What is Systemic Vacancy?
IN THIS SECTION
Systemic vacancy describes the community experience of widespread property vacancy caused by the combined actions of population shifts, economic change, and policy decisions.
It is important to understand that not all vacant properties are harmful. A certain level of property vacancy is normal and necessary for a functioning real estate market. When families and businesses move—due to job changes, preference changes, family transitions, or economic necessity—a property must be available for them to move to. Without properties available for sale or rent, growing job markets could not sustain new workers, and households would struggle to find suitable housing. In this sense, vacancy supports both local mobility and a broader economy.
Vacancy becomes a problem when vacant, abandoned, or deteriorated properties in a community become so widespread that it changes the character of a neighborhood and perpetuates a negative cycle. People may begin describing those buildings, blocks, or neighborhoods as “blighted,” “eyesores,” “dilapidated,” or “derelict.” The presence of these properties intensifies poor living conditions and harms the economy, community, housing stock, and residents, which in turn fuels more vacancy and abandonment and undermines neighborhood stability.
What is “Blight”?
Blight is a shorthand term many use to refer to properties they perceive as problematic in some way: appearing unsafe, visually unpleasant, or a threat to neighborhood property values.
While “blight” is commonly used in community revitalization, urban planning, and housing policy, its connotations are often problematic or harmful, as it rarely stops at describing property conditions.
For decades, the ambiguous term “blight” has been used to describe entire neighborhoods—including the people who live there. Its definition is difficult to pin down, because one might use blight to describe anything they find aesthetically displeasing. As a result, the term has been used as thinly veiled justification to strip low-income Black and Brown residents of businesses, intergenerational wealth, and community—all in the name of urban renewal, blight elimination, and blight eradication.
“Blight” also often implies that all blighted properties are vacant or abandoned, when in fact many properties that could be considered blighted are still occupied. Rental properties with absentee landlords still create dangerous living conditions for tenants and their neighbors. These deteriorated properties harm a community just as much as vacant, abandoned buildings.
For these reasons the Center for Community Progress avoids using “blight” to describe the problems we are attempting to address. Instead, we use “vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties (VAD)” and “problem properties.” These terms are more accurate and they acknowledge strategies that equitably, efficiently, and effectively get those properties back to productive, community-aligned uses.
History of Vacancy, Disinvestment, and Uneven Recovery
Systemic vacancy persists where housing supply continues to outpace demand, but market forces alone do not explain it. Public policies that prioritized suburban growth, underinvestment in urban neighborhoods, and ongoing racial disparities in lending, appraisal, and resource allocation have reinforced these patterns. The result is a landscape of stark contrasts: concentrated abandonment and disinvestment in some neighborhoods, alongside rapid growth and rising values in others.
The history of systemic vacancy in American cities is rooted in decades of demographic shifts, economic upheaval, public policy, and racial inequity. Following World War II, federally backed mortgages and highway construction made suburban homeownership widely accessible to white families—largely excluding Black families either explicitly or implicitly. At the same time, millions of Black families fled Southern oppression for Northern industrial cities. However, on average, about three white families left cities for every Black family that arrived, and by the 1960s there were emerging signs of systemic vacancy in many urban neighborhoods of cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Between the 1950s and 1980s, cities were bisected by urban renewal and highway construction with the promise of urban revival. In reality, this displaced half a million households (disproportionately Black and Latino families) and facilitated white flight. During this period, cities in the Northeast and Midwest lost millions of residents to the suburbs and the sunbelt.
During the 1960s and 1970s, many of the factories that had sustained urban economies and driven population growth began to close. Middle-class residents moved away, manufacturing jobs disappeared, and public services weakened. As a result, the lower-income residents who remained had access to fewer and fewer opportunities. When property values declined and neighborhoods began to have more and more deteriorated properties, many owners—seeing little point in continuing to invest in repairs—stopped investing in property maintenance or walked away entirely. This exacerbated a negative cycle leading to more population loss and more vacant and abandoned houses, stores, and industrial buildings.
