community revitalization
Vacant and “Blighted” Properties in the American South: Historical Causes and Today’s Patterns
In the American South, vacant, abandoned, and deteriorating properties—which some call “blighted” properties—are the physical footprint of hundreds of years of deliberate wealth extraction and policies designed to prevent Black and low-income Southerners from building wealth by owning property.
Examining that history helps explain a pattern still visible today. The South has a significant number of vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties spanning a wide geography and disproportionately affecting Black communities. The South also has a unique set of policy conditions and historical context that makes revitalization more challenging, including a legacy of slavery, significant outmigration, fragile ownership, and limited tools and resources to intervene. This article explains how those dynamics came to be.
Executive Summary
Vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties in the American South (defined in this piece as Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee) are the physical legacy of more than 150 years of deliberate policy choices designed to prevent Black and low-income Southerners from building wealth through property ownership.
- Disinvestment in the South is concentrated in Black communities—the result of intentional, compounding policy decisions. There is a clear historical path from the rescinded promise of “40 acres and a mule” to the patterns of fragile ownership and neighborhood disinvestment seen today across much of the historical “Black Belt.” Racially targeted policy decisions had a compounding effect as they layered atop one another to weaken Black property ownership in the South (e.g., racial covenants, exclusionary zoning, urban renewal, redlining, lending discrimination). When Black communities did build wealth, that wealth could easily be destroyed overnight through racial violence.
- The South has fewer policy tools and resources to address the problem. Key challenges include widespread heirs’ property issues (where fractured title makes it difficult or impossible for owners to get loans or access aid available to homeowners), weak renter protections, few land banks, inadequate code enforcement and delinquent property tax enforcement systems, deep poverty with limited safety-net support, and a long-standing gap in philanthropic investment compared to the rest of the country.
- The South also simultaneously contains some of the nation’s fastest-growing and most steeply declining communities. Thriving metro areas like Atlanta, Nashville, Raleigh, and Charleston have relatively low vacancy and are gaining population, while the Mississippi Delta has the region’s highest concentrations of vacant properties and population decline.
- Disinvestment in the South was baked into laws, policies, and practices. Reinvestment must start with reforming systems at the same level. Policies that prioritize effective code enforcement, repair assistance, tax systems that reduce ownership limbo and provide front-end protections, stronger land banks, and better heirs’ property support can help Southern communities turn deteriorated and vacant properties back into community assets.
Part 1.
How Racialized Property Policy Shaped the South's Housing Landscape
The Origins of Property Instability in the South
Before the first white colonists set foot in the southeastern United States, the land was home to the Choctaw, Muscogee, Cherokee, and dozens of other Indigenous nations with sophisticated systems of land stewardship.
From the earliest days of European settlement, colonial powers used violence, coerced treaties, and steady settler expansion to displace these communities. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 provided legal framework to scale up what had already been happening for two centuries. It forced over 125,000 Native Americans on what became known as the Trail of Tears, a death march relocating them to reservations west of the Mississippi.
This pattern of using laws and statutes to formalize violent methods of taking land came to define American property policy. Systems of property ownership were constructed from the beginning to protect the land claims of white settlers while extinguishing all others. Legal mechanisms like title registration, inheritance law, and mortgage access were designed and administered to make it nearly impossible for Native and Black individuals to establish and maintain their right to own property.
In the case of chattel slavery—a term for the colonial system of slavery where people were the personal property or “chattel” of their owners for life—the economic foundation of the institution depended on stripping an entire population of the ability to own anything at all. On the eve of the Civil War, the nearly 4 million enslaved people in the United States had a market value of between $3.1-3.6 billion in today’s dollars. To put that in perspective, that amount was more than triple the national value of all banks, factories, farmland, and railroads at the time. With little invested in the commercial and manufacturing economy, the Southern economy was architecturally dependent on the labor of enslaved people.
Yet the people who physically built that economy—and their descendants—reaped none of the wealth.
What Happened to "40 Acres and a Mule"?
The end of the Civil War briefly changed the equation. In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Field Order No. 15, confiscating roughly 400,000 acres of Confederate land along the Southeast coast and redistributing it in 40-acre parcels to newly freed Black families. This was the origin of “40 acres and a mule” in the American memory. (Though mules were not specifically mentioned in the order, many families received army mules in addition to provisions.) It was the first major federal attempt at something resembling direct reparations.
This effort to redistribute land to the people who had labored on it without pay was short-lived. President Andrew Johnson—a Southerner whose postwar decisions aligned far more with the defeated Confederacy than with the Union-led Congress—rescinded the order later that same year, returning the land to its former Confederate owners. In his 1978 book Forty Acres and a Mule, historian Claude F. Oubre cited an American Missionary Association estimate that, by November 1865, some 105,000 freedmen in Virginia alone had been rendered “houseless, homeless, and helpless.” The policy’s swift reversal kicked off a pattern of promising land to Black Americans only to withdraw or withhold access to it.
