Vacant Land Elements Examples
Vacant land stewardship requires four fundamental elements: knowing your community’s context, having clear goals and plans, committing to collaboration, and enacting facilitative policies. These four elements will look different in every community, but they are all critical components of implementing successful vacant land stewardship. To learn more about these elements and discover some next steps for your community's learning journey, explore the element examples below.
Element Type
Organization
Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative
The Terra Firma Vacant Lot Toolkit provides extensive background on vacant lots in Chicago while laying out actionable goals and steps for others to transform parcels into spaces of dignity. Created by the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative, this toolkit sets out to provide a blueprint for various stakeholders that are interested in embarking on this work.
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UConn College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources Doctoral Researcher Pan Zhang and Assistant Professor Sohyun Park
The Vacant Land Assessment System (VLAS) uses ArcGIS tools to create strategies for assessing and prioritizing vacant lots for their most suitable regeneration possibilities. The tool analyzes the geographical surroundings, potential repurposing strategies and property features to classify them and provide ideas for transforming the lots. The VLAS framework becomes a powerful strategy for future planning in a way that is collaborative across disciplines and stakeholders and assesses lots effectively.
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Cornell University Legal Constructs Lab
The National Zoning Atlas enables users to visualize the prevalence and nature of regulatory constraints, particularly on housing. The Zoning Atlas is an important tool to help people understand what their local zoning codes say; compare codes across jurisdictions, illuminate regional and statewide trends, and strengthen national planning for housing production, transportation infrastructure, and climate response.
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Grandmont Rosedal Development Corporation
The Grandmont Rosedale Development Corporation (GRDC)’s Vacant Property Task Force is a resident-led initiative to target and prevent blight and vacancy in the five neighborhoods GRDC serves. Working closely with resident volunteers, the task force monitors vacant homes with the goal of ensuring that every property is properly maintained.
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City of Danville
The City of Danville zoning ordinance provides a number of useful tools for vacant lot development, including allowing urban gardening in most districts with a special permit, and creating a designation for districts where new development will infill parcels with vegetation and landscaping.
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City of Baltimore
Open Baltimore is an online data portal that provides the public with access to hundreds of datasets and interactive dashboards, including a Vacant Building Dashboard. The Vacant Building Dashboard shares data on the number of vacant building notices, building rehabs, and demolitions. The data can be sorted and filtered by geographic bounds, time increments, and even “housing market typology.”
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Baltimore Environmental Equity Partnership (BEEP)
Baltimore Environmental Equity Partners (BEEP) aims to foster cross-sector collaboration to improve community and environmental well-being and sustainability in neighborhoods of East Baltimore. BEEP is comprised of nonprofit and government organizations working on community development, community organizing, environmental and health advocacy, and social justice.
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Allegheny Green Web Collaboration
The Allegheny Green Web Collaboration is a network of more than 20 nonprofit recreation and conservation organizations with a vision for connected parks, open spaces, and trails throughout Allegheny County to enhance the quality of people’s daily lives, promote healthy living, and encourage increased engagement with nature. The collaboration manages a website providing an interactive narrative of their efforts.
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PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and PA Downtown Center
Developed through a partnership between the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Pennsylvania Downtown Center this handbook provides strategies for communities to utilize their natural, outdoor recreational resources as assets to grow and enhance their community and economic development.
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East Trenton Collaborative
The East Trenton Neighborhood (ETN) Brownfields Area-Wide Plan provides site-specific recommendations for 12 brownfield sites with an emphasis on two catalyst sites that have the greatest likelihood of development and impact. Cities dealing with high rates of vacant land and contamination may find this plan helpful in understanding the opportunities and challenges of putting properties back into productive use in a safe and healthy way.
Read More »Elevated Chicago
In Elevated Chicago’s report, a case study of two areas in Chicago near transit hubs discuss the impact of vacant lots as well as the potential they hold for the area.
Read More »University of Michigan, School for Environment and Sustainability
A study led by the University of Michigan and the University of Michigan-Dearborn aims to understand the connection between vacant lot maintenance, such as greenwater storm infrastructure (GSI), and subsequent mental health effects.
Read More »Groundwork USA
The New Orleans Green Infrastructure Map is an ArcGIS map, created in partnership with Groundwork USA, Groundwork New Orleans and several community partners, seeks to document the various greening initiatives across the city of New Orleans.
Read More »Pennsylvania Horticulture Society (PHS)
The Green Equity Initiative by the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society (PHS) is a proposal for environmental neighborhood investment in Philadelphia in the form of neighborhood-based greening solutions.
Read More »Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development’s (DECD)
The Brownfield Remediation and Development Program provides $24.6 million in state funding to remediate 41 VAD properties across Connecticut.
Read More »Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
The EPA Region 5 Brownfields Map is an ArcGIS visual of various brownfield redevelopment success stories in the Midwest. The map has 30 examples with descriptions of projects including environmental assessments, redeveloping spaces into medical complexes, housing, a museum, etc..
Read More »Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
The Greening America’s Smaller Legacy Cities from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is a policy-focused report on how local governments in small and midsize older industrial cities can adopt and implement comprehensive sustainability initiatives.
Read More »Trumbull Neighborhood Partnership
The Garden Resources of Warren (GROW) Program provides technical support leadership development, and educational programming for Warren’s community gardens and operates the Warren Farmer’s Market. Operated by the Trumbull Neighborhood Partneship,
Read More »Metropolitan Planning Council
A pilot report from the Metropolitan Planning Council and Emerald South explore how greenwater storm infrastructure (GSI) can be implemented based on local sewer conditions and vacant lot availability for efficient stormwater management.
Read More »Calhoun Land Bank Authority
Led by the Calhoun County Land Bank Authority the Washington Heights Land Re-Use Strategy seeks to revitalize the Neighborhood Planning Council 2 (NPC2) area of Battle Creek, Michigan. Led by the Calhoun County Land Bank Authority
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