An inspired national field of practice is now watching.
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