Emancipation freed nearly 4 million people into a society that had spent generations excluding them from its economy. Most had been barred from learning to read and write, had no capital, and were given little legal protection or material support to build their new lives. In other words, freedom without property left the "freedmen" acutely vulnerable to white landowners both legally and financially.
The Union considered many resettlement proposals in the aftermath of the Civil War, including transporting the freedmen to homesteads out west or allowing them to “colonize” Texas or Florida. One proposal would have opened 3 million acres of unoccupied public land for homesteading in any state to the freedmen. However, that was limited to Florida, Arkansas, and Mississippi because senators did not want to allow preferential treatment to Black people on land that would appeal to white settlers.
The eventual Southern Homestead Act of 1866 opened 46 million acres of unsold public land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi “for the exclusive use of freedmen and loyal refugees.” But this period of exclusivity only lasted six months. Any (white) settler was able to acquire this land after January 1, 1867.
Most freedmen were unable to purchase land at the time the bill became law, because they were on contracts to work through the end of the year or had already leased and planted land. Efforts to extend the time horizon in Congress beyond six months failed.
The freedmen who did try to claim the land promised to them met aggressive resistance:
- Many government agents opposed the concept of Black people owning land entirely, and white residents were hostile to the newly freed population.
- Segregation began immediately, with even sympathetic leaders suggesting that, whenever possible, freedmen should be settled in colonies isolated from whites to reduce potential conflict.
- While over 46 million acres of public land were nominally available, much of it was heavily forested, swampland, or otherwise not farmable.
Under these conditions, a system of sharecropping emerged. Sharecropping became the dominant form of wage labor in the South among freedmen. Family units of Black Southerners farmed subdivided plots of plantation land and, instead of cash wages, received a share of the crop at the end of the season.
White landowners held significant economic control in this system. They set the crop prices, advanced supplies at inflated costs, and pressured sharecroppers into exploitative contracts by threatening not to renew leases. Many sharecroppers were paid not in dollars but in plantation scrip redeemable only at the landowner’s store, where prices kept them in perpetual debt. The result was a cycle of wage theft with no legal recourse, leaving Black families with little ability to save, let alone buy their own land.
By 1900, most Black farmers still did not own the land they worked.
Comparison by Race of Farm Operators in Seven Selected States of the Deep South, 1900
| Percentage of Farms Operated by Whites | Percentage of Farms Operated by Blacks | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| State | Owner | Manager | Tenant | Owner | Manager | Tenant |
| Alabama | 61.5 | 0.9 | 37.9 | 15.0 | 0.1 | 84.9 |
| Arkansas | 64.4 | 0.6 | 35.0 | 25.4 | 0.2 | 74.4 |
| Georgia | 54.4 | 1.0 | 44.6 | 13.7 | 0.3 | 86.0 |
| Louisiana | 66.2 | 1.7 | 32.1 | 16.2 | 0.1 | 83.7 |
| Mississippi | 66.2 | 0.9 | 32.9 | 16.3 | 0.1 | 83.6 |
| S. Carolina | 57.9 | 1.2 | 40.9 | 22.2 | 0.2 | 77.6 |
| Texas | 53.8 | 0.9 | 45.3 | 30.8 | 0.1 | 69.1 |
| Seven states | 58.9 | 0.9 | 40.2 | 19.1 | 0.1 | 80.8 |
Source: Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule (Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 179.
Comparison by Race of Farm Operators in Seven Selected States of the Deep South, 1900
| Percentage of Farms Operated by Whites | Percentage of Farms Operated by Blacks | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| State | Owner | Manager | Tenant | Owner | Manager | Tenant |
| Alabama | 61.5 | 0.9 | 37.9 | 15.0 | 0.1 | 84.9 |
| Arkansas | 64.4 | 0.6 | 35.0 | 25.4 | 0.2 | 74.4 |
| Georgia | 54.4 | 1.0 | 44.6 | 13.7 | 0.3 | 86.0 |
| Louisiana | 66.2 | 1.7 | 32.1 | 16.2 | 0.1 | 83.7 |
| Mississippi | 66.2 | 0.9 | 32.9 | 16.3 | 0.1 | 83.6 |
| S. Carolina | 57.9 | 1.2 | 40.9 | 22.2 | 0.2 | 77.6 |
| Texas | 53.8 | 0.9 | 45.3 | 30.8 | 0.1 | 69.1 |
| Seven states | 58.9 | 0.9 | 40.2 | 19.1 | 0.1 | 80.8 |
Source: Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule (Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 179.