However, systemic vacancy is not limited to cities. Vacancy in rural areas manifests differently; spread across larger geographic areas, it can be less visible but equally damaging to community sustainability and local government capacity. In rural communities, economic shifts away from agriculture or natural resource extraction can undermine a small town’s economic base. Rural towns are aging faster, as young people leave town for education and employment opportunities available in cities. In these communities, properties may sit vacant not because of market oversupply, but because demand has evaporated entirely.
While the 1990s brought change as more young adults, immigrants, and empty-nesters sought out urban living and walkability, the reality of this new “urban revival” was more selective. Even as downtowns and select neighborhoods in select cities transformed into upscale residential areas, most low-income and Black neighborhoods saw little change.
At the turn of the new millennium, subprime lending hit Black neighborhoods especially hard, in both central cities and nearby inner-ring suburbs. Lenders disproportionately steered these communities toward high-cost, complex mortgages, leaving many borrowers with loans they had little chance of repaying.
When foreclosures accelerated in the mid-2000s—just as the Great Recession drove widespread job losses—the effects were swift and severe. Home values fell, vacant and abandoned properties spread, and homeownership declined as foreclosed homes were sold in bulk to investors. Many remaining homeowners left and, in the years since, these neighborhoods have struggled to regain stability. While they remain intact on the map, they no longer offer the same sense of community or pathway to opportunity they once did.
Seeking to address the problem of “blighted” properties, cities began steadily demolishing abandoned buildings, creating a proliferation of vacant lots. Contaminated industrial sites known as “brownfields” further undermined disinvested areas.
Recent Market Shifts and Emerging Challenges
In the decades since the Great Recession, home values in many communities have skyrocketed, making supply of affordable homes a primary concern in the national conversation. But while home values have increased, and rates of mortgage foreclosure declined overall, the post-Great Recession revival has been uneven. In cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland—hit hard by the recession and experiencing limited overall market change—some individual neighborhoods have dramatically rebounded and transformed. Bit as some neighborhoods have revitalized or gentrified, others remain disinvested or begin to decline—creating stark contrasts of wealth and poverty, abandonment and reinvestment, growth and decline.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered new housing market dynamics. Remote work enabled migration from dense urban cores to suburbs and smaller cities, creating a “donut effect” in major metros with increased office vacancy in city centers. Early in the pandemic, home prices surged as interest rates fell to record lows, prompting a homebuying frenzy—particularly in suburban and exurban areas. Overall housing vacancy rates hit multi-decade lows in 2022, creating intense affordability pressures. However, as with the recovery from the Great Recession, rising home values did not benefit all communities equally. The most disinvested communities—both rural and urban—saw little growth.
Another concerning dynamic in the housing market post-pandemic has been the rise in investor-ownership through limited liability companies (LLCs). Many corporate landlords purchase and hold residential properties under opaque LLC structures, which can make it difficult for communities and regulators to identify who owns housing stock and hold owners accountable for maintenance of vacant (or occupied) properties. LLC ownership has been linked to higher rents and increased neighborhood instability. In some cities, homes held by LLCs are more likely to deteriorate or remain vacant because owners face limited legal risk and can more easily walk away from problem properties. This can further constrain affordable housing options in areas with already tight markets and exacerbate inequality in disinvested neighborhoods.
Finally, climate change has emerged as another driver of property abandonment and vacancy. Rising insurance costs—which increased by more than 30 percent in one-third of all US zip codes between 2021 and 2024—can make homeownership even more unattainable in high-risk areas. Insurers have withdrawn from markets in Florida, California, Louisiana, and Texas following catastrophic wildfires and hurricanes. Over 3.2 million Americans have already left high flood-risk neighborhoods, with projections suggesting another 2.5 million may follow within 30 years. Properties in climate-vulnerable areas face declining values as insurance becomes unavailable or prohibitively expensive, creating new patterns of abandonment distinct from traditional economic disinvestment.
This history shows systemic vacancy cannot be attributed to market factors alone. Public policies have undermined urban centers while offering few pathways out of poverty for disinvested neighborhoods. Racism continues to shape housing markets, investment decisions, and resource allocation. These forces, combined with new climate-driven displacement, sustain persistent property vacancy, abandonment, and deterioration in certain communities even as new development transforms a neighborhood miles or even a few blocks away.