Land banks and other local authorities aim to be strategic about where the demolitions take place, often trying to cluster them in “target areas” as part of larger efforts to stabilize neighborhoods.
In the Washington region, only Maryland has passed a law authorizing the creation of land banks. The measure was designed partly to help Baltimore deal with its glut of vacant and abandoned homes, but the land bank has yet to become reality.
A balance of interests
The donations keep coming, and not just in Cleveland.
At the end of August, the nation’s banks, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had an inventory of more than 816,000 foreclosed properties on their books waiting for a buyer, according to RealtyTrac. An additional 800,000 are working their way through the foreclosure process.
At Wells Fargo, Smith said, about a dozen asset managers “scrub these portfolios weekly” in cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, looking for possible donations.
Rebecca Mairone, national mortgage outreach executive for Bank of America, said the company is expanding its donation programs to nearly a dozen cities, including Detroit and Chicago.
“It does balance the bank’s best interest with the community’s best interest,” she said.
In previous decades, Detroit, perhaps more than any other American city, saw such a vast swath of buildings torn down as the result of blight that some activists now urge that this land be returned to agriculture.
In Cleveland, much has changed since the first awkward meetings with the banks.
“My conversations [with banks] now are totally different than two years ago,” Frangos said. “We’re very comfortable with them, though there are still a lot of hard feelings in the community with big banks.”
Streets throughout Cleveland remain scarred by the crisis. Once-elegant homes sit empty and rotting, like ghosts of better times. A map in Frangos’s office marks the location of each foreclosure filing in recent years. No neighborhood has escaped untouched. With as many as 15,000 vacant and abandoned structures remaining and more on the way, the job at the current pace could take longer than a decade and cost $250 million for demolition and other expenses.
Frangos said he expects progress, not miracles.
“It is the root canal of community development that we’re doing,” he said, “and it’s not a quick fix.”
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