How Segregation Both Shaped and Destroyed Black Wealth
Limiting the ability of Black farmers to build wealth and purchase land was rarely a function of economic control alone. Often with the explicit support of local governments and law enforcement, white Southerners used violence and terror to enforce the racial order. There were a documented 4,400 racial lynchings between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II, carried out by white mobs and the Ku Klux Klan against Black Southerners. Historians believe the actual death toll is likely higher, given that there was no formal tracking of these murders at the time.
Racial violence was a tool of both property dispossession and suppression of political power. At the same time white Southerners drove Black settlers off their purchased land, they terrorized Black voters at the polls. Black elected officials across the South were targeted with violence and forced from office. This eroded political power the freed Black community could leverage to protect their property rights.
In the 1870s, Southern states began passing “Jim Crow” laws, enacting racial segregation in schools, factories, public entertainment spaces, and more. White developers used racial covenants, clauses written into property deeds to bar non-white individuals from purchasing homes in new subdivisions.
Segregation had an unintended effect. By forcing Black consumers and Black businesses into the same corridors, it created concentrated pockets of Black economic activity and wealth—like Sweet Auburn Ave in Atlanta, which was described in 1956 as “the richest Negro street in the world.” Jackson, Mississippi’s Farish Street was the largest economically independent Black community in the state between the Reconstruction Era and the Civil Rights movement.
These thriving districts were the exception, not the rule. Segregation also denied millions of Black Southerners access to capital and confined them to overcrowded, underserved neighborhoods with substandard housing.
Prosperity also made Black communities the targets of racial violence:
- In Atlanta, whites afraid of the growth of Black wealth attacked Black businesses and killed dozens of Black residents during the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906.
- The summer of 1919 became known as the Red Summer, when racial violence swept 26 cities as Black soldiers returned home after fighting in World War I. That year, in rural Arkansas, the Elaine Massacre saw white mobs kill hundreds of Black sharecroppers who had organized to demand fairer pay for their cotton.
- And Tulsa’s Greenwood District, once nicknamed Black Wall Street, was destroyed by white supremacists in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The event is still considered one of the deadliest events of mass racial violence in American history.
Taken together, these acts of violence sent an unmistakable message that Black wealth was not safe, and property that had been built could be destroyed overnight.
Fleeing the South: The Great Migration
It was against this backdrop of terror, segregation, and economic exploitation that millions of Black Southerners made the decision to leave. Beginning in the 1910s, approximately 6 million Black Southerners moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states.
The Great Migration was accelerated by World War I, which created industrial labor shortages just as conditions in the South were becoming deadlier for Black residents. Suddenly threatened by the loss of their “cheap labor,” many white Southerners tried—and ultimately failed—to stop Black people from leaving through intimidation and travel restrictions.
The migration fundamentally changed the demographic map of the country. In 1910, roughly 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the South. By the end of the Great Migration around 1970, 47 percent of Black Americans were living outside the South.
How Federal Policy Dismantled Black Neighborhoods
The middle of the 20th century brought federal intervention in land and housing on an unprecedented scale as the government leveraged its power to shape who could own a home and where. In the South especially, that intervention often compounded exclusionary policies already in place and left communities economically and physically divided.
In 1926, the US Supreme Court upheld racially restrictive covenants (Corrigan v. Buckley) and exclusionary zoning (Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co.). These were land-use rules that were widely used to keep lower-income residents and people of color out of certain neighborhoods, and with the Court’s blessing, use of both tools spread rapidly.
Federal lending policy then put the government stamp of approval on these exclusionary policies. In its 1934 Underwriting Manual, and for years after, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)—the agency responsible for insuring mortgages and shaping access to mainstream homeownership—explicitly promoted racially restrictive covenants and neighborhood segregation through its neighborhood risk rating system. Insuring a mortgage meant the FHA effectively guaranteed lenders against loss, which made low-down-payment, long-term loans available. Denying that backing to Black neighborhoods cut them off from the single most-affordable path to homeownership. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency best remembered today for its “redlining” maps, largely reflected discrimination that was already deeply embedded in FHA policy and private lending.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, the FHA and private lenders insured low-down-payment mortgages for millions of white families while excluding Black families. As late as the 1960s, Black families comprised 6 percent of all American homeowners but only accounted for 2.5 percent of FHA mortgages.
The 1944 GI Bill replicated the divide. Returning World War II veterans received unprecedented benefits, including access to low-cost home loans. But because the program was administered locally rather than federally, white-run financial institutions could still deny Black veterans mortgages, and racial covenants still barred Black families from buying homes in white suburbs. In the South, for example, of the more than 3,200 VA-backed home loans issued in 13 Mississippi cities in 1947, only two went to Black borrowers.
Then came the bulldozers. Between 1950 and 1966, the federal government funneled money to cities large and small to clear “blighted” or “slum” neighborhoods. The stated goal was better housing. The actual outcome of “urban renewal” was the demolition of Black neighborhoods—many of them in Southern downtowns and commercial corridors—to make way for highways, stadiums, university expansions, and commercial developments.
This tore apart the social fabric of communities. Residents who had owned their homes, sometimes for generations, were displaced. Renters were scattered, and the people who remained were now often physically separated by major freeways from amenities they had once walked to.
In some cities, like Montgomery, Alabama, the new highways were built without any nearby on-ramps to and from the Black communities they divided. This further isolated Black neighborhoods and businesses as it rendered them even more inaccessible.
Urban renewal was so effective at dismantling Black communities that James Baldwin called it “Negro removal.” Of the estimated 1 million Americans displaced by urban renewal from 1940-1966, about 60 percent were people of color.
Eminent domain was the primary mechanism governments used to take private property for public urban renewal projects. But there are many documented instances decades before and after urban renewal of government taking property from Black residents and business owners through eminent domain, letting it sit vacant, and then selling it to private developers for a substantial profit. In the 1920s, city officials in Manhattan Beach, California, used eminent domain to acquire a successful Black-owned beach resort, claiming plans to build a public park. The park was never built, and the city only compensated the Black landowners $14,500 of their requested $120,000 for damages and land value. As of 2021, the land was worth an estimated $75 million.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 finally prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. However, it alone could not undo the decades of discrimination embedded in and enabled by the federal government.
The Act and broader civil rights legislation of the 1960s opened new doors for Black families. As white families left for the suburbs, Black families who had long been confined to underserved neighborhoods moved to the nicer urban areas the whites had vacated. Many were now able to access better housing and the ability to build wealth through homeownership.
But the departure of the Black middle class also marked the end of many traditional Black neighborhoods where, by necessity, middle-class and poor Black residents shared the same churches and businesses. By 1980, the economic integration that had characterized Black urban life a decade earlier had sharply reversed. Income segregation—the uneven geographic distribution of income groups within an area—grew four times as fast among Black families as among white families between 1970 and 2009.
Those who could afford to move, did; those who could not, stayed. The result of this demographic unraveling was a collapse of housing markets in the neighborhoods left behind, where concentrated poverty often persists to this day.
Systemic vacancy in historically Black and low-income Southern communities is the natural conclusion of the policies and practices to suppress Black wealth, political power, and property ownership. Each policy decision had a compounding effect as they layered atop the previous one to systemically undermine Black wealth creation and community stability. The combination of fragile ownership, weak housing markets, and steady population decline perpetuated a cycle that, over decades, manifests as widespread vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties.
Part 2.
Vacant, Abandoned, and Deteriorated Properties in the South Today
The history described in Part 1 shows the direct path from two things we observe in the South today:
- The context surrounding vacant properties in the South—from who owns them to which tools are available to revitalize them—makes them challenging to address.
- There are more communities in the South with high concentrations of vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties compared to other regions across the US.
The clearest place to see these compounding factors at work is heirs’ property.
When a homeowner dies without a will, in many states the property passes to all surviving heirs simultaneously. Over generations, a single property can end up with dozens of co-owners, many of whom may not know each other (or even know they’ve inherited property) or agree on what to do with the land. Probate courts can clarify property distribution, but some family members may be unaware of probate, lack the resources to use it, or distrust the system.
Heirs’ property creates title vulnerabilities with practical consequences. Families generally can’t get mortgages on heirs’ property or make repairs that require permits or loans, and they have a harder time accessing disaster aid. As a result, homes deteriorate and may become abandoned. A University of Georgia survey (unpublished, conducted for Community Progress) found that of those respondents who frequently encountered heirs’ properties in revitalization work, nearly 90 percent reported that heirs’ properties disrupted their neighborhood revitalization efforts.
Title vulnerabilities are also compounded by a legal framework that makes family land vulnerable to forced sale. For decades, any one heir—regardless of how small their ownership interest was—could sell their interest to an outside buyer. That buyer could petition the court for a partition sale, forcing the entire property to be sold, often at auction. Speculators and developers have long exploited this legal mechanism to purchase property out from under other family members for pennies on the dollar.
As a result, heirs’ property represents one of the largest sources of Black land loss, accounting for tens of billions of dollars in lost or locked-up wealth. A USDA Forest Service and UGA Carl Vinson Institute study of heirs’ property in 10 non-metro Atlanta counties identified that those properties alone had a total tax assessed value of $2.15 billion.
Heirs’ property is not exclusively a Southern or rural Black phenomenon, but that is often where the pain is most acutely felt. Generations of Black Southerners were excluded from the majority-white institutions—like banks, legal institutions, and estate-planning services—that make orderly inheritance possible. Without institutions willing to do business with them, Black families often passed on their land informally to their next of kin.
Why the South Has More Vacant Properties and Fewer Tools to Address Them
The South ranks among the most economically distressed regions in the United States. The region's political and legal landscape has resulted in the existence of many vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties, disproportionately concentrated in Black and low-income communities.
In this context, “political” does not refer to partisanship, but rather to the choices governments make about what to prioritize. These priorities affect which policy tools (e.g., code enforcement, delinquent property tax enforcement, land banking, homeowner or tenant assistance) are available when a property starts to deteriorate. Generally speaking, laws and policies in Southern states tend to favor businesses and property owners—and strongly protect individual property rights—over renters, low-income residents, and housing-vulnerable populations.
1. Southern states have fewer renter protections and more evictions.
With weaker tenant protections and higher eviction rates, landlords in Southern states face less accountability for keeping a building in livable condition, particularly in weaker housing markets where they can only raise the rent so high. The costs of deferred maintenance can snowball as, for example, a minor roof leak turns into water damage, then mold, then a costly roof failure—all while harming renter health. Renters will be more afraid to speak out about the conditions, fearing retaliatory eviction. As tenants cycle in and out, eventually an owner may decide the property isn’t worth the investment and simply walk away, leaving behind a vacant, deteriorating structure.
2. Southern states have fewer land banks.
Land banks are public entities with unique powers to put vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties back to productive use according to community goals. Four Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee) have land bank-enabling legislation, and yet Georgia is the only state with a robust land bank network. The map below overlaps where land banks are located with places in the South that have a high level of property vacancy.
3. Weaker code enforcement capacity to catch and address problems early.
Code enforcement is a crucial tool to intervene before a deteriorating property becomes a danger to its occupants and neighbors. Like many municipal functions, code enforcement is funded largely by property taxes. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee are in the bottom 10 for property tax revenue per capita in the United States. (Southern states tend to rely on consumption taxes.)
Reliance on consumption tax means that disinvested communities, which have lower consumer spending due to population loss and business closures, and less retail activity, bring in less tax revenue. This creates a cycle in which less tax revenue means fewer resources for code enforcement, and fewer resources for code enforcement leads to deeper property decline.
An effective code lien foreclosure process—which lets a local government enforce unpaid code liens by foreclosing on the property—can help municipalities address deterioration. Few states in the South have such a process; Louisiana is an exception.
4. A need for reform to delinquent property tax enforcement systems.
Delinquent property tax enforcement laws and processes vary by state, and sometimes by county or municipality. Community Progress did not conduct an in-depth legal analysis of tax enforcement laws across the South for this article. However, the data on property vacancy across these communities clearly shows that state policy isn’t meeting the scale of the vacancy challenges.
The delinquent tax enforcement system is a critical intervention point because property tax delinquency is the single most reliable signal that a property is in trouble. It suggests an absentee owner may have already deserted their ownership obligations, an heir may not know they have inherited responsibility for the property, or an owner-occupant may be struggling to make payments.
In Southern communities where heirs’ property is common and where local legal, code enforcement, and land banking capacity is limited, inadequate tax enforcement laws and practices mean properties can be stuck in ownership limbo for years. This is especially damaging in smaller, rural, and historically Black communities where weak housing markets already make reuse difficult. As properties continue to decline, neighbors and municipalities absorb the harm and the financial cost.
A more equitable, efficient, and effective tax enforcement system must focus on keeping properties out of ownership limbo, distinguish between owners who need support and owners who have walked away, and create a clearer path to return vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties to responsible ownership. Communities must have front-end protections for property owners: circuit breakers, payment plans, pathways to resolve title issues, and notice that actually reaches owners. Without upstream support, delinquent property tax enforcement can deepen ownership instability and exacerbate vacancy.
5. Deeper poverty, with less of a safety net.
Southern poverty tends to be deeper and less supported by social programs than in other regions. Four of the Southern states in our scope have some of the highest poverty rates in the country:
- National Average: 11.4%
- Alabama: 14.6%
- Arkansas: 15.8%
- Louisiana: 18.9%
- Mississippi: 17.3%
- Georgia: 12.9%
- North Carolina: 13.2%
- South Carolina: 12.7%
These households are also more vulnerable to major health-related expenses that can drain a savings account. As of 2026, 41 states (including DC) have adopted the Affordable Care Act’s provision to expand Medicaid coverage to adults making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($21,597 for an individual). Seven of the eight Southern states in our scope have not. This matters for housing because health coverage is a crucial financial buffer. Without it, a single medical emergency can drain the savings a household might have used for a tax bill or a critical repair, or it becomes medical debt that damages credit and crowds out housing payments. States that expanded Medicaid saw measurable reductions in medical debt and in eviction rates, with the largest effects in the highest-uninsured communities.
6. Less philanthropic investment.
There is a well-documented lack of funding in the South from institutional philanthropy. A 2017 analysis found that the Black Belt and Delta region saw just $41 in philanthropic funding per person, compared to the national average of $451. Individual charitable giving also lags behind national averages, with charities in the Delta region receiving donations 15 percent smaller than other regions. The dearth of funding is rooted in widespread donor misconceptions that local Southern leaders have less experience and capacity to lead systemic change. This belief inadvertently reinforces established power structures and keeps local leaders who know their community needs best from having a seat at the table. It creates an additional barrier to revitalization in resource-strapped communities.
This confluence of lower tax revenues, fewer and less-utilized tools, less philanthropic investment, and high poverty rates means properties in the South have a higher chance of becoming trapped in a cycle of deterioration and abandonment.
Where Vacant Properties are Concentrated in the South Today
Population and Household Change in the South
Addressing widespread vacant properties starts with understanding where populations are growing and shrinking.
Many parts of the South—including Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and rural Georgia—have steadily lost population over the past two decades. The pattern is most pronounced in the historical Black Belt, named for its rich soil and plantation economy, and later used to describe Southern communities where Black residents outnumbered white.
The South contains both the nation’s largest concentration of severe household decline and one of its largest concentrations of rapid household growth, revealing sharply divergent housing market trajectories within the region. Nearly 60 percent of households living in severely declining counties reside in the South, yet the region also contains nearly one-quarter of the households living in rapidly growing counties nationwide.
The Southeast Has Among the Most Counties Experiencing Significant Household Decline and Significant Household Growth
This table shows the percent change in households from the 2000 US Census to the 2024 American Community 5-Year Survey. Total number of population and households are as of 2024. Areas have been highlighted where the Southeast has significantly steeper decline (orange) and growth (blue) than other regions.
| Appalachia & Upper South | Great Lakes | Great Plains | Mountain West | Northeast & Mid-Atlantic | Pacific West | Southeast | Southwest | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SIGNIFICANT DECLINE | ||||||||
| Counties | 9 | 9 | 26 | 8 | n/a | 7 | 43 | 37 |
| % of Category's Counties | 6% | 6% | 19% | 6% | 0% | 5% | 31% | 27% |
| % of Region's Counties | 2% | 2% | 6% | 2% | 0% | 4% | 7% | 10% |
| Total Households | 42,486 | 18,578 | 38,287 | 7,333 | n/a | 3,601 | 227,106 | 54,723 |
| Total Population | 111,883 | 47,502 | 98,223 | 17,783 | n/a | 12,475 | 596,152 | 158,873 |
| DECLINE | ||||||||
| Counties | 90 | 48 | 145 | 68 | 11 | 5 | 114 | 70 |
| % of Category's Counties | 16% | 9% | 26% | 12% | 2% | 1% | 21% | 13% |
| % of Region's Counties | 18% | 9% | 35% | 19% | 5% | 3% | 18% | 19% |
| Total Households | 771,775 | 1,109,955 | 467,649 | 108,541 | 267,877 | 14,060 | 1,097,512 | 274,651 |
| Total Population | 1,879,336 | 2,759,216 | 1,143,694 | 281,671 | 635,742 | 36,449 | 2,725,139 | 724,930 |
| STABLE | ||||||||
| Counties | 115 | 189 | 136 | 71 | 69 | 18 | 164 | 82 |
| % of Category's Counties | 14% | 22% | 16% | 8% | 8% | 2% | 19% | 10% |
| % of Region's Counties | 23% | 36% | 33% | 20% | 29% | 11% | 26% | 22% |
| Total Households | 1,316,212 | 4,950,777 | 1,564,184 | 178,512 | 4,647,717 | 567,337 | 3,079,856 | 824,046 |
| Total Population | 3,264,971 | 11,796,936 | 3,793,422 | 452,864 | 11,172,088 | 1,521,395 | 7,733,670 | 2,211,107 |
| GROWTH | ||||||||
| Counties | 149 | 182 | 65 | 66 | 112 | 55 | 137 | 84 |
| % of Category's Counties | 18% | 21% | 8% | 8% | 13% | 6% | 16% | 10% |
| % of Region's Counties | 30% | 35% | 16% | 19% | 47% | 34% | 21% | 22% |
| Total Households | 3,750,981 | 9,471,784 | 1,378,168 | 775,254 | 14,169,297 | 9,503,876 | 4,073,532 | 1,339,109 |
| Total Population | 9,416,137 | 23,403,136 | 3,405,311 | 1,887,325 | 36,572,274 | 26,746,734 | 10,461,108 | 3,541,382 |
| SIGNIFICANT GROWTH | ||||||||
| Counties | 140 | 96 | 40 | 137 | 45 | 75 | 180 | 105 |
| % of Category's Counties | 17% | 12% | 5% | 17% | 6% | 9% | 22% | 13% |
| % of Region's Counties | 28% | 18% | 10% | 39% | 19% | 47% | 28% | 28% |
| Total Households | 7,134,024 | 5,928,359 | 2,347,553 | 5,709,099 | 5,162,775 | 8,993,321 | 13,911,470 | 13,756,144 |
| Total Population | 18,142,827 | 15,081,452 | 5,887,575 | 15,035,497 | 13,318,854 | 25,189,243 | 36,065,848 | 37,079,811 |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2024. Analysis by Community Progress.
The Southeast Has Among the Most Counties Experiencing Significant Household Decline and Significant Household Growth
This table shows the percent change in households from the 2000 US Census to the 2024 American Community 5-Year Survey. Total number of population and households are as of 2024. Areas have been highlighted where the Southeast has significantly steeper decline (orange) and growth (blue) than other regions.
| Appalachia & Upper South | Great Lakes | Great Plains | Mountain West | Northeast & Mid-Atlantic | Pacific West | Southeast | Southwest | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SIGNIFICANT DECLINE | ||||||||
| Counties | 9 | 9 | 26 | 8 | n/a | 7 | 43 | 37 |
| % of Category's Counties | 6% | 6% | 19% | 6% | 0% | 5% | 31% | 27% |
| % of Region's Counties | 2% | 2% | 6% | 2% | 0% | 4% | 7% | 10% |
| Total Households | 42,486 | 18,578 | 38,287 | 7,333 | n/a | 3,601 | 227,106 | 54,723 |
| Total Population | 111,883 | 47,502 | 98,223 | 17,783 | n/a | 12,475 | 596,152 | 158,873 |
| DECLINE | ||||||||
| Counties | 90 | 48 | 145 | 68 | 11 | 5 | 114 | 70 |
| % of Category's Counties | 16% | 9% | 26% | 12% | 2% | 1% | 21% | 13% |
| % of Region's Counties | 18% | 9% | 35% | 19% | 5% | 3% | 18% | 19% |
| Total Households | 771,775 | 1,109,955 | 467,649 | 108,541 | 267,877 | 14,060 | 1,097,512 | 274,651 |
| Total Population | 1,879,336 | 2,759,216 | 1,143,694 | 281,671 | 635,742 | 36,449 | 2,725,139 | 724,930 |
| STABLE | ||||||||
| Counties | 115 | 189 | 136 | 71 | 69 | 18 | 164 | 82 |
| % of Category's Counties | 14% | 22% | 16% | 8% | 8% | 2% | 19% | 10% |
| % of Region's Counties | 23% | 36% | 33% | 20% | 29% | 11% | 26% | 22% |
| Total Households | 1,316,212 | 4,950,777 | 1,564,184 | 178,512 | 4,647,717 | 567,337 | 3,079,856 | 824,046 |
| Total Population | 3,264,971 | 11,796,936 | 3,793,422 | 452,864 | 11,172,088 | 1,521,395 | 7,733,670 | 2,211,107 |
| GROWTH | ||||||||
| Counties | 149 | 182 | 65 | 66 | 112 | 55 | 137 | 84 |
| % of Category's Counties | 18% | 21% | 8% | 8% | 13% | 6% | 16% | 10% |
| % of Region's Counties | 30% | 35% | 16% | 19% | 47% | 34% | 21% | 22% |
| Total Households | 3,750,981 | 9,471,784 | 1,378,168 | 775,254 | 14,169,297 | 9,503,876 | 4,073,532 | 1,339,109 |
| Total Population | 9,416,137 | 23,403,136 | 3,405,311 | 1,887,325 | 36,572,274 | 26,746,734 | 10,461,108 | 3,541,382 |
| SIGNIFICANT GROWTH | ||||||||
| Counties | 140 | 96 | 40 | 137 | 45 | 75 | 180 | 105 |
| % of Category's Counties | 17% | 12% | 5% | 17% | 6% | 9% | 22% | 13% |
| % of Region's Counties | 28% | 18% | 10% | 39% | 19% | 47% | 28% | 28% |
| Total Households | 7,134,024 | 5,928,359 | 2,347,553 | 5,709,099 | 5,162,775 | 8,993,321 | 13,911,470 | 13,756,144 |
| Total Population | 18,142,827 | 15,081,452 | 5,887,575 | 15,035,497 | 13,318,854 | 25,189,243 | 36,065,848 | 37,079,811 |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2024. Analysis by Community Progress.
Data on Vacant Properties in the South
While there is no national database tracking vacant properties, data from the US Census Bureau sheds some light on where vacancy may be entrenched.
The Census Bureau defines a housing unit as vacant if it does not have a resident at the time of the survey, which encompasses properties most wouldn’t consider “blighted” (e.g., vacation homes, homes on the market, apartments in between tenants). To better understand which properties are truly “vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated,” we often look at the properties in the “Other” vacant category, which includes homes in foreclosure, homes in legal proceedings, and homes that may be abandoned or condemned.
Counties surrounding major metropolitan areas—like Atlanta, Nashville, Raleigh, and Charleston—tend to have lower levels of “Other” vacant properties. Their diverse economies attract new residents and investments, driving more competition for real estate. Higher property values give property owners more incentive to maintain or sell their properties rather than allow them to fall into disrepair. However, even these thriving metros still have concentrated pockets of poverty and disinvestment between blocks and neighborhoods.
In contrast, the counties with the most “Other” vacant properties are clustered in the Mississippi Delta. Spanning western Mississippi, eastern Arkansas, and parts of Louisiana, this was the heart of the Black Belt plantation economy, which never fully diversified after the Civil War. These communities lost significant population during the Great Migration. And the previous map shows corresponding population loss in these very same counties over the past two decades.
A thinning tax base limits local government capacity to address vacant and deteriorated properties, fewer businesses and residents want to move in, property values fall, and some owners eventually walk away. The result is a disproportionate share of vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated homes in foreclosure or ownership limbo.
In the Delta counties with the steepest population declines, the number of vacant housing units may appear relatively modest. However, that likely reflects the small baseline populations of those rural communities. What is most troubling is the quantity and spread of counties with both significant population loss and significant vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties. Where population loss and vacancy reinforce each other at this scale, market forces alone will not reverse the trend—and doing nothing becomes a policy choice in itself.
The data makes clear that growth at the regional level obscures the reality that many small cities and rural communities, even within fast-growing states, continue to experience deep poverty and widespread vacancy. The result is a divided South: one booming along certain corridors while another is being quietly hollowed out.
Policy Change is the Hope for Revitalization
When confronting a history this long and heavy, it’s tempting to conclude that the problem is too big and too structurally entrenched to solve. But many Southern communities are already making strides towards the kinds of policies that promote lasting revitalization:
- Georgia has a strong network of over 30 land banks which address vacant properties in the communities they serve and continue to innovate in the land banking field. The Metro Atlanta Land Bank was the first land bank in the United States to launch a land banking depository agreement program, enabling an entity to transfer a property to the land bank to be held tax-exempt while it completes a development project that meets community needs. In its first two years, the Rome-Floyd Land Bank acquired and sold 83 vacant tax-foreclosed properties to responsible owners—returning these properties to the tax rolls. These land banks and others across the state have had a transformative impact.
- Louisiana expanded a critical code enforcement tool statewide. Code lien foreclosure reform gave local governments the ability to foreclose when owners of vacant properties ignore citations, are found in violation, and still fail to bring their properties into compliance. It also gave code liens “super priority” status, helping communities recover the public costs of maintaining or securing deteriorated properties.
- Many Southern states have adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which provides protection for heirs who want to keep family property. It requires a fair-market valuation of the property, gives co-owners the right to buy out a selling heir before an auction, and ensures heirs receive their share of proceeds if a sale does occur.
The conditions that produced widespread vacancy in the South weren’t inevitable. They were the result of specific decisions, made by specific people, at specific moments; like the lawmakers who gave freedmen only six months to stake claim to public land, or the segregationists who deliberately routed highways through Black civil rights corridors.
Making different policy decisions today can produce different outcomes. Community Progress works alongside Southern communities to strengthen legal tools and political will to transform vacant properties into community assets. We support projects that help families resolve heirs’ property issues; help states build capacity for land banking; and connect local leaders so they can learn from one another’s successes.
If you’re working on revitalization in a Southern community, connect with us! We’d love to hear from you.
Project Credits
Writing: Maria Elkin, Director of Communications; Charles Linton, Communications Officer; Danielle Lewinski, Chief Program Officer
Header Illustration: Maria Elkin (assets from Adobe Stock and Wikimedia Commons)
Mapping: Mallory Rappaport, Program Officer, National Land Bank Network